Apple will get a new CEO on September 1, when Tim Cook steps down and hands control of the company to John Ternus, currently Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering.
The announcement ends Cook’s 15-year run leading one of the most valuable companies in the world. Ternus, who joined Apple in 2001, has overseen hardware engineering through some of the company’s most consequential product cycles, including the iPad, AirPods, and multiple generations of the iPhone and Apple Watch. He became vice president of Hardware Engineering in 2013.
Cook’s departure comes at a complicated moment for Apple. The company is deep in the AI push reshaping the broader tech industry, and it has several major product launches ahead, including a tabletop AI companion device expected to hit the market in 2027, a new smart speaker with a visual display, and a home security system meant to compete directly with Ring and Google Home. Ternus will inherit all of it on day one.
“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. Cook took over from co-founder Steve Jobs in 2011, after Jobs’s retirement and death, and the handoff at the time felt precarious to many observers. It wasn’t. Under Cook, Apple grew into a multi-trillion-dollar enterprise, expanding its services business and turning the iPhone into the defining consumer product of the era.
Cook also made history as one of the most prominent openly gay executives in American business.
That part of the story is quieter now.
When Cook came out publicly, it was front-page news. Today, as SFist noted in its coverage of the announcement, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman holds a similar position in the tech world and his sexuality barely registers as a news item. The shift says something real about how the industry has changed since 2011.
Ternus, for his part, isn’t coming in cold. He’s spent almost his entire professional life at Apple, joining three years after Cook did, and credits both Jobs and Cook as direct influences. “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’s also not understating what he’s walking into. “I am profoundly grateful for this opportunity to carry Apple’s mission forward,” he said. He added that he’s “filled with optimism about what we can achieve in the years to come,” and pointed to Apple’s workforce as the reason. “The most talented people on earth are here at Apple, determined to be part of something bigger than any one of us,” Ternus said.
Apple’s investor relations page will reflect the leadership change when it takes effect September 1. The company has been navigating pressure from regulators on both sides of the Atlantic over its App Store practices, a set of legal fights that Ternus will need to manage alongside the product roadmap. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission requires public disclosure of executive transitions of this significance, and Apple filed accordingly.
Cook’s Apple Watch, which Ternus helped engineer, has also been at the center of an ongoing International Trade Commission dispute over patent claims, another open file landing on the new CEO’s desk.
For now, Cook stays through the end of August. After fifteen years building supply chains, launching products, and steering Apple through a global pandemic and multiple geopolitical disruptions, he’ll close out his tenure the way most of it went: deliberately, on a schedule he set himself.