Tim Cook

At Apple Campus, One Infinite Loop, in 2016, as a prize from the Globo hackathon that we won. It was my first time flying. Yes, my eyes are closed because the sun was bright and the genius decided to take the picture facing it.

Apple announced on 20 April 2026 that Tim Cook will become Executive Chairman, and that John Ternus will become Apple's next CEO on 1 September 2026. That news made me stop for a moment and think about what Apple, and by extension Tim Cook's era, meant in my own life.

I do not have the detached perspective of a market analyst here. My connection is personal. I was accepted into the Apple Developer Academy in 2013 (then BEPiD), and that experience changed the direction of my career.

Before that, I was working as a mechatronics and electronics technician. I already liked programming, but most of my background was in low-level systems: microcontrollers, PLCs, and embedded logic. In a way that still feels funny to me, my first object-oriented language was not Java, like it was for so many people around me, but Objective-C.

During my time at the Academy, they gave us the equipment we needed to work: MacBook, iPad, and iPod touch. If you completed the program, you kept the devices. We also received a scholarship that, as far as I remember, was around 1.4 times Brazil's minimum wage at the time. For a student, that was not a detail. It was the condition that made the whole thing possible.

That kind of support matters more than people sometimes realize. When you need to help at home, as I did, or when you already have adult responsibilities, as some of my classmates did, the difference between "this looks like a good opportunity" and "I can actually do this" is often financial. Without that support, I probably would not have been able to leave my job and focus on studying.

After that, everything changed. I was no longer stuck in the same technical path, with the same salary ceiling and the same feeling that my professional horizon had already been decided for me. That opening eventually led me to finish my master's degree, move to Portugal, and start a PhD in Digital Game Development.

In more recent years, that thread kept going. I was glad to see Apple expand AI training to Academy students and alumni, then to attend Apple's Foundation Models Workshop in Madrid. And now, in the same year Apple turns 50 and Tim Cook begins his transition out of the CEO role, I also got invited to the WWDC26 Special Event at Apple Park.

That is why this moment feels personal to me. I do not agree with Apple about everything, and I do not romanticize large companies. But I also cannot pretend their investment had no effect on my life. It had a very concrete one. It helped move me from a dead-end technical track into software, research, and a completely different future.

And I know my story is not an isolated one. There are much bigger examples than mine: people whose health or safety was transformed by Apple Watch, former classmates and teachers who ended up working at Apple, and many developers from different Apple Developer Academy programs around the world whose lives changed because someone gave them a real chance at the right time. All of that matters, and this page collects many of those testimonies. But that is not really what I want to focus on here. This post is about the smaller, personal version of that story, what that opportunity changed in my own life.

So this post is not really about corporate succession. It is about gratitude. If I get the chance to see Tim at Apple Park in June, I only want to say one thing:

Hey Tim, thank you.