Apple Names John Ternus as New CEO, Tim Cook Steps Down

Tim Cook steps down as Apple’s CEO on September 1, handing the job to John Ternus, the company’s senior vice president of Hardware Engineering.

Cook’s exit closes a 15-year run at the top. Ternus, who joined Apple in 2001, takes over a company sitting at the center of an industry-wide AI race, with a product roadmap that includes a tabletop AI companion device expected in 2027, a new smart speaker with a display, and a home security system designed to go head-to-head with Ring and Google Home.

He won’t get a grace period. All of it lands on his desk September 1.

Ternus has been around long enough to know the territory. He became vice president of Hardware Engineering in 2013 and has shepherded major product lines through cycles that defined the company’s hardware identity, from the iPad and AirPods to successive generations of the iPhone and Apple Watch. He’s not a new face to anyone who watches Apple closely.

“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,” Ternus said in a statement. He also didn’t downplay what he’s inheriting. “I am profoundly grateful for this opportunity to carry Apple’s mission forward,” he said, adding that he’s “filled with optimism about what we can achieve in the years to come.” On the workforce: “The most talented people on earth are here at Apple, determined to be part of something bigger than any one of us,” Ternus said.

Cook, for his part, kept it gracious. “It has been the greatest privilege of my life to be the CEO of Apple and to have been trusted to lead such an extraordinary company,” Cook said in the company’s release.

That statement doesn’t capture the full scale of what he built. Cook took the reins from co-founder Steve Jobs in 2011, after Jobs’s retirement and death, at a moment when a lot of people weren’t sure the company could hold together without its founder. It held. Under Cook, Apple grew into a multi-trillion-dollar enterprise, built out a services business that now rivals the hardware side in strategic importance, and turned the iPhone into the defining consumer product of the last two decades.

Cook also became one of the most prominent openly gay executives in American business. When he came out publicly, it was front-page news across the industry and far beyond it. The reception today is different, as SFist noted in its coverage of the announcement. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman occupies a comparably visible position in tech in 2026, and his sexuality doesn’t register as a notable fact in most coverage. That’s a real shift from where things stood in 2011, and Cook’s public profile is part of why it happened.

Apple has been managing pressure on multiple fronts, including regulatory scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic and ongoing battles with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over disclosures. Ternus walks into all of that on top of the product pipeline. The investor relations page will update when the transition takes effect.

Cook’s legacy isn’t really in question. Ternus’s is just getting started.