New York
Apple veteran John Ternus will take over the $4 trillion company as CEO come September 1.
“Having spent almost my entire career at Apple, I have been lucky to have worked under Steve Jobs and to have had Tim Cook as my mentor,” he said in a press release announcing his new position Monday.
Here’s what you need to know about Apple’s incoming CEO.
Ternus knows Apple at its core: He is currently the company’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, according to Apple’s website. That means he led the hardware engineering behind Apple’s most recognizable products, such as the iPhone and Mac, as well as newer innovations like the Apple Vision Pro.
He played a major role in new product lines for the Mac, AirPods and iPhone. His team was essential in developing the new MacBook Neo, Apple said in a press release, and the iPhone 17 lineup.
Ternus has spent a quarter of a century at Apple. He joined the company’s product design team in 2001 and eventually became a vice president of hardware engineering in 2013. Apple promoted him to the executive team in 2021, when he became senior vice president of hardware engineering.
He worked as a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems before joining Apple and he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, according to the press release.
Ternus’ latest promotion isn’t much of a surprise – he had been considered a CEO front-runner for at least the last year.
Ternus certainly has big shoes to fill. Cook has served as CEO since 2011 and led the company to reach a $4 trillion market cap in a post-Steve Jobs era.
The big question mark hanging over Ternus is Apple’s efforts in AI.
“Cook leaves a lasting legacy in Cupertino and there will be a lot of pressure on Ternus to produce success out of the gates, especially on the AI front,” analyst Dan Ives said in a note Monday.
While Jobs was a risk taker, Cook found steady success in services building off existing products, such as the Apple Watch, AirPods and Apple TV+. It’s up to Ternus to decide which path he will take, and whether Apple can create the next big thing in a volatile AI landscape.
“Ternus is a hardware engineer, which signals that Apple will seek differentiation in its physical products even as it looks to reframe the device as a substrate for intelligent experiences,” Forrester principal analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee said in a note.
