At the end of each Apple board meeting, Tim Cook, chief executive, raises the question of who should succeed him if he “[steps] off the wrong curb or something”. It is a tribute to Mr Cook after five years at the helm of the world’s most valuable company that an accident is more likely to finish him than investor discontent.

Mr Cook became Apple’s chief executive in August 2011 in tragic and extremely difficult circumstances: just before the death of Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and guiding genius. Jobs was, as Mr Cook noted in an interview with the Washington Post, an impossible act to follow. “It would have been a treacherous thing if I would have tried to do it,” he said.

The impossibility is clear in how Mr Cook’s first five years are sometimes seen: as a mild disappointment. He has presided over the launch of Apple Watch and Apple Pay but it has unveiled no blockbuster to rival the iPhone, an astonishingly successful device that now accounts for nearly 70 per cent of its revenues.