Apple grew from $347 billion to $4.6 trillion under Tim Cook

When Tim Cook took the helm at Apple, many people questioned whether the longtime Apple executive could bring the company as much success as the late Steve Jobs had. Under Cook, Apple rose from a $347 billion tech giant to a $4.6 trillion behemoth when he retired.

Apple's new CEO, John Ternus, faces some of the same initial skepticism as his predecessor. Going from a $347 billion company to $4.6 trillion is more than a 13 times increase in valuation. For Ternus to match that, it would mean Apple would eventually be worth around $60 trillion, which is 88 percent higher than the annual GDP of the United States.

Meanwhile, Apple is dealing with rising memory prices as tech companies buy up available memory for data centers. Apple management said on the company's fourth quarter earnings call that product margins are expected to be 45 percent to 46 percent in the December quarter.

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One of the leading memory chip companies, SK Hynix, a major South Korean memory chip maker, has already sold out half of its memory supply for 2027 and 2028. Apple is also trying to find its footing in the artificial intelligence era, competing with rivals like Alphabet, Meta Platforms, and OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research organization backed by Microsoft.

Still, the company's non-GAAP earnings per share rose 14 percent to $2.10 in the fourth quarter, and sales rose 12 percent to $114.5 billion. Ternus is also accelerating product launches, rolling out the iPhone Duo, a touchscreen MacBook Pro, and the Apple HomeView smart home device in his first two months. According to Yahoo Finance, nobody should expect him to turn Apple into a nearly $60 trillion company.