On September 1, 2026, John Ternus will become Apple’s new CEO. This was officially announced by the Cupertino company itself with a press release that closes a 15-year long cycle and opens one of the most uncertain and potentially most exciting phases in the history of Apple. Tim Cook will assume the role of executive chairmanremaining on board to ensure an orderly transition until the end of the summer.
It is the first change at the top since 2011, when Cook himself replaced Steve Jobs, a few weeks before the co-founder’s death. The timing is anything but coincidental. The news arrives just three weeks after Apple’s big 50th anniversary celebrationsfounded on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in a garage in Los Altos, California.
A month of global events, with Alicia Keys making a surprise performance at New York’s Grand Central Station and Sir Paul McCartney closing the festivities with a private concert in Apple Park on March 31st. A spectacular ending, almost an involuntary farewell ceremony for Cook. And now, the curtain opens on a new act.
Who is John Ternus
John Ternus is 50 years oldwas born in California, and represents something unusual in the panorama of Big Tech CEOs: he is, first and foremost, an engineer. He graduated in mechanical engineering at University of Pennsylvania in 1997his thesis project was a robotic arm for people with quadriplegia, controllable with head movements. Before Apple, he worked as a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems, where he designed virtual reality headsets.
He joined Apple in 2001four years after graduating, and never left. He started on the product design team, initially working on the Apple Cinema Display. In the 2013 became vice president of hardware engineeringuntil promotion in 2021 to Senior Vice Presidententering the small circle of the executive team. Since then he has led all hardware engineering teams: iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods, and Apple Vision Pro. It has been, in Apple’s own words, “instrumental” in the development of some of the most important product lines of recent years, including the recent MacBook Neo and the iPhone 17 lineup.
«Having spent almost my entire career at Apple, I was fortunate to work under Steve Jobs and have Tim Cook as a mentor»Ternus said in the official statement. A phrase that summarizes his position well: a man who knows the company from the inside like few others, formed by both of the great souls of Apple’s history.
Ternus is considered an internally respected leader, with a direct and technical style, far from the grandiloquent public communication of other CEOs in the industry. As per Apple tradition, it built its reputation on products, not on stage. With his promotion to CEO, Johny Srouji will assume the role of chief hardware officer, taking charge of hardware engineering in an expanded role.
The Cook era: the numbers of an emotionless success
To understand what Tim Cook leaves behind, some figures are enough. Apple’s market capitalization has grown more than 20 times during his tenure, reaching i 4 trillion dollars at the close of Monday 20 April, the third most valued company in the world, behind only Nvidia and Alphabet.
Apple shares appreciated more 1,700% from 2011 to today. First quarter fiscal 2026 revenue exceeded 143.8 billion dollarswith the iPhone alone generating over half of the revenue. Under Cook, Apple transformed the App Store, Apple Music, iCloud, Apple TV+ services into a second billion-dollar business engine, capable of balancing the cyclical nature of the hardware.
Cook brought Apple into the wearables industry with Apple Watch and AirPodstwo categories that the company effectively invented or reinvented. It pushed the transition to proprietary silicon with the chips of M seriesone of the most technologically daring moves in recent years in the computer world.
He built one of the more efficient and complex supply chains in the world, even if today this complexity clashes with geopolitical tensions, Trump administration tariffs and a chip crisis linked to the demand for AI. Yet, something is missing. And everyone knows it.
Jobs’ shadow and the “Think Different” paradox
Tim Cook was an excellent captain. But it was never Steve Jobs (and he definitely didn’t even want to be). This is perhaps the paradox that Apple has lived with for 15 years, and which today, on the eve of an epochal change, is more evident than ever.
Jobs was an uncomfortable visionary, capable of redefining entire markets with a single product: the Mac in 1984, the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007, the iPad in 2010. His philosophy of “Think Different” it wasn’t just a slogan: it was a way of looking at the world, a promise to consumers that Apple would always choose the courage of radical innovation over the safety of iteration.
Cook governed with the logic of a manager, not a visionary. He optimized, scaled, diversified. It transformed Apple into a perfect machine for creating financial value. But no product launched during its era was a game changer the way the iPhone did.
The Apple Vision Proits most ambitious product, it has remained a niche objectinteresting but unfinished, incapable of creating a new mass category. The promise of “spatial computing” is still there, waiting to become a reality. And then there is the issue ofartificial intelligence: Perhaps the biggest Achilles heel of the Cook era.
The delay on AI: the most urgent dossier for Ternus
Artificial intelligence is the field in which Apple has accumulated the most embarrassing delay. While OpenAI revolutionized the sector with ChatGPT, while Google integrated Gemini into each of its products and Microsoft transformed itself with Copilot, Apple launched Apple Intelligenceits suite of AI features, with years of delay, incomplete functionality and a Siri that struggled to keep up with competitors.
The result? Weak demand for the iPhone 16, disappointment among developers, and a public perception that Apple is struggling with one of the most important technology trends of the decade. The big question mark weighing on Ternus is Apple’s commitment to AI.
It is a challenge that the new CEO will have to face immediately, with the awareness that the gap with rivals is real and that recovering it will require not only resources but an extra gear.
The foldable iPhone, almost certainly a success
The other big test for John Ternus will be the foldable iPhoneexpected for September 2026 together with the iPhone 18 Pro lineup. The device, which according to rumors will have a book-like design, will arrive on the market with about seven years behind Samsungwhich launched its first foldable, the Galaxy Fold, in 2019.
The delay is enormous. But Apple, historically, has never entered a category first: it entered Better. The question is whether it will be able to do the same with leaflets, in a segment where competitors have years of know-how and millions of already loyal users. The bitten apple fans are certainly waiting for this moment with palpable excitement and it will most likely be a success.
Samsung Display will produce the flexible OLED panels for the first foldable iPhone: one of the tastiest ironies in the history of consumer technology.
What we expect from Ternus
John Ternus brings with him something Tim Cook never had: a purely engineering background and a visceral closeness to the product. He’s the man who’s been building Apple’s hardware for the past twenty years. He knows every component, every design element, every decision that turns an idea into an object that millions of people will hold in their hands every day.
But being a great engineer isn’t enough to lead the largest technology company in the world. Ternus will have to prove he knows how build a visionnot just execute it. It will have to speak to the world, to investors, to governments, to the creatives who have chosen Apple as a tool for work and life.
It will have to, in some way, bring Apple back to the center of the cultural conversation that matters, the one where you decide which technology really changes things. Apple’s 50th anniversary just passed. The next 50 years begin now. And they start with John Ternus.
