John Ternus Replaces Tim Cook
Apple (Hacker News, CNBC, MacRumors, ArsTechnica):
Tim Cook will become executive chairman of Apple’s board of directors and John Ternus, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple’s next chief executive officer effective on September 1, 2026.
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As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.
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“I am profoundly grateful for this opportunity to carry Apple’s mission forward,” said Ternus. “Having spent almost my entire career at Apple, I have been lucky to have worked under Steve Jobs and to have had Tim Cook as my mentor. It has been a privilege to help shape the products and experiences that have changed so much of how we interact with the world and with one another. I am filled with optimism about what we can achieve in the years to come, and I am so happy to know that the most talented people on earth are here at Apple, determined to be part of something bigger than any one of us. I am humbled to step into this role, and I promise to lead with the values and vision that have come to define this special place for half a century.”
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Apple Services has been a major focus area of Cook’s, and during his tenure the category has grown to become a more than $100 billion business, the equivalent of a Fortune 40 company. Cook was also instrumental in creating the wearables category at Apple, which now includes the world’s most popular watch and headphones, and which has served as the foundation for Apple’s remarkable impact on the health and safety of its users. Under Cook’s leadership, Apple also transitioned to Apple-designed silicon, enabling the company to own more of its primary technology and deliver industry-leading gains in power efficiency and performance that directly benefit users across its products.
Johny Srouji will become chief hardware officer. Srouji, who most recently served as senior vice president of Hardware Technologies, will assume an expanded role leading Hardware Engineering, which John Ternus most recently oversaw, as well as the hardware technologies organization.
Ternus will become the 8th CEO in Apple’s 50-year history[…]
I’d actually be surprised if Cook isn’t in the executive chairmanship for a lot longer than people expect. I don’t think he’s ready to put Apple in the rearview—but I do think he’s trying to get the timing on this exactly right.
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The company is impossibly larger than the one Cook took over from Jobs. The explosive growth of the iPhone, especially from 2014 on, has changed the fundamentals of the company. When iPhone growth finally slowed, Cook swapped in a growing wearables business (led by what I assume is the product Cook is most proud of, the Apple Watch) and a dramatically growing set of subscription services. Those growth lines keep Wall Street happy.
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Cook’s priorities helped make Apple a manufacturing powerhouse, capable of building products nobody else could—at least, until Apple showed the way. But as Patrick McGee so capably showed in his book Apple in China, Apple was also training up China on being a tech manufacturing powerhouse.
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In spite of its success, or perhaps because of it, Apple has been a company in stasis for 15 or 20 years. When everything’s going great, and all the executives just stick around no matter how rich they get on stock options, it’s really hard to make changes. The arrival of any new person in charge, not just John Ternus in particular, is an opportunity to shake things up. New leaders have the freedom to make their mark. That could be good for Apple.
Whatever issues one might have with Apple, they aren’t likely to apply to the company’s hardware, where performance and reliability have been top-notch. His skills may well translate to improving quality in other parts of the company.
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I very much doubt we’ll see major changes at Apple once Ternus takes over because the company culture runs deep and its executive team has decades of experience. Ternus may be new to the CEO role, but he knows exactly how Apple works and is unlikely to modify that in any significant way—which, given the company’s current performance, is probably entirely appropriate.
It’s difficult to get excited at this point. Ternus doesn’t seem to be the type of person who will rock the boat. Navy, not pirate.
I’m legitimately hopeful Apple uses this an opportunity to rethink its approach to developers and regulatory issues — but will take time to see if that’s true.
Here’s hoping John Ternus is more open to remote work than Tim Cook.
It’s not likely - but I’m hoping Apple resumes live keynotes and press events. Ternus is a much better presenter than Cook. While no one is as good a showman as Jobs was, Ternus at least seems to have the best presence out of all the big tech CEOs.
The Hacker News page currently has 1,234 comments, and top one is:
Wow. Hopefully, Ternus will bring what he brought to Apple’s hardware to their software. The hardware is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else, but their software gets worse and worse every generation.
Tim Cook is 65 years old, has been CEO for 15 years, and is going out on top. Looking only at the numbers, Cook is the GOAT. But Cook, by all accounts, would be the first to tell us he doesn’t want to be judged by the numbers alone.
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With the table set by the budding iPhone and nascent iPad products Jobs left behind, Apple didn’t need a product person at the helm in the 2010s. They needed someone to let the existing products blossom and expand. Today, it feels to me like Apple needs a product guy at the helm again. Someone with the itch to spearhead the creation of new things.
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And, if you agree that Apple itself was Jobs’s greatest product, Cook really is a product person after all.
I have a different take, which is that the conventional wisdom was wrong. That is, if you’re judging by the products rather than the numbers. The problem with Cook wasn’t the creation of new things; it was the lack of focus and failure to maintain what Apple already had. It turns out that you do need a product person, even to be a caretaker CEO, or decay sets in. I don’t want to minimize his accomplishments, though, because clearly the post-Jobs era could have been a lot worse. There were no bigger shoes to fill.
I don’t think it’s the case that Apple, the company, was Jobs’ greatest product. We all wanted that to be true, but we’ve now had two long intervals to see how it functions without him. It seems like a totally different company. History is not going to see Apple itself as greater than the iPhone unless Apple under Ternus or a subsequent CEO delivers another iPhone-scale product. That’s an unreasonable expectation that I don’t think anyone is predicting.
What frustrates me most is all the low-hanging fruit that was just left to rot, mostly because—I can only assume—Cook didn’t really have finger on pulse of the entire ecosystem. Failing on “the last 10%” for pretty much every current product is the best proof I offer.
But despite all of that, the soul of the company has felt increasingly bland, and the accumulating faux pas in software quality–culminating in the Liquid Glass debacle and the general state of macOS and iPadOS–have tested even the most faithful.
Ternus is a hardware guy, and very likely deeply involved in the MacBook Neo. My hope is that he has a better feel for what good product actually looks like, and can drive the kind of change that has been overdue for a while now.
I’d start with fixing macOS and iPadOS, preferably in a way that matches what people actually expect from their devices rather than what a design committee thinks looks modern.
The challenge for Apple is still software, an increasingly cluttered interface across multiple hardware devices and platforms, and a distinct lack of clarity about what role AI will (or will not) play in its future. Ternus’s other task will be to repair an incredibly fragile relationship with developers, who have been vocal about their dissatisfaction with Cupertino.
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Sure, Cook inherited the greatest product portfolio and the greatest brand in modern business. How many times have we seen people screw it up? He ran it with operational ruthlessness. He is no product visionary, and neither is Ternus. They are not Steve. Tim has run Apple for fifteen years, through a pandemic, two trade wars, a supply chain reordering, and the slow grinding shift from hardware-only to hardware-plus-services-plus-silicon.
That said, while his tenure has been financially successful, I think a lot of people feel like Apple isn’t quite the company they originally fell in love with, and I hope Ternus can make us feel more that way again. I recognize that’s hard when you’re not the scrappy underdog, you’re one of the biggest companies in the world, but I do think it’s important for Apple to keep that “we do whatever is right for the user” energy and less of that “we extract as much as we’re legally allowed to from every user and developer” energy.
Seriously, how the fuck do you go from the idea “do what’s right” to “keep adding ad slots”?
“What Makes Apple Apple” isn’t a new question; it was the central question of Apple University, the internal training program the company launched in 2008. Apple University was hailed on the outside as a Steve Jobs creation, but while I’m sure he green lit the concept, it was clear to me as an intern on the Apple University team in 2010, that the program’s driving force was Tim Cook.
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The core of the program, at least when I was there, was what became known as The Cook Doctrine[…]
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Cook, in this critique, prioritized Apple’s financial results and shareholder returns over what was best for Apple in the long run. […] This isn’t the only part of Apple’s business where this critique has validity.
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It really is ironic: Tim Cook built what is arguably Apple’s most important technology — its ability to build the world’s best personal computer products at astronomical scale — and did so in a way that leaves Apple more vulnerable than anyone to the deteriorating relationship between the United States and China. China was certainly good for the bottom line, but was it good for Apple’s long-run sustainability?
This same critique — of favoring a financially optimal strategy over long-term sustainability — may also one day be levied on the biggest question Cook leaves his successor: what impact will AI have on Apple?
The Tim Cook story at Apple is an almost poetic arc. Upon arrival, he fundamentally overhauled the way its products would be made, primarily by moving manufacturing to Japan, Taiwan, and China. This groundwork is what allowed him to transform the company when he arrived as CEO, growing it into a global behemoth and working within China to create the best and most precise electronics manufacturing chain anywhere. And that became a problem for him.
In a new Bloomberg report, reporter Mark Gurman suggests one of the reasons Ternus has been chosen as successor is for his decision-making style, which is said to be closer to co-founder Steve Jobs than Cook, who has a more deliberative approach.
Last night, a new report on incoming CEO John Ternus called the Apple veteran a decisive leader who is often led more by instinct than consensus.
And some of that initiative-taking in leadership decisions, it seems, is already focused on integrating AI more deeply into Apple’s internal operations.
See also: Dithering, Accidental Tech Podcast, Mac Power Users Talk.
Previously:
- The Quadrant Was Now Complete
- A Letter to John Ternus
- More App Store Ad Spots
- Apple Succession Planning
- The Tim Cook Era
- Apple in China
Update (2026-04-28): Joe Rossignol:
Apple on Monday announced that Tim Cook will be stepping down as CEO, and some top leaders around the world have publicly commented on the news.
Reactions on the MacRumors forums run the gamut from positive to negative, with some people praising Cook for everything he’s done for Apple, and others celebrating his departure from the role.
That last sentence is something that Cook won’t get enough credit for. A major product defect or recall is just inherently more memorable than the lack of major defects or recalls. Compare and contrast to Samsung: 2016’s Note 7 was recalled for battery combustion; six other Samsung models caught fire in 2016 too; the early Galaxy Fold phones were an outright debacle. Nothing like that ever happened under Cook.
Apple recalled both MacBook Pros and Beats speakers that posed fire risks. I had a Mac, an iPhone, and an iPad become unsafe due to swollen batteries. There was Staingate. Not to mention the butterfly keyboards (with only a limited repair program) and the Apple Mail data loss, both of which took years longer to remedy than they should have.
By all means, Tim Cook was a better choice for Apple CEO than most people you could pick out of a hat; perhaps even of high executives at Apple working at the time. But this judgement is not unalloyed.
The following things happened under his watch (in no particular order)[…]
Among the working titles for this post were Good riddance and Stop the praises, and I haven’t chosen them not because I thought they were somehow mean-spirited, but because they sounded like coming from a place of deep care. They sounded like the reaction of someone with deep emotional investment in the whole thing. But over the past few years I — a long-time enthusiastic Apple user and customer — have become desensitised towards most of what Apple does and what Apple has become. And I have to thank Tim Cook for that.
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I don’t want to exclusively defend Ive on this — I’m not a fan of certain design decisions and directions he made and took both under Jobs but especially under Cook — but I don’t feel that he was properly managed and utilised as the valuable asset he had been before Cook became CEO.
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It’s worth noticing that, wherever Apple deviated from the tried-and-true formula, the results were questionable at best. Examples include, in no particular order[…]
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One sin of Cook’s Apple I’ll never forgive is wanting to be everywhere and keep adding platforms and services. Apple went from being excellent at a selected few things to being mediocre at many things.
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Fucking up Mac OS was not necessary and was completely avoidable, but it has become collateral damage under a direction that has always clearly favoured the iOS platform.
There was a stretch where many thought Apple was going to actually abandon the Mac. There’s been some rent-seeking behavior in the area of services. The iPad has sort of been aimlessly existing as a hardware marvel with no clear vision.
Your AirPods just connected to the wrong device. Again.
iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. HomeKit forgot the kitchen lightbulb exists, and will remember it again in three hours like nothing happened. System Settings, which used to be one of the cleanest preferences UIs ever shipped, now feels like a bad Electron app pretending to be macOS.
These aren’t dramatic failures. They’re worse than dramatic failures. They’re daily proof that somewhere along the way, Apple stopped caring about the texture of using its own products.
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Each one of these, on its own, is just a bug. Together, they’re a culture.
They survive because they don’t move metrics. They don’t reduce revenue. They don’t show up in the quarterly. But they’re exactly the kind of paper-cuts that would have annoyed Steve at 9pm on a Tuesday, and they would have been fixed by Wednesday morning.
Apple has gone down market without eroding their perceived value of being “nice” compared to the alternatives. Apple makes nice hardware and people pay extra for that nice-ness. Yet they’ve released progressively lower cost hardware that more people can afford without compromising on quality.
As Tim Cook departs Apple as its CEO after 15 years, this should be applauded. You can spend $2500 to get one of everything they make in all of their product categories including watch, headphones, speaker, phone, laptop and iPad. Remarkable.
Is there any reason why we give Tim Cook credit for Apple silicon when both Johny Srouji and the P.A. Semi team joined Apple in 2008?
As someone who podcasts about Apple roughly once a month, what I find most striking about the past few years in Cupertino is how frequently I’ve wanted to argue that Cook’s decision-making will cost his company dearly, only to conclude at the end of a conversation that he was probably playing things the right way.
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Cook’s doubling and tripling down on China (“[By 2008] Apple’s machinery in China had become more valuable than all of Apple’s buildings and retail stores put together”) may look like a mistake in retrospect, but it’s not at all clear the company ever could have scaled Apple products to reach billions of people without the skills, human scale and cost effectiveness of Chinese labor and manufacturing.
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My primary criticism of Cook and his China investments is that no CEO in America was better positioned to understand the bankrupt character of the CCP. By at least 2016, Cook should have been able to extrapolate that conflict with the United States was likely inevitable, and continued reliance on almost-exclusively Chinese manufacturers and component suppliers could have catastrophic consequences for Apple.
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There is also the aforementioned $109 billion in annual Services revenue, now responsible for 41% of the company’s overall profit, and built on the strength of Google’s advertising and Apple’s arguably extortive App Store policies that have gotten the company in regulatory trouble on multiple continents (amusingly, China is now “Looking at Anti-Monopoly Escorting the Digital Economy from the ‘Apple Tax’ Reduction”). Those policies alone are controversial and worth all the regulatory scrutiny they’ve received, and that’s before you consider something like the Apple “offer” to Facebook that would have taken cuts of Facebook mobile revenue and seen Facebook push users toward premium, ad-free subscriptions (from which Apple would take 30% of all sales). A few years after that deal was rebuffed, Apple introduced App Tracking Transparency to temporarily nuke Facebook’s ad business while Apple was building an ads business of its own, and continuing to take a cut (at least $20 billion per year) from a Google ads business that uses the same sort of surveillance tactics Apple loudly denounces in its own advertising. I’ll also note here that the company has been involved in vicious patent litigation, is notorious for its merciless squeeze on suppliers, and for years schemed to crush Qualcomm and its modem fees.
Apple not only squandered opportunity to bring supply chain back to U.S., on wealth gained, but additionally now finds itself in the unenviable position that they’re no longer the BIG DOG with TSMC (to Nvidia). Was that inconceivable to Cook?
The Neo is already a pretty big departure from the Cook era.
Also, I’ll bet that software design will change pretty substantially. Not in terms of aesthetics - Liquid Glass will be around for a while - but rather, in terms of the general philosophy around information architecture as well as ‘junk drawer’ design.
Two small examples we’ve already seen:
Mac SKU configuration in the Apple Store app
Moving the ‘App Updates’ button to the top in the App Store app
These are small changes, but they hint at a shift away from marketing-centric design and towards user-centric design.
Ternus will probably be the most highly scrutinized Apple CEO of the past 20 years. He’s not Steve, and he’s not Steve’s hand-picked successor. There’s no real remaining “divine Jobsian connection” for him to fall back on during rough times, and he’s following Cook’s 15 years of remarkable growth. I think people are probably over-estimating the kinds of big changes he is likely to make. Recall that the people that matter see Apple’s last 15 years not as any sort of “decay,” but historic success.
Ternus will say all the right things right now about staying the course that Apple is already on. But again, he has little choice at the moment, that path is pretty much set. Sure, there will be choices here and there – in particular with partnerships around AI and elsewhere – but the product pipeline is pretty locked. The question is really what Ternus chooses to set in motion for 2028 and beyond.
Can only hope that Tim Cook stepping down also leads to some old Jobs2.0-era grudges getting squashed… Apple—as a U.S. company—needs to join in with other American tech like Jenson/Nvidia, Google, Intel, and Elon, bury stupid squabbles, and achieve even greater greatness.
This weekend in his Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman shared several John Ternus quotes from Apple’s employee town hall this past week.
Ternus reportedly praised the work of Apple’s services teams, and pledged to continue expanding that important business in the future.
The giant folding iPad, for example, has reportedly been a “priority” for Ternus in his current role, but being the new boss’s pet project gives it no guarantee of making it to market.
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Couple random remarks. I expect Cook to be on the board until well into his 70s and possibly beyond, health permitting. A lot of people are writing like he’s somehow gone forever, he’s probably going to keep going into the same exact building every day for the next 20 years, maybe just a bit less often.
And “keep adding ad slots” is one of those things you can talk yourself into being the “right” thing if you only look at the “right” numbers. I don’t know if it was Cook or it came before him or both, but Apple seems to have a phobia about not making insane profits. Cook’s inarguable legacy is making the company ten times bigger and making the prospect of Apple ever coming near bankruptcy again essentially an impossibility.
It’s interesting how Tim is leaving Apple at such a high and yet, such a low. Everything that *really* matters, like the people making the platforms great, the platforms themselves, the impact of the company on the world are worse
But financially they’re doing amazing
@Manx sounds like the perfect time to me. He has min/maxed to the extent of his ability. Time to let someone with the opposite strengths do the same for a while.
Tim Cook leaves behind a company that wasted untold billions on chasing what other companies were doing; autonomous cars. Abased itself with pathetic attempts to become a fashion brand, allowed its software platforms to fall apart, and pursued a hardware strategy that has resulted in not being able to deliver about half their product range *at all* because RAM is constrained, and they can't just sell it in a lower config, and let the customer source their own to fill (at a later date).
A secondrate John Scully, who certainly made Apple into his own image; subscription pricing & financialisation.
He's going to spend some well-earned time pursuing his greatest enthusiasm of licking fascist boot.
Finally!
Hopefully getting rid of the bean counter will invigorate Apple.
How many years before we will see the effects though?
The defining idea of Apple in the last 10 years or so has been arrogance. They thought they were so clever to smart out the laws of individual countries instead of making rules for everyone. Developers don't matter anymore. Software quality is practically non-existent. They wasted for sure untold billions on a car with nothing to show because they thought they could do an "eierlegende Wollmilchsau" (egg laying wool milk pig = does everything at once). After 4 years Crapple Intelligence does not do one thing well at all.
Instead of a vision they have Liquid Ass.
Cook oversaw the time period where I joined then left the Mac ecosystem. I think though his stance on privacy has increased the safety of hundreds of millions especially in the current climate, that should not be forgotten.
This is fantastic news and I’m looking forward to John and Craig having a good long series of meetings figuring out how to make Apple’s software as good as its hardware now that we have a product guy as Craig’s boss.
@Nathan The problem is that Cook's great failing was that he DIDN'T direct things. Apple's software is a garbagefire because that's how *Craig* directed it. If Craig couldn't make good software because of Tim, that's on Craig.
Unless the new guy is brave enough to wipe out all the deadwood running things currently (and that's unlikely with Tim the Undead CEO protecting his own legacy from the board), as @Catman suggests, nothing's going to change.
Jobs picked his steward for Apple with unerring accuracy. Tim’s great hardware wins are AirPods and Apple Watch. iPhone, iPad and Mac saw steady improvements and then a quantum leap with the M series. His greatest contribution maybe being prescient as COO and seeing that China was going to become the world manufacturer. Another good thing he did was show restraint in hiring as practically every other tech company went on an over hiring spree and is now firing huge chunks of their staff.
That said Tim has had some failures as well. AirPower vapourware, decline in software quality, pushing too hard on services revenue.
Apple car was a fumble but at least it was never released. Vision Pro was released too early, needs to become significantly better and cheaper to be a mass market product. AI might be a fumble but given the bubble economics and no clear path to profitability, it may be the most fiscal disciple shown by Apple. Let the others crash and burn and then swoop in to pick up the pieces that matter.
I would say Siri remains the biggest failure of Tim’s era. Virtually no development in more than a decade.
Coming to political stuff, Trump’s tariffs have nothing to do with economics. He just likes making other powerful people squirm.
It’s interesting to think what Steve would have done if faced with Trump. Given his personality, he would not be able to make himself squirm for Trump. What he would probably do is outsource this to Tim.
So in some sense Cook is doing what Steve would have wanted. That makes me feel a bit better about Tim selling a bit of his soul to protect Apple, Steve’s greatest creation, from the whims of a mad king.
I don't see John as a person that can win the "talent war". There is no indication on his charm (inspiration) that he can repel the new shiny emerging horses
I don’t see John as someone who can win the “talent war.” He is not the next Steve Jobs with "vision" that attract like the shiny emerging horses.
"Instead of a vision they have Liquid Ass."
They do have vision. VISION PRO, the product missing from all the Appleratis farewell posts.
> Seriously, how the fuck do you go from the idea “do what’s right” to “keep adding ad slots”?
Obviously easy: greed.
I'm with Catman, I bet nothing changes. At this point there's probably far too much institutional momentum and dysfunction for the ship to be righted. The Apple that delivered the best computing products, with a wide margin between them and second place, is gone, and I don't see it ever coming back. What's worse, there's no room in the industry now for anyone new to come in and disrupt things with an actual good product like the Mac was 15 years ago.
I would love to be proven wrong.
"Apple car was a fumble but at least it was never released"
How is it good that it was never released? All major Chinese tech companies are either releasing their own cars or are deeply involved in car manufacturing as technology suppliers. People claim that Apple will never again release a product on the scale of the iPhone, but the car market is being disrupted right now, the US car brands are completely shitting the bed, and Apple has failed to benefit from that in any way.
Typing "Are Scott Forstall and John Ternus still friends?" into every search engine, apple-adjacent subreddit and Craigslist personals category until I get the answer I want.
@Plume The rumours around Apple car suggest that they wanted to make something not just technologically great but also socioeconomically disruptive. Apparently they could not reach that goal. Maybe setting sights lower would have been better.
Also, Tesla has great software but continues to struggle with quality of manufacturing. That’s another data point that’s suggestive that Apple might have struggled to corner this market.
@Hardik I think regardless of whatever intentions the Apple Car project had, the rise of the Chinese car companies @Plume is alluding to is pretty damning evidence.
The current narrative is that if Apple couldn't make a cost effective car that seamlessly weaves technology into a redefining automotive experience, then no one could. But Xiaomi (and others) made such a product. It seems we are seeing what happens when the copycats are staying more true to Apple design philosophy than Apple is.
@Plasma Hence my contention that Apple should have set their sights lower. There were rumors of a car without a steering wheel that would be fully autonomous and have forward and backward seats facing each other. They seem to have gotten too enamored with dragging us all into the future.
What the Chinese have done is far more practical and had Apple pursued that with some Chinese partner, they would probably have succeeded by doing design at Apple and manufacturing in China.
Quoth Someone:
@Nathan The problem is that Cook's great failing was that he DIDN'T direct things. Apple's software is a garbagefire because that's how *Craig* directed it. If Craig couldn't make good software because of Tim, that's on Craig.
My view is that Tim Cook neither helped nor hurt Apple’s software quality, mainly because Tim Cook doesn’t appear to care about software quality.
If Craig couldn't make good software because of Tim, that's on Craig.
If Craig can’t make good software because his boss is giving him a feature checklist that requires 10 million engineer-hours to implement well without dropping software quality elsewhere via rot and he only has 8 million engineer-hours to do it all in, and can’t hire more engineers for one reason or another (almost certainly multiple reasons), then that’s on Tim.
Of course, there are things Craig could do that would make fixing bugs cheaper with the headcount he has, like letting engineers talk to bug reporters directly instead of playing games of Telephone through a censor board.
At any rate, I think Craig Federighi needs help, and John Ternus would actually be able to provide it.
@Anonymous
> If Craig can’t make good software because his boss is giving him a feature checklist
IMHO the only checklist Tim would have provided is "hooks to subscription pricing".
But the way the software works - the fact you can't remove all the shovelware bloat apps like Music, Freeform etc "Internet Explorer is a core part of Windows 95", is because Craig chose that.
@HardikPanjwani
> Jobs picked his steward for Apple with unerring accuracy.
Jobs picked Cook to replace him when he was medicated to the eyeballs, and dying young from a cancer that would have been perfectly treatable if he hadn't tried diet as an alternative to medicine when first diagnosed.
His "accuracy" was at best painting a target around already existing random bullet holes on the side of a barn.
I strongly suspect the actual succession plan was for Tim to be an interim CEO, and to hand over to Scott Forstall within a few years, which woud explain why he was so profoundly disinterested in managing the conflict between the largely-useless-without-Jobs Ive, and the Jobsian charismatic lead of the most valuable product in the company, Forstall.
I hate to come off as some fanboy, but I think we actually do need Scott Forstall back to clean up the software and interface design. He's probably the only one who can do it. To @billyok's point, no idea how he got along with Ternus, but... happy thoughts keep us young.
I think it's great that Apple is having one of their top-engineering minds ascend to CEO. Boeing was at its best when it was an engineering organization run by engineers. I fail to understand where all of this cynicism is rooted from.
Like damn, give the guy a chance before you start slinging shit.
Would you all rather have had Jeff Williams?
- - - -
Tangental: It was pretty recently revealed that anti parasitic drugs were known to attack cancer/minimize tumors, for decades. As a matter of fact, it was discovered that John Hopkins actually has a patent for a mebendazole drug (anti-parasitic) intended for use in cancer treatment. Until just now, all of that was considered conspiracy theory quackery by the mainstream medical community. I simply can't criticize Jobs for looking outside western medicine. I also can't speak to what he actually did, or how it went down, of course, but his instincts appear to be correct even if his execution wasn't.
"Until just now, all of that was considered conspiracy theory quackery by the mainstream medical community"
This is a nonsensical argument. It's the Galileo fallacy: "This guy argued against the mainstream consensus and was correct, so any argument against the mainstream consensus should be taken seriously." No, it shouldn't. Eating fruit and getting acupuncture were never going to cure pancreatic cancer. He killed himself by delaying proper treatment for almost a year, allowing the cancer to spread, and everyone knew that he was doing it.
Your specific point is also misleading. The Johns Hopkins patent on polymorph C was filed in 2016 and granted in 2021. There is no decades-old hidden wisdom about its efficacy, this is normal scientific progress.
@Someone From what I have heard Forstall was disliked by pretty much most of the C-suite at Apple with the exception of Steve. So I don’t know how realistic him being CEO was. And if he did get the role, we might have seen a lot of exits from Apple leadership. Jony would have left much sooner for sure.
@Plume Scott seems to be enjoying retirement as a producer for Broadway plays I think. Doubt he is considering a second stint at Apple.
@Hardik Panjwani
> And if he did get the role, we might have seen a lot of exits from Apple leadership. Jony would have left much sooner for sure.
And this is a bad thing, because?
Oh no, you mean, we might have lost Jony "has done nothing good without Steve" Ive. Imagine, no laptops so thin they constantly overheat. No 2013 Mac Pro. No glued-together products that can't be repaired. No Butterfly keyboards. No garbagefire retina-burning UI design. No fetishised minimalism which sees reduced capabilities as a virtue.
And imagine losing such towering colossi of competence and product quality as Eddy Cue, will the wailing and gnashing of teeth never cease at the thought of losing Eddy?
Imagine if we'd never had the retail genius of John Browett, and Angela Ahrendts, or the earth-shaking legacy of fundamental change brought by Bozoma Saint John.
Really, it's just hard to imagine how Apple would have survived without the quality of people Tim Cook brought to the company.
Ternus is a ‘product guy’ and that could be great, but I hope he’s the right kind of ‘product guy’ for me.
Tons of ‘product guys’ out there but each one will have different instincts and priorities.
Jobs was an unusual combination — but his general arc is that he focused on helping humans be better (iPod, while amazing for its time, notwithstanding) and making the difficult easy.
Willing to take big risks… that aren’t really risks in hindsight because they’re so good.
So Ternus is someone who knows how to build great things that leapfrog to the next stage (and when not to release something after finding out a hypothesis is wrong — Like Cook did stopping the car idea)… not just improve what’s out there (though that’s important too), and not someone who jumps onto bandwagons or fads.
@Plume - Incorrect, your information is outdated so you mis-parsed what I wrote. Do a google search for "cancer CIA Soviets antiparasitic" and see what comes up.
Okay, I did that, and I got this result:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cia-cancer-cure/
I don't get how this makes Jobs's instincts about juice fasts and acupuncture correct.
Quoth Ben:
I also can't speak to what he actually did, or how it went down, of course, but his instincts appear to be correct even if his execution wasn't.
My general impression is that one is best served by trying the experimental stuff after the generally-proven-to-Western-science stuff fails. Hey, sometimes the not-yet-proven stuff works.
Going on an all-fruit diet instead of getting chemotherapy sounds like the guy being dumb.
Quoth Someone:
And imagine losing such towering colossi of competence and product quality as Eddy Cue, will the wailing and gnashing of teeth never cease at the thought of losing Eddy?
He didn’t seem to do well running the App Store, and I’m glad he’s not running it anymore, but from what I can tell he seems to be well-placed now as Mr. Dealmaker for TV shows and whatnot.
@Plume - Lol, you're not connecting the two - they've known for decades a possible effective mechanism for disrupting tumor growth, and then JH filed a patent for a drug using that mechanism. Snopes is like "the source document doesn't say it's a 'cure,' gotcha idiot haha!" as if it's an own or as if it disqualifies anything. That website went to crap like a decade ago, the fact that you even referenced it...
(This is a stupid thing to be arguing about on MJTSAI's blog, and on an article about Tim Cook -> John Ternus. Won't be responding further.)
I encourage anyone to actually go read the Snopes article for themselves, rather than trusting Ben's summary of what it says.
Ben, your argument reduces to "because science made advances after point X, people's instinct to ignore science at point X is correct," which is as unsound an argument as I've ever heard.
I'm not in favor of needless death. I want people to receive the best care they can, regardless of who they are. Steve Jobs's death was a tragedy. I hope anyone reading this takes this to heart.
I agree with Nathan: get your acupuncture if you want and if it makes you feel better, there's no harm in it. But don't replace the best science-based care with it; do it *in addition.* Don't be like Steve Jobs and needlessly die at 56 when you could live another 20 happy, healthy years.
No, I'm afraid I don't find the "Tim Cook was the best because Apple is still here" argument to be at all compelling. Apple is still here, yes, but at what cost? Perhaps the most charitable interpretation of this thesis is that Tim put Apple in a good place to invest in its future, even if he wasn't necessarily the best man to do that himself. The most obvious counter to that would of course be Apple Silicon—but even there, the priority is on profit maximisation, and the consumer benefits are essentially a consequence of the vertical integration. Even his social instincts are, as we know, thoroughly costed for business impact—in PR value. See Michael's next post for an illustration.
So yeah. Move on Tim, take a smack on the arse for your trouble, and let someone else with a bit more vision spend your money. You were a good bean counter, but Apple needs proper leadership now.
And just to be clear, in case someone misinterprets the second paragraph in any way, but yes, I think it's deeply meaningful for a CEO to come out as gay.
@gildarts @someone else
Jony leaving too soon after Steve’s death would have triggered a pretty negative reaction from Wall Street. Also, I don’t know if there was a designated successor for Jony at that point so might have triggered tensions internally.
@someone else
Are you perfect? Because following your comments here seems to me that you pretty much seem to demand that other people be perfect. You definitely seem to enjoy sarcastic putdowns over genuine communication attempts.
@Sebby: "The most obvious counter to that would of course be Apple Silicon—but even there, the priority is on profit maximi[z]ation, and the consumer benefits are essentially a consequence of the vertical integration."
Why can't both be true? It would be more self-serving for Apple to have done this with little or no performance/efficiency gains, but it could still have made sense from a business perspective to cut costs, or even just to control more of the stack. It could also make sense to do it anyway for the huge performance/efficiency gains that they've achieved, even if the cost would have been the same or a little more.
So was it, "hey, look at how great this chip is! I wonder what it would cost?" or "hey, look how much cheaper this chip would be! I wonder how well our stuff would run on it?" ? Conceptually, those two things (and more) probably evolved simultaneously.
@DJ
DID Apple get performance and efficiency gains? I keep seeing this presented as fait accompli, but Intel has kept up with Apple in terms of mobile power use and performance. Hell, the new low end entry system i3 can do three external displays on a laptop. Apple’s low end systems are lucky to do a single external display. AND Intel can do external graphics, to plug in whatever beefy GPU they like.
I am increasingly convinced that the alleged benefits of Apple Silicon are within the realms of experientially undetectable performance gains, relative to contemporary alternatives, while the sacrifices in capability expansion and flexibility are in the realms of “these are tasks you literally cannot do on a Mac any more”.
And as we’ve seen from “operational genius” Tim Cook, half the product range is no longer purchasable, because Apple made every SKU a custom-fabbed one-off at the silicon level, and they’re in the ultimate single-supplier trap.
@Someone Yes, I would like to see a comprehensive analysis of what we got from Apple Silicon, because I agree that I don’t think it’s as simple as the common narrative. My general impression is that AS is generally better at performance and power for the low and mid range but that it’s behind in performance at the high end. And there are definitely missing features and flexibility, as you mention.
I bought the first M1 Air and remember just how fast it was compared to the near top of the line MacBook Pro I replaced. I don't think Apple Silicone is universally better than Intel or AMD, but if you are looking on a performance per watt measure, Intel is only just now catching up to Apple with battery life from what I've seen on tests and AMD isn't in the same universe.
Apple's biggest problem is the lack of flexibility and expandability on the high end. If you want to do AI training work on a Windows/Linux machine, you just build a workstation or server with lots of GPUs and crazy amounts of RAM. If you want to do it on macOS and it doesn't fit on a single machine, you network them together with TB4/5 cables and lose overhead to orchestration between machines.
So I wonder how many Macs you'd have to add to that TB-clustered setup to account for the overhead, and would that still be cheaper, quieter, and cooler than the Linux/windows alternatives? ;-)
The problem is that adding more machines adds more overhead, and you have a limited number of TB ports to connect machines with. I could be wrong but I think what I saw was that you maxed out at 5 Mac Studios before you had to fall back to using networking, which even 10Gbps is super slow compored to TB.
I'm not an AI developer/researcher, so all my information is second hand, but not even Apple is using their own hardware for large infrastructure deployments from the reports I've seen.
I doubt the results are comparable because DMA probably uses a different path, but FWIW I used iperf3 to benchmark IP-over-TB between two TB4 Macs and it came out at about 18 gbps. That is half of what I'd expect from a 40 gbps link including overhead, and even with bidirectional concurrent testing it never exceeded that. Real-world use would of course be still lower.
But yeah I think @Michael and @Gildarts are basically right, the real gain is the much lower thermal envelope; my 2020 M1 Mini wasn't appreciably faster than my 2020 iMac once the cache had warmed up, but it was colder and quieter. I'm not saying there's no benefit there, it's just a nice bonus of shrinking and economising your fabs.
"A major product defect or recall is just inherently more memorable than the lack of major defects or recalls"
I had one of the MacBook Pros whose GPU destroyed itself. I'm not sure if Apple ever recalled them, but they absolutely should have.
