Baldwin County’s own Tim Cook, a Robertsdale High School graduate, is stepping down from his nearly 15-year role as Apple’s CEO.

The announcement came on April 20 to mark the end of a tenure that saw the global company’s market value grow from $350 billion to $4 trillion as yearly revenue nearly quadrupled from 2011 to 2025.

The 65-year-old will hand the reins to John Ternus, Apple’s head of hardware engineering who has been building Apple products for the past 25 years, on Sept. 1 and become Apple’s executive chairman. The move is similar to shifts made by Jeff Bezos at Amazon and Reed Hastings at Netflix, according to PBS News.

“This is not goodbye. But at this moment of transition, I wanted to take the opportunity to say thank you. Not on behalf of the company, this time, though there is a wellspring of gratitude for you that overflows inside our walls. But simply on behalf of me. Tim. A person who grew up in a rural place in a different time and, for these magical moments, got to be the CEO of the greatest company in the world,” Cook wrote in a community letter Monday.

Cook went on to earn a degree in industrial engineering from Auburn University in 1982 after graduating from Robertsdale in 1978, according to Gulf Coast Media reporting in 2011 upon his promotion from acting to official CEO. He was previously Apple’s chief operating officer.

He attended Duke University to earn his M.B.A. then spent 12 years at IBM as director of North American fulfillment for manufacturing and distribution of the company’s personal computer division in North and Latin America, GCM previously reported. He started working for Apple in 1998.

Earlier in 2011, when he was named acting CEO, GCM spoke with a family that knew him from his high school days.

Cook worked at Lee Drug Store during his time as a Golden Bear, owner Betty Rawls said at the time.

“He was a fine young man and very smart, too. He worked hard and helped stock and clean up the store for us. We hired several young boys to help, and he was just your average guy. But you could tell he was smart,” Rawls said.

Her daughter Susan worked on the yearbook staff with him. Rawls told GCM in 2011 that Susan “always said he was funny and fun to be around.”

He was his high school class’s salutatorian and was a member of the National Honor Society, won the National High School Mathematics Test, was a Baldwin County Youth Tour winner, named “Who’s Who Most Studious” and a Boys State representative, Bruce Sims wrote in a standing invitation for Cook to visit that GCM published in 2011.

Rawls told GCM, and other outlets from AL.com to The New York Times have reported over the years, that Cook was always “real good about coming back” to visit his parents in Robertsdale.

While he may not have added his teenage alma mater to his visits through the years, he did come through for the Golden Bears marching band, of which he was a member, in 2022 when he donated $100,000 to new instruments to meet the needs of the growing program.

In 2018, the RHS band had less than 90 members, GCM reported at the time, but had grown to 230 members by 2022.

"Our band director came to me and said that our band is growing faster than we can keep up, and we have some needs," then-Principal Joe Sharp told GCM. "Typically, our parents, our boosters, help us with trumpets, clarinets and the flutes. Those are a little bit more affordable. These larger instruments are instruments that the school usually pays for."

Some of the instruments needed, such as French horns and tubas, cost up to $10,000, GCM reported.

“After discussing the band's needs, Sharp decided to reach out to Cook, saying the worst thing that could happen would be to be told, ‘no,’” former reporter Jessica Vaughn wrote. “Instead, he got a resounding ‘yes.’”

During Cook’s tenure at Apple, the company grew by more than 100,000 employees and increased its active installed base to more than 2.5 billion devices, according to the press release Monday announcing his transition away from the top job. Since 2011, Apple has introduced new categories such as Apple Watch, AirPods and Apple Vision Pro, and services ranging from iCloud and Apple Pay to Apple TV and Apple Music.

“Apple Services has been a major focus area of Cook’s, and during his tenure the category has grown to become a more than $100 billion business, the equivalent of a Fortune 40 company,” according to the release, which went on to note the company’s carbon footprint reduction by more than 60% below 2015 levels, and Cook’s advocacy for privacy “as a fundamental human right.”

While Cook now has his CEO tenure to reflect on, he told graduates at Auburn’s commencement ceremony in 2010 to trust their intuitions, even when what their gut says is to stray from what seems logically right or what others think.

“One of my dreams was to attend Auburn University, and the other was to work for Apple Computers. When I went to work for Apple in 1998, it was a much different company than it is now,” he said in his speech. “They had been losing sales for years and were on the verge of extinction. I was still at Compaq, and they were at the top of their game. I was advised by friends to stay at Compaq and would be a fool to go work at Apple. Well, at that point I had to rely on my gut and intuition, and it paid off.

“Life throws us curveballs, and we can’t count on predictability or the 25-year plan, but we can prepare. Intuition will tell you which door to walk through, but it won’t tell you what is on the other side.

“Abraham Lincoln said, ‘I will prepare and someday my chance will come.’ You will achieve more and go farther with preparation. Success without hard work is not possible. The most important decision I made was to trust my intuition.”