John Ternus takes over as Apple CEO from Tim Cook: The wider industry impact

John Ternus takes over as Apple CEO from Tim Cook

It is the first change at the top of Apple since Cook succeeded Steve Jobs in 2011, and Cook spent the summer working alongside Ternus on the handover rather than clearing out. He has also been Apple’s most visible engineering executive on stage for years, presenting the iMac Pro, the redesigned 2019 Mac Pro, the 2018 iPad Pro, the MacBook Neo and the iPhone Air, and he was the executive who introduced Apple silicon to the public. Apple announced the transition in April.

Tim Cook moves to executive chairman, Arthur Levinson becomes lead independent director, and Ternus joins the board of directors alongside the CEO title. Johny Srouji takes an expanded role as chief hardware officer. Unusually for a hardware chief, he arrives at the CEO job already comfortable being the face of a launch.

He is 51, a mechanical engineer by training, and he has spent the last 25 years of his working life inside one company. He came in on the product design team, became vice president of hardware engineering in 2013, and was made senior vice president of hardware engineering in 2021, when he joined the executive team. Delivering the engineering commencement address at UPenn in 2024, he described a standoff with a supplier over the number of grooves on the screws that would sit in the back of the display. The supplier offered screws with 35 grooves. Apple had specified 25. He has shipped hardware in every major category the company sells, run the transition to Apple silicon, and spent 25 years learning how Apple’s supply chain and design teams actually work together.

Because he understood how Apple made things at scale, cook was a supply chain executive who became CEO. Because he understands how they are designed in the first place, ternus is an engineer who became CEO. Apple has had seven chief executives before him, and none of them arrived at the job the way he has, which is from the product design bench, having spent two decades deciding how Apple’s hardware is actually put together. The story he tells about those early years is about the Cinema Display. He held out, then stopped mid-argument to ask himself whether this was a normal way to spend a working day. He concluded it was probably not normal, but it was right. That leaves the record itself as the explanation for why Apple picked him. The board has decided that is the more useful qualification for what Apple builds next.

John Ternus runs Apple from today.