The challenges of John Ternus, the engineer who will command Apple
Tim Cook has turned Apple into the most valuable company in history. Now it's up to his successor to demonstrate that they can do what he never managed: reinvent it
When Tim Cook took over from Steve Jobs in September 2011, Apple was worth 350 billion dollars. When he leaves, 15 years later, it's worth 4 trillion – ours; trillions yours. In total, Cook has created almost 3.7 trillion in value for shareholders, a figure that no other American executive has matched, except Jensen Huang at Nvidia. The stock has risen by nearly 2,000% during his tenure, far above the overall stock market performance.
The numbers have long since settled the debate about Cook's suitability. However, the figures don't fully explain how he did it, nor why Apple hasn't surprised anyone with a truly new product in years.
The manager who surpassed the visionary
When Steve Jobs died, on October 5, 2011, everyone wondered if Apple could survive without him. Jobs had reinvented personal computing, music, and phones in less than a decade. Cook, on the other hand, was the manager who had built a global supply chain capable of producing hundreds of millions of devices each year.
What no one expected is that being a good manager could generate so much wealth. Cook understood that the iPhone was the goose that laid the golden eggs and that his job was not to kill it. Two years after taking office, he closed a deal with China Mobile, the world's largest operator, and sales soared. China became Apple's second market, and the iPhone went from being a trendy product to personal infrastructure that hundreds of millions of people renewed every three years.
But Cook didn't stop there. He understood that devices could be the foundation of a much more profitable services business. Today, this activity – App Store, Apple Music, Apple TV+, iCloud, Apple Pay, and all the rest – is twice as profitable per euro invoiced as device sales. The result: more than 100 billion dollars in net profit each year.
The suspended assignments
Cook has never quite shaken off the label of not being a product creator. During his 15 years, Apple launched the AirPods and Apple Watch, competent and profitable products, but they did not represent the leaps that Jobs had spearheaded with the Mac, iPod, iPhone, or iPad.
When Cook tried to bet on something truly new, things didn't go so well. The autonomous car project – internally known as Titan and which mirrored Tesla, often considered the Apple of the automotive industry – burned billions of dollars for almost a decade, only to be canceled in 2024 without having produced even a presentable prototype.
It has also stumbled with the Vision Pro, the mixed reality headset that Cook presented in June 2023 with an unusual enthusiasm for him. An impressive device, but heavy, expensive, and without a use case that attracts ordinary consumers. Sales have been well below forecasts.
And then there's artificial intelligence (AI). Here the balance must be more nuanced. Apple is much slower than Google, Meta, Microsoft, or OpenAI in deploying generative AI models, and Siri continues to be the clumsiest digital butler available to us: an anomaly in a company that makes chips that any AI engineer would want to have. The promise of a revamped Siri – announced almost two years ago – remains, to date, a promise.
But here we must be fair to Cook. In a sector where companies like OpenAI have launched AI products without regard for hallucinations, privacy, or security, Apple has chosen to go slow and do it right. The fact that it has ended up partnering with Google to integrate Gemini into the new Siri might seem like a weakness, but it's pure pragmatism: if you don't have the best model, get the best one. Prudence in the face of a wild race may seem like timidity, but it could also turn out to be a success.
John Ternus, the seventh
On September 1 John Ternus will become the seventh CEO in Apple's history, a list that includes illustrious names and some not so much. He is 50 years old, studied mechanical engineering, and joined Apple in July 2001 after four years at a virtual reality company. Practically his entire career has been spent in Cupertino, something the board of directors clearly values.
Cook makes way for someone with the same disciplined profile, but with an important difference: Ternus is a hardware engineer who knows how each part of each device is made. While Cook mastered the supply chain, Ternus thoroughly understands the product.
His great success was leading the transition of Macs from Intel processors to its own chips, too much car for the audience it was aimed at. An experiment that has confirmed that Apple can also lose sight of what the user wants.
The counterpart is the smartphones on the planet, whatever brand you carry in your pocket. A decision made 35 years ago, in a time of crisis, by a management team that history has forgotten.
The iPhone Air and MacBook Neo: a pass and a notable
The last few months have been a kind of early exam for Ternus. And the result is uneven. The iPhone Air –the thinnest device, presented as the most significant design change in years– has been a disappointment: too thin to have a decent battery, too expensive for the audience it was aimed at. An experiment that has confirmed that Apple can also lose sight of what the user wants.
The counterpoint is the MacBook Neo, the laptop at 699 euros with a mobile phone chip that Ternus considers one of its prides. And rightly so: Apple had avoided the cheap computer segment for decades, convinced that it harmed the brand image... and margins. David Pogue, in his recent book chronicling the company's first 50 years, details this. The Neo breaks with this dogma and, for now, sales prove it right.
The challenges
The big question of the Ternus era is not whether he will know how to manage Apple, but whether he will know how to drive the radical and often uncomfortable decisions that define the great technological leaps.
Ternus takes the wheel at a time when the new version of Siri –with Google's Gemini at the helm– must prove that Apple can be relevant in AI. If it fails, the company's credibility will be tarnished. If it works, it could open its own path: private AI, processed on the device, without sending anything to the cloud. Apple Silicon chips can already run language models locally. If Ternus manages to make a clear proposal, Apple could find its definitive differentiator in AI, precisely thanks to the prudence they now criticize.
Meanwhile, Tim Cook will remain present as executive chairman of the board. He has been the man who got along well with both Trump and Chinese leaders. Ternus will have to learn to be diplomatic too in an increasingly complicated world, with supply chains under pressure and the future of manufacturing in China, India, and the United States to resolve.
