Thinking Differently: Steve Jobs' Last 5 Years Vs. Tim Cook's First 5 Years At Apple

It’s hard to believe it has been nearly five years since the passing of iconic Apple Inc. AAPL co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs. Successor Tim Cook had impossibly large shoes to fill when he first took over the CEO role on August 24, 2011. Cook took his fair share of heat during his first few months at the helm of Apple. However, Cook has now had nearly five years to show what Apple can do under his leadership.

The Stock

Investors gauge a CEO’s performance using one metric above all others: share price. Since Cook took over in 2011, Apple’s share price has more than doubled. Apple has gained 103.7 percent, outpacing the SPDR S&P 500 ETF SPY’s 85.25 percent gain by more than 15 percent.

It turns out that Cook isn't that bad of a CEO after all.

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Unfortunately, fair or not, Cook will always be compared to Jobs, one of the most inspiring visionaries of all time.

In Jobs’ last five years as CEO, Apple’s stock skyrocketed 454.8 percent. Incredibly, that five-year period included the worst financial crisis in the U.S. since the Great Depression. In fact, the SPY actually lost 8.9 percent during that same five-year stretch.

Tim Cook may not be Steve Jobs, but there will never be another Steve Jobs.

The Innovation

During Jobs' last five years as CEO, Apple launched the most successful product of all time: the iPhone. In addition, in that same five-year period, Apple launched the MacBook Air and the iPad. Together, those three products have generated hundreds of billions in revenue for Apple.

So far the two biggest innovations under Cook’s tenure are probably the Apple Watch and Apple Pay.

Apple Watch generated an estimated $6 billion in revenue in its first year, but sales were down 55 percent in Q2. While Apple’s services business, which includes Apple Music, iCloud storage and Apple Pay showed promising growth in Q2, the entire segment still accounted for only $6 billion in revenue.

Think Different

For a company that generated $233 billion in total revenue in 2015, Cook's projects aren't moving the needle much for Apple so far.

Cook will likely never be the innovator that Steve Jobs was. Luckily for Apple investors, the numbers show Apple is still a great long-term investment under Tim Cook.