Why John Ternus is the right pick at the right time

After 15 years at the helm of the company, Tim Cook is finally stepping down as CEO of Apple. In his place will be John Ternus, an Apple veteran who most recently served as Apple’s head of hardware and has walked the halls of Cupertino for most of his adult life. If there’s anyone who knows Apple as well as Cook, it’s Ternus.

The transition will not happen immediately. WWDC26 in June will be Cook’s final Apple event, with Ternus taking over on September 1, just before the iPhone 18 Pro reveal. This is a pretty important time for change.

What can we expect in the future? Tim Cook praised Ternus effusively, saying: “John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honor. He is a visionary whose contributions to Apple over 25 years are already too numerous to count, and he is undoubtedly the right person to lead Apple into the future.”

But what will the John Ternus era actually look like? Will he be able to correct Apple’s mistakes and put the company on a path to greater prosperity? And what will that future look like for you? I’ve looked at tea leaves, examined my fair share of innards, and read every palm I can find to see if I can figure it all out. Here’s what I think we could do.

Who is John Ternus?

Until his appointment as the new CEO, John Ternus was Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering and oversaw the physical products that made Apple successful. (Apple announced that Johny Srouji would succeed Ternus as hardware chief.)

He first joined Apple in 2001 as part of the company’s product design team, with a particular focus on the popular Cinema Display. He graduated to Vice President of Hardware Engineering in 2013 and then was promoted to Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering in 2021.

As head of hardware engineering, he initially managed Apple’s AirPods, iPad and Mac hardware divisions. iPhone hardware was added to that list in 2020, with the Apple Watch coming under his purview in 2022. He also played a leading role in Apple’s transition from Intel processors to Apple silicon, taking the stage and conducting interviews to promote the new chips.

And since John Giannandrea’s ouster as Apple’s head of AI in 2025, the company’s secret robotics projects have also been moved under the Ternus umbrella.

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Currently, he is one of the youngest members of Apple’s management team. He will be 51 when he takes the Apple throne, almost exactly the same age as Tim Cook when he became CEO in 2011, 15 years ago. This tells you that in making this decision, Apple is planning for the long term. If all goes well for the company, Ternus could be at the helm of the company for the next fifteen years or more.

The John Ternus era

Tim Cook is a lot of things, but unlike Steve Jobs, he’s never really been a product expert. However, Ternus is passionate about hardware, which could help him solve some of Apple’s most pressing problems, such as its struggling Vision Pro and how it makes its upcoming augmented reality glasses a smash hit.

On this subject, it is worth noting that the first role Ternus took on after graduating from college was at Virtual Research Systems, a company focused on manufacturing virtual reality headsets and other devices. Could this give it an unusual insight into how Apple can put the beleaguered Vision Pro on the right track?

Maybe, maybe not. Ternus left Virtual Research Systems to join Apple in 2001, and since then, a lot has changed in the world of virtual reality. At the same time, Ternus was at Apple during the entire process of creating Vision Pro and would have played an important role in its development. If he was in a management position at that time, would much change now that he’s about to lead the company?

I wouldn’t rule it out. His nature as a product specialist could give him the ideas and vision needed to course-correct now that he has more concentrated power in his hands. It could also be just what’s needed to bring about the long-rumored launch of Apple’s smart glasses.

And there’s one encouraging piece of information from a profile of Ternus published in the New York Times earlier this year. It was noted there that around 2018, Apple was considering adding a LiDAR scanner to its iPhones, but was concerned that the relatively expensive $40 component would cut into its profits. Ternus proposed that the part be limited to Pro models and excluded from entry-level iPhones.

But importantly, he didn’t do this just because he was looking after Apple’s financial results. According to the Times profile, Ternus’ reasoning was that Pro-level iPhones “tend to be purchased by Apple’s most loyal customers, who would be excited about new technology. Average consumers, on the other hand, probably wouldn’t care.”

This is telling because it reveals Ternus’ confident understanding of Apple’s customers and what they care about and what they don’t.

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Apple is often accused of being so obsessed with being the best that it becomes too premium, making its devices unaffordable for most people. But if Ternus can take the knowledge demonstrated in the Times profile and apply it to the rest of Apple’s products going forward, perhaps we can hope for a company that stays strongly in touch with what its base wants.

Ternus also weighed in on the right-to-repair debate, saying Apple’s goal is to improve product durability rather than increase repairability, which can add points of failure and “unintended consequences that are worse for the consumer and for the planet.” That doesn’t mean repairability issues will be pushed aside: the MacBook Neo, after all, is one of Apple’s most repairable devices in years. However, as Ternus focuses on device quality and longevity, the focus will likely be placed elsewhere.

Much more than equipment

Ternus’ tenure as hardware chief has of course not been perfect. He pushed hard for notorious missteps like the Touch Bar and the MacBook Pro’s butterfly keyboard, both of which are now considered major missteps.

There are unanswered questions, like whether he has the same deep commitment to privacy, accessibility, and environmental action as Tim Cook. It would not be surprising if he did, as it would be highly unusual for Cook to choose a successor who disagreed with these issues. But it’s still an unknown for now.

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And for all of Ternus’ hardware expertise, many of Apple’s biggest problems lie in software, with AI and its Liquid Glass design particularly at the forefront. Yet even here there are promising signs. Apple is a highly integrated company that controls both its hardware and its software. You may be a “hardware specialist” like Ternus, but you are not locked in a quarantine, never to touch software.

We can see this in Ternus’s own story. According to Bloomberg, Ternus was one of the loudest voices within Apple who pushed for the creation of iPadOS. Ternus argued that the iPad would not be able to realize its potential and take advantage of its hardware capabilities if it did not have its own bespoke operating system. In other words, Ternus understood how hardware and software can help each other thrive. This is the ideal mindset to have at a company like Apple.

Additionally, one of Ternus’ additional roles is that of “executive sponsor” for design. While this doesn’t mean he’s a designated design guru like Jony Ive or Alan Dye, it does mean he’s responsible for handling design issues (hardware and software) in executive meetings. So while it remains focused on hardware, it has been looking at software issues for some time now.

Interestingly, Apple’s most recent CEOs have all specialized in slightly different disciplines. For Jobs, it was design and marketing. For Cook, operations. And in the case of Ternus, it’s hardware. I know this is kind of a simplification, but it will be interesting to see how Ternus’ background impacts how he approaches his new job.

With Tim Cook’s tenure ending and John Ternus stepping into the spotlight, we could be on the cusp of a major change at Apple. But given everything we know about the company’s new CEO, from his passions and priorities to how he focuses on hardware without excluding everything else, Apple appears to be in good hands.