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:
- A Letter to John Ternus
- More App Store Ad Spots
- Apple Succession Planning
- The Tim Cook Era
- Apple in China
1 Comment RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
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.
