Apple CEO John Ternus and Tim Cook
Ternus joined Apple’s product design team in 2001, fresh off a short stint at Virtual Research Systems and a degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He was 26, and by his own account, thoroughly out of his depth.
“The people I met were so smart and so confident, and they knew so much more than me,” he said, in comments Fortune resurfaced from a 2024 commencement address he gave to Penn’s graduating engineers. He moved into a managerial role within a few years and led hardware engineering on the G5 era iMacs, work he later said sharpened his ability to approach problems from different angles, even when the company itself was shifting its entire design language from clear plastic to aluminum. “I’ll always be grateful that I wasn’t afraid to ask for help when I needed it,” Ternus said, framing it not as a weakness to be managed but as the fastest route to becoming genuinely capable. “This is your time, this is your moment,” he told the graduates, “so do what Steve Jobs once said, and go out there and make a dent in the universe.
Ternus’s first project at Apple was the Cinema Display, a large plastic desktop monitor, and from there his rise through the company was steady rather than sudden. He was equally direct about the value of admitting what you do not know. Being around people who care deeply about their work, he argued, does not just push you to stretch your own limits. It teaches you how to get there. Ternus closed his address the way a Apple executive almost has to, by quoting the man who built the company’s original operating philosophy. It is a fitting line for a speech, and an even more fitting one in hindsight. Ternus was, at the time, still a year away from being handed the largest dent of his own career. What Darwin understood about ignorance and confidence, Ternus seems to have understood about ambition and doubt: that the two are not opposites competing for space, but partners that, handled correctly, take turns doing the work. Get the latest Education News and Live updates. Download the TOI app.
It is a strange thing to say about the people who eventually rise to the top of anything, and it is exactly the mindset that carried a 26 year old engineer through two and a half decades at Apple until he became, this year, the company’s eighth chief executive officer (CEO) in its 50 year history. John Ternus has taken over from Tim Cook, who is stepping down after a 15 year run that turned Apple into a 4.6 trillion dollar company. By 2013, he was vice president (VP) of hardware engineering, overseeing the iPad and the Mac.
In his final memo to Apple employees, obtained by Fortune , he wrote that he took “enormous comfort in handing the helm to someone as brilliant and wonderful and capable as John,” adding that few people understand what it takes to build products that change the world the way Ternus does. “The care that you put into your work, it really matters,” he told them. He urged young professionals to chase what interests and excites them rather than a title or a paycheck, and to build it in a way that “aligns with your values,” whether that meant product design, medical research, or something that does not exist yet.
Charles Darwin, a man who spent five years sailing to the Galapagos before he ever dared publish a theory that would upend how humanity understood itself, once wrote that ignorance more frequently produces confidence than knowledge does. But, the mindset Ternus credits for getting him there had very little to do with certainty. It had to do with the opposite of it. Over the following decade, he contributed to the hardware behind every generation of iPad, the first AirPods, and builds across the iPhone and Apple Watch lines. He was eventually promoted to senior vice president (SVP), reporting directly to Cook, before being named the executive to succeed him. Cook, for his part, did not sound like a man handing off the company reluctantly. Ternus’s commencement remarks were aimed at Wharton engineers about to enter a job market that offers them, statistically, plenty of long hours and modest starting salaries. His advice was not the usual instruction to climb faster or network harder, it was to care. Learning how to keep learning, he added, was one of the great gifts of a college education, and one that does not expire the day the tassel gets turned.
He described the early years as “intimidating and exhilarating,” a combination that will sound familiar to anyone who has ever taken a job they were not entirely sure they deserved. What Ternus did with that discomfort is the more interesting part. Rather than letting it corner him into silence, he built a working rule for himself, one he later passed on to a room full of graduates: “Always assume you’re as smart as anyone else in the room, but never assume that you know as much as they do. It is a small distinction, but it does real work. Confidence gets you through the door. Humility is what gets you asked back.