John Ternus takes Apple's chair as Tim Cook becomes executive chairman

John Ternus became Apple's chief executive on 1 September. Tim Cook, who held the job for 15 years, moved the same day to a new post as executive chairman. The board approved the succession in April. Ternus also joined the board with effect from Tuesday. He is 51. Cook is 65.

Cook's last public note as CEO went up on Monday. He thanked the Apple community, said the title would change and the attachment would not, and called Ternus brilliant, capable and rare in his understanding of how products get built. Over the weekend he hosted a farewell gathering at Apple Park. The first product event of the new tenure is scheduled for 9 September, the slot in which Apple usually shows new iPhones. This year's rumours include a foldable device as well as the iPhone 18 line.

The company Ternus inherits is larger than the one Cook inherited from Steve Jobs in 2011. Annual sales were $108 billion at the start of Cook's term and $416 billion in the last fiscal year. Profit grew more than fourfold, to $112 billion. Market value moved from about $350 billion to more than $4.5 trillion and, at one point, briefly toward $5 trillion. The product list on Cook's watch includes every iPhone from the 5 onward, the Apple Watch, AirPods, Vision Pro, HomePod, Apple Music, Apple TV+ and Apple Fitness+. Services grew faster than hardware in the later years.

Ternus is a hardware engineer, not an operations man. He joined Apple's product design group in 2001 after work on virtual-reality headsets at Virtual Research Systems and a degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He became vice-president of hardware engineering in 2013 and senior vice-president in 2021. That path is the first time in more than a decade that the top job has gone to someone whose daily work was the physical product rather than the supply chain.

Cook is not leaving the building. Apple says the executive chairman will handle "certain aspects" of the business, in particular conversations with governments. The two governments that matter most to Apple's factories and sales are the United States and China. Cook has spent years on both relationships. Keeping him in that lane lets Ternus spend September on a launch event and on the backlog that investors actually argue about: Siri's delayed rebuild, Vision Pro's weak sales, a memory-chip squeeze, and the sense that Apple is late in on-device and cloud models.

Those are the open files, not slogans. Siri's next generation has slipped. Vision Pro did not become a third pillar next to the iPhone and the Watch. Samsung has sold foldable phones since 2019. Apple has not. RAM pricing is rising across the industry. None of that is hidden. Ternus's first 10 days will not close any of it. They will show whether a career hardware lead changes the order of those files or keeps Cook's sequence and Cook's diplomatic cover.

Jobs told Cook not to ask what Jobs would have done. Cook has now told the company, in public, that Ternus knows how to build the objects. The objects on 9 September will be the first evidence. The governments Cook still calls will be the second. The share price already baked the handover in April. What it has not baked is whether the next Siri ships on the calendar Ternus inherits, or on a new one he writes after the event.