In his 15 years leading Apple, Tim Cook has achieved what many thought was impossible. But when he leaves the top job this year, his hand-picked replacement will face an unprecedented challenge – leading a giant of classical computing into an uncertain AI era.
How will John Ternus, a quiet hardware engineer known for meticulous and careful attention to detail, shape the massive company over the next decade as it adapts – or doesn’t – to an upheaval that some believe requires a full reset of how we understand computing?
Who is John Ternus?
At 50, Ternus has spent half his life working at Apple. Joining the company as part of the design team in 2001, he was appointed vice president of hardware engineering in 2013, overseeing Mac, AirPods and iPad. In 2021, he replaced his mentor, Dan Riccio, as senior vice president of hardware engineering, by which time he was also in charge of iPhone and Apple Watch.
Ternus is deeply involved in the technical nitty-gritty of the company’s products. Any time I’ve been to Apple Park over the past four years, he’s been the executive in the background briefings answering my questions about the new gadgets and features. In contrast to some of the cliches about Apple formed in the 2010s, he is quick to emphasise that sleek design shouldn’t come at the expense of performance and longevity, and on AI he’s spoken about preferring the invisible behind-the-scenes type to the kind that takes centre stage.
If you look at Apple’s line-up of products over the past five years – the period in which Ternus has held the top hardware engineering role – you can spot patterns that might speak to his priorities. There have been more functional improvements than game-changing novelties, with an emphasis on battery life, longevity and robust design.
The standard iPhone has become a lot more advanced, closing the gap between itself and the Pro models, which in turn have become testing grounds for new buttons, interfaces, camera technology and powerful processors. On the other hand, Apple has also produced more “less expensive” models than before, most recently with the iPhone 16e and MacBook Neo.
Not everything produced under Ternus’ watch has been a slam-dunk. Long-time MacBook users will remember the touch bar and the butterfly keyboard mechanism, neither of which are on current devices, and for good reason. But he’s also credited with helping smooth the Mac’s transition to Apple Silicon chips, which has proved an enormous success, as well as enriching the iPad line with features including desktop-style features, magic keyboards and OLED screens.
Apple’s next era
If you split the past 30 years of Apple into two equal parts, you would, of course, call them the Jobs and Cook eras respectively. The first era, in which the company’s co-founder returned, is marked by a flurry of new products now seen as revolutionary. Jobs was a visionary, a master of product development and marketing. Under his watch, Apple returned to relevance by predicting what consumers would want before they knew they wanted it.
Throughout the next era, Cook faced constant questions about whether he could live up to Jobs’ innovation. But that’s not his superpower. Having already reorganised Apple’s supply chain as COO, he continued to refine the strategy and finances, safeguard Apple’s culture and shepherd shrewd and iterative advancements to market, while boosting the company’s digital services branch. In the time he’s been chief, Apple’s value has grown from $US350 billion ($489 billion) to $US4 trillion ($5.6 trillion). Shares have risen by around 2000 per cent.
Ternus is young enough to serve as Apple chief executive for the next 15 years. But if he does, how might his era be marked?
You could view him as a safe pair of hands. With Apple’s dominance established, and its supply chains perfected, it could be an era of maintaining the consumer technology giant rather than reinventing it. But it’s now hard to ignore the voices predicting that AI will make reinvention mandatory, and the technology could throw up unpredictable hurdles.
Apple has been criticised for not competing with Google and OpenAI with its own foundational AI models, and its Apple Intelligence suite is not as ever-present on its devices as AI is on Android phones and Windows PCs. Ternus could lead an Apple that turns that around, or one that shows there’s another way forward. Or one that gets left behind.
On a more existential level, given half of Apple’s revenue comes from device sales, the combination of AI and network infrastructure advancements could push consumers away from hardware devices and local computing power entirely. If conversational AI begins to replace phones and laptops, Apple would need to compete with smart-glasses and AI wearables to maintain its high-margin service and subscription business.
Rumours indicate that Apple already has glasses and an AI wearable in development, which Ternus has probably overseen from their inception. Other supposed devices in the Apple pipeline include home robots that act as AI-powered assistants, and smart security sensors. In the nearer term, Apple is tipped to release updates including a folding iPhone, a touchscreen Mac and a large folding iPad.
Josh Gilbert, market analyst at investing platform eToro, said that any change in senior leadership at a company of this size would bring some uncertainty, but that Apple has been here before.
“When Cook succeeded Steve Jobs in 2011, many questioned what was next for Apple without its visionary founder. Cook’s results spoke for themselves,” he said.
“Ternus inherits a business generating more than $US400 billion in annual revenue, with some of the most loyal customers on the planet, but the AI chapter is still being written. Whether he can accelerate the AI story will be the biggest question over the next 12 months, and he’ll have pressure to deliver right from day one.”
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