Tim Cook’s Five-Year Report Card

Tim Cook is celebrating his five-year anniversary this week — officially commemorating the date the torch officially passed from Apple Founder Steve Jobs to the man who became his handpicked successor to run the firm.

Which means this is a week dedicated to evaluating the Cook legacy — and determining if he has been good overall for the mega-firm he has headed for half a decade.

By some measures, Tim Cook was the best non-Steve Jobs option Apple could have hoped for. Apple had $53 billion in net income last year — more than the combined earnings of Facebook Inc., Google’s parent Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp.  The iPhone 6 was an inarguable hit — and in the almost decade since it launched, Apple has sold a billion iPhones.

But…

The iPhone is slowing, stock price seems stuck in neutral and there is a mounting worry that is no longer just a whisper floating around tech. Apple may simple be out of epoch-making ideas — which means that for all its strength, Apple’s best days are behind it.

Apple has done new things in the Cook-era, Apple Music, Apple Pay, iPad pro, Apple Watch — but none of them has exactly taken the world by storm yet, whereas the iPhone remains 2/3 of Apple’s profit.

Apple is by no means stock market poison — the rain of dividends showered on investors over the last few years has certainly kept them content — but the emerging consensus is that these days, Apple is a value stock, not a growth stock.

The worry is that it might not be able to maintain that status — unless it has another world-changing technology hiding as an ace up its sleeve.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Tim Cook wrote in his first email as CEO: “I want you to be confident that Apple is not going to change.”

But whether Apple changed or not, the world around it has changed a good deal in the last 5 years, and the competition for digital dominance has shifted with it. Which means this year Tim Cook might just want to target his assurance email around the idea that Apple is going to change — and better meet the needs of the world around it.