The way Apple makes products, conceives ideas, and ultimately tries to change the world through innovation looks set to shake up from September onwards, and a new person in charge could be why.
Apple has officially announced that after 15 years as the head of the company, CEO Tim Cook will be stepping into a different role, and one of its leadership team responsible for some of the company’s most known and loved products will be taking over.
From September 1, John Ternus, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, will take over from CEO Tim Cook, and things could get very interesting. It’s a change from business expert to engineer, and almost feels like a passing of the baton back from business to technology, as if we’re seeing a nod to Apple’s engineering roots, when Steve Wozniak made up the two Steves, and it wasn’t just the Steve everyone knew (Steve Jobs).
If you don’t know the name, there’s a good chance you’ve seen it and just not clocked it at the time. John’s been popping up with quotes in stories for several years now, appearing as far back as when Apple still made Intel Macs, with his expertise covering a variety of gadgets for the brand.
You can thank him and his teams for the AirPods and AirPods Pro, for iPhones and iPads, for Apple Watch models and yes, for an assortment of Macs. He’s been at Apple for 25 years and has touched so much of what the company is now known for, and he’ll be replacing Tim Cook as the guy in charge on September 1.
Tim’s tenure
There’s no denying that Tim’s time and tenure at Apple has helped solidify the company’s growth, and been a part of what made the company what it is today. Though it’s one we’ve heard people frame as “boring”, or more specifically, that it made Apple “boring”.
While that might be somewhat true, boring isn’t a bad thing. For a company like Apple, “boring” may have allowed it to excel and perfect its products, all the while working on ideas designed to shake up the world, like the recently launched MacBook Neo, a premium-designed laptop for well under the price of other premium laptops.
Rather, Tim’s approach to Apple was less about unusual ports and ideas that were specific to Apple, something that Steve Jobs would have tried (and did), Apple under Cook did things we would have never expected with Jobs in command: it adopted standards.
USB. HDMI. These were things that might never have made it into a MacBook had Cook not been in charge, moving it to newer standards that were eventually adopted by all.
In that time, we’ve seen Apple do great things, some of which we noted for its 50th birthday.
That includes Apple Silicon, easily one of the better developments that pushed its laptops to higher speeds and better battery life. It’s a similar story with the iPhone, which has gone onto become not just a fantastic product, but consistently one of the best phones you can find, with its operating system going on to give control back to users and not simply assuming they want something.
But they were also products that existed under Job. They may have been refined and improved under Cook’s watch, but there are products that arrived specifically under his leadership.
Devices like the AirPods are counted here, which in the AirPods Pro deliver some of the best noise cancellation in the world, while Apple’s best on wearables has largely paid off in the Apple Watch. It may not be a perfect product, a comment you can easily push towards the battery life, but the Apple Watch offers one of the best smartwatch experiences hands down.
The soul of an innovator
With Tim moving on to become the executive chairman of the board of directors, John Ternus will take over from September 1, and that could make things interesting.
We’ve already seen solid hardware design from Ternus’ leadership, but now he gets to make calls to push Apple’s next stage. Shifting leadership to an engineer is an interesting move, and one that could help Apple embrace AI positively, beyond simply bolting it in and making Siri work with it, or making it pretty up text and images.
If anything, it feels like Ternus might be the person to bring a spark of imagination to Cupertino, but temper it with the values Cook has imparted over the past 15 years.
“John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honour,” said current-CEO Tim Cook. “He is a visionary whose contributions to Apple over 25 years are already too numerous to count, and he is without question the right person to lead Apple into the future.”
“I could not be more confident in his abilities and his character, and I look forward to working closely with him on this transition and in my new role as executive chairman,” he said.
In terms of what’s next, we’d say very much to watch this space.
The rest of the year is likely to be the gear that occurred under Cook’s leadership. Ternus might have been in charge of the teams through much of it, but what’s coming will very much come from Cook, including the upcoming software from the Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) in June, the rest of the 2026 Macs, the impending launches of the iPhone and Apple Watch ranges in September, and even an eventual iPhone Fold to join the iPhone range, to name a few.
Ternus has touched much of what passes through the company, including its approaches to recyclable materials and 3D printing technologies, not to mention reliability and durability. He may be who you come to thank when your iPhone doesn’t snap when you sit on it.
And it means his next steps are likely to be in the products that arrive late 2026 and early 2027.
With easily removable and replaceable batteries part of what the EU will require from manufacturers next year, it may be one of the first challenges Ternus and his team work on: how do you make an iPhone and iPad retain their design while also make them support easily replaceable batteries?
Only time will tell, and perhaps a team of engineers led by the new Apple chief.
