The speech was given at the United Nations, where Mr. Cook was accepting a lifetime achievement award from Auburn, his alma mater. He graduated from the university in 1982 with a degree in industrial engineering. He worked at IBM while earning a graduate business degree at Duke, then went to Intelligent Electronics and Compaq. In 1998, he was approached by Mr. Jobs when Apple was struggling, but as Mr. Cook recounted later in a 2010 commencement speech at Auburn, he saw it as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work for the creative genius.”

He rose to become executive vice president for worldwide sales and operations in 2002. In the period after he became C.E.O. in 2011, the working conditions in Chinese factories used by major tech companies, including Apple, came under increasing scrutiny. By April 2012, after suicides and accidents among Chinese factory workers, a quarter of a million people had signed a petition on Change.org urging Apple to improve working conditions in the factories. Apple since 2006 had already commissioned public reports on troubling practices inside many factories. In 2012, it also began publishing an annual list of its major suppliers, their locations, and what is made at the major ones, as well as reporting the working hours for more than a million factory employees.

Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to President Obama, said Mr. Cook’s building of a production plant in Arizona and a Texas factory for making high-end Mac computers domestically was “a tremendous vote of confidence for an iconic company that previously shipped jobs overseas.” (A majority of manufacturing is still done outside the United States — for instance, an estimated 90 percent of the iPhone’s hundreds of parts are made abroad.) Ms. Jarrett also praised Apple’s donation of $100 million to equip schools with technology, including iPads and high-speed Internet.

Apple also made a quick transition to using 100 percent renewable energy sources in its data centers, which makes it “the most aggressive of the companies that we evaluated in getting renewables online,” said Gary Cook, a senior policy analyst at Greenpeace.

Ryan Scott, the chief executive of Causecast, a nonprofit that helps companies create volunteer and donation programs, called Mr. Cook’s charitable initiatives a “great start.” But Mr. Scott added that its programs are “not as significant as what other companies are doing.” Apple’s ambitions “could be much higher,” he said, given its money and talent. By comparison, Microsoft says that, on average, it donates $2 million a day in software to nonprofits, and its employees have donated over $1 billion, inclusive of the corporate match, since 1983. In the last two years, Apple employees have donated $50 million, including the match.

Apple, too, has faced accusations from government officials on a number of troubling issues, including strategies to minimize its corporate taxes. (On the tax issue, Mr. Cook, told a Senate panel last year that Apple is the nation’s largest taxpayer and pays what it owes.) Last July, a federal judge ruled that Apple had illegally conspired with publishers to try to raise prices in the e-books market; Apple is appealing.

Mr. Cook’s public emphasis on social issues nonetheless puts him “on the cutting edge of an emerging new mind-set in corporate leadership about values and value creation,” said James E. Austin, an emeritus professor at the Harvard Business School. But Kellie McElhaney, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, said she “gets nervous” when C.E.O.s talk about doing what is “right” without making a business case.