Apple's market cap grew from $350 billion to over $3 trillion under Tim Cook. That is the ledger. John Ternus inherits it in 2025, along with every structural bet Cook made: services revenue, supply chain dominance, and a hardware ecosystem built for margin, not disruption.
The Equity episode does not just recap the Cook era. It interrogates the tradeoffs. Services now account for roughly 25% of Apple's gross profit. That shift insulated Apple from hardware cycles but created regulatory exposure in the EU, the US, and beyond. Ternus walks into a company that is simultaneously its own biggest dependency and its own biggest risk.
What makes this worth listening to in full: the discussion of what Ternus is actually trained to do. He is a hardware engineer who led the M-series chip transition. Whether that background maps onto a company that now lives and dies by App Store economics is the question the episode leaves open, deliberately.
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