Apple has had a successful decade. The next one looks tougher

will surely fall, even if ever so slowly. When Tim Cook took the helm from Steve Jobs, the firm’s co-founder, a decade ago, even the most boosterish of Apple fanboys worried that the company was destined to decline. Without Apple’s original Willie Wonka, the digital chocolate factory was about to be run by an automaton who made his career organising global supply chains and scrutinising spreadsheets. How could someone with so little dazzle inspire Apple employees to continue creating “insanely great” products, in Jobs’s famous formulation?It turned out Mr Cook could. As he celebrated his tenth anniversary as Apple’s boss on August 24th, no one made a peep. And for good reason. He has staged what is arguably the greatest succession success in tech, an industry littered with managers who failed in the effort to follow in the founders’ footsteps. In fact, in pure financial terms, he has been a far more successful chief executive than the late Jobs, who succumbed to pancreatic cancer six weeks after stepping down.