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New York
John Ternus could have simply landed the greatest and worst CEO job on the planet.
When Ternus takes over as Apple’s CEO in September, traders will be anticipating a return to the form of daring, artistic motion that made Apple a design pioneer beneath Steve Jobs. They’ll additionally anticipate Tim Cook-level mastery of Apple’s sprawling operations. And they’ll need to see the new man do extra than simply emulate his predecessors — he should embody Apple’s “think different” mantra and put his personal stamp on the Ternus Era.
So, yeah, congrats on the promotion, John! All you’ve got to do now’s steer a $4 trillion firm and its 166,000 workers by the wilderness of the synthetic intelligence growth and/or bust, provide you with a blockbuster product on par with the iPhone and keep away from pissing off any of the governments — like China, India and the United States, all of which have competing pursuits — that maintain the keys to your suppliers’ factories. No stress!
Of course, any CEO gig is a tall order, however the weight of expectations solely grows when it’s one in every of the greatest firms in the world and you’re the third man to observe to two back-to-back showstoppers.
Cook announced Monday that he would step down at the finish of the summer season, capping 15 years of what could nicely go down in enterprise historical past books as one in every of the most profitable CEO tenures ever.
From the begin, Cook bought plenty of criticism for not being Steve Jobs 2.0. He was the “operations guy,” not the artistic visionary. But the numbers don’t lie: Apple’s revenue has greater than quadrupled beneath Cook; it grew to become the first ever trillion-dollar firm in 2018, and later grew to become one in every of only a few to hit the $4 trillion degree.
“It is easy to forget that when Cook assumed the CEO role, the iPhone had less than a quarter of the US smartphone market, facing potent competitors like BlackBerry, Samsung, Motorola, and Nokia,” wrote Yale researchers Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian in Fortune. “That was a far cry from the iPhone’s dominant position today, capturing a third of the global market and nearly two-thirds of the US.”
It’s additionally straightforward to neglect that Apple almost went bankrupt in the late Nineties. At the time, the board turned to Jobs, a prolific inventor who co-founded the firm earlier than being pushed out in 1985, to return as CEO. Under the obsessive Jobs, Apple cast its fame as a relentlessly consumer-focused firm.
Apple wouldn’t at all times be first, the considering went, however it could be the greatest. Jobs definitely didn’t invent MP3 gamers or internet-capable cell phones. But he and his designers developed iPods and iPhones that made rivals’ devices really feel clunky and uncool.
Cut to 2026: The iPhone — launched by Jobs and made ubiquitous by Cook — is a tentpole, driving the bulk of Apple’s $416 billion in income final 12 months. Iterating on that flagship product 12 months after 12 months has labored out fairly nicely for Cook, however there’s solely so many bells and whistles you possibly can jam right into a single gadget to persuade people to half with $1,000 for a new telephone.
Apple needs one other hit. The Vision Pro ain’t it.
In tapping Ternus, a {hardware} govt who doesn’t come from the iPhone world, Apple appears to understand it may’t put all its eggs in the iPhone basket. (The firm didn’t reply to a request for remark.)
One of Ternus’s most important achievements lately was main the advanced transition of Mac computer systems from utilizing Intel chips to Apple’s proprietary processors, wrote Ming-Chi Kuo, tech analyst at TF International Securities, on X.
“Moving the Mac to Apple Silicon was a system- and platform-level transition, essentially a brain transplant. Within Apple, no one has more experience managing a shift at this scale than John Ternus,” Kuo wrote. “That is exactly what Apple needs as it moves into the next phase of on-device AI.”
Ah, sure, the AI factor. Apple has had some trouble with that wily new know-how, partly as a result of giant language fashions can be unreliable, and Apple’s entire, like, ~factor~ is high quality. After some stumbles with AI in 2024, Apple has been largely sitting on the sidelines of the AI race. And that’s labored to Apple’s benefit as traders have shopped for another to risky tech giants scrambling to outspend each other on knowledge facilities and circular financing deals.
Under Ternus, many analysts anticipate Apple to shift its positioning barely and, slightly than double down on homegrown AI software program, deal with its bread-and-butter {hardware} that can inevitably be the platforms that join AI to prospects.
“Apple has more cash, consumers, and brand recognition than any company in the world… but now is the time to flex the muscles and go on the offensive instead of the defensive,” Wedbush Securities’ lead tech analyst, stated in a word. “Ternus is not going to take over the CEO baton with a treadmill approach, in our view, and this is a good thing. Apple needs to balance keeping all the great culture with some new innovation going forward.”
Bottom line: Jobs was the artistic guru. Cook the strategic planner. Ternus could have to be each. And extra.