John Ternus, Apple's VP of hardware engineering, will take over as CEO in September.
A version of this story appeared in CNN Business’ Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
New York —John Ternus may have just landed the best and worst CEO job on the planet.
When Ternus takes over as Apple’s CEO in September, investors will be eager for a return to the kind of bold, creative action that made Apple a design pioneer under Steve Jobs. They’ll also expect Tim Cook-level mastery of Apple’s sprawling operations. And they’ll want to see the new guy do more than just emulate his predecessors — he must embody Apple’s “think different” mantra and put his own stamp on the Ternus Era.
So, yeah, congrats on the promotion, John! All you have to do now is steer a $4 trillion company and its 166,000 employees through the wilderness of the artificial intelligence boom and/or bust, come up with a blockbuster product on par with the iPhone and avoid pissing off any of the governments — like China, India and the United States, all of which have competing interests — that hold the keys to your suppliers’ factories. No pressure!
Of course, any CEO gig is a tall order, but the weight of expectations only grows when it’s one of the biggest companies in the world and you’re the third guy to follow to two back-to-back showstoppers.
Cook announced Monday that he would step down at the end of the summer, capping 15 years of what may well go down in business history books as one of the most successful CEO tenures ever.
From the start, Cook got a lot of criticism for not being Steve Jobs 2.0. He was the “operations guy,” not the creative visionary. But the numbers don’t lie: Apple’s profit has more than quadrupled under Cook; it became the first ever trillion-dollar company in 2018, and later became one of just a few to hit the $4 trillion level.
Steve Jobs unveiling the first iPhone in 2007.
Tim Cook in 2019.
“It is easy to forget that when Cook assumed the CEO role, the iPhone had less than a quarter of the US smartphone market, facing potent competitors like BlackBerry, Samsung, Motorola, and Nokia,” wrote Yale researchers Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian in Fortune. “That was a far cry from the iPhone’s dominant position today, capturing a third of the global market and nearly two-thirds of the US.”
It’s also easy to forget that Apple nearly went bankrupt in the late 1990s. At the time, the board turned to Jobs, a prolific inventor who co-founded the company before being pushed out in 1985, to return as CEO. Under the obsessive Jobs, Apple forged its reputation as a relentlessly consumer-focused company.
Apple wouldn’t always be first, the thinking went, but it would be the best. Jobs certainly didn’t invent MP3 players or internet-capable mobile phones. But he and his designers developed iPods and iPhones that made competitors’ gadgets feel clunky and uncool.
‘Exactly what Apple needs’
Cut to 2026: The iPhone — launched by Jobs and made ubiquitous by Cook — is a tentpole, driving the bulk of Apple’s $416 billion in revenue last year. Iterating on that flagship product year after year has worked out pretty well for Cook, but there’s only so many bells and whistles you can jam into a single device to persuade folks to part with $1,000 for a new phone.
Apple needs another hit. The Vision Pro ain’t it.
In tapping Ternus, a hardware executive who doesn’t come from the iPhone world, Apple seems to realize it can’t put all its eggs in the iPhone basket. (The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Ternus introduced the M2 microprocessor at Apple's 2022 developer conference.
One of Ternus’s most significant achievements in recent years was leading the complex transition of Mac computers from using Intel chips to Apple’s proprietary processors, wrote Ming-Chi Kuo, tech analyst at TF International Securities, on X.
“Moving the Mac to Apple Silicon was a system- and platform-level transition, essentially a brain transplant. Within Apple, no one has more experience managing a shift at this scale than John Ternus,” Kuo wrote. “That is exactly what Apple needs as it moves into the next phase of on-device AI.”
Apple CEO Tim Cook barely mentioned AI during Tuesday's marketing event.
Why Apple is sidestepping Silicon Valley’s AI bloodsport
4 min readAh, yes, the AI thing. Apple has had some trouble with that wily new technology, in part because large language models can be unreliable, and Apple’s whole, like, ~thing~ is quality. After some stumbles with AI in 2024, Apple has been largely sitting on the sidelines of the AI race. And that’s worked to Apple’s advantage as investors have shopped for an alternative to volatile tech giants scrambling to outspend one another on data centers and circular financing deals.
Under Ternus, many analysts expect Apple to shift its positioning slightly and, rather than double down on homegrown AI software, focus on its bread-and-butter hardware that will inevitably be the platforms that connect AI to customers.
“Apple has more cash, consumers, and brand recognition than any company in the world… but now is the time to flex the muscles and go on the offensive instead of the defensive,” Wedbush Securities’ lead tech analyst, said in a note. “Ternus is not going to take over the CEO baton with a treadmill approach, in our view, and this is a good thing. Apple needs to balance keeping all the great culture with some new innovation going forward.”
Bottom line: Jobs was the creative guru. Cook the strategic planner. Ternus will have to be both. And more.
See all topics Email Link Copied!
