Jeremy Hobson: Apple’s future looks a little different this morning following last night’s surprise announcement that CEO Steve Jobs is stepping down for good. He’s been on a leave of absence for health reasons since January.

The man who will replace him is a guy named Tim Cook, as Marketplace’s Silicon Valley correspondent Steve Henn reports.

Steve Henn: Tim Cook revamped Apple’s supply chain, ran the Macintosh division, and has the reputation of being an operational genius, where jobs was the technology oracle.

Michael Gartenberg follows Apple at Gartner, and says Cooks been tested.

Michael Gartenberg: He’s their operations person, but more importantly he’s acted as CEO twice before. And both of those times Apple continued to perform well, introduced new products and the value of the company increased under his watch.

Molly Wood executive editor at CNET. She says while Cook “made the trains run” at Apple, he doesn’t have the reputation of being a tech visionary.

Molly Wood: It will be interesting to see down the road if Tim Cook does have his own vision and if so what it looks like, because it is hard to imagine that he could be the next Steve Jobs.

In his resignation letter to the board, Jobs strongly recommended that Cook take the reigns, and added that he thought Apple’s most innovative days were ahead of it.

In Silicon Valley I’m Steve Henn for Marketplace.