John Ternus takes over as Apple CEO as Tim Cook moves to executive chairman

John Ternus has taken the top job at Apple, replacing Tim Cook as CEO and ending a 15-year run that made Cook one of the longest-serving leaders in big tech. According to The Verge, Cook is not leaving the company entirely: he stays on as executive chairman of Apple's board. Ternus, previously the executive in charge of Apple's hardware engineering, now leads a company navigating the rise of AI, component shortages and an increasingly complicated political landscape.

A product engineer in the corner office

Ternus has spent 25 years at Apple, largely on the hardware side, and The Verge argues that his elevation puts product engineering back at the centre of the company in a way it has not been since Cook, an operations specialist by background, took over in 2011. Speaking on Apple's earnings call, Cook said the timing was right because the business had been performing strongly, growing double digits year over year in the first half of the year, and because "there is no one on this planet I trust more to lead Apple into the future than John Ternus." Ternus declined to discuss the roadmap but called it "the most exciting time in my 25 year career at Apple to be building products and services."

Cook's farewell letter to staff, reported by Bloomberg and 9to5Mac, struck a cultural note: "This place is proof that culture triumphs over everything."

The Jobs generation walks out

The Verge frames the change as bigger than a single succession. With Cook's departure, the roster of executives handpicked by Steve Jobs is nearly empty; Eddy Cue, who joined in 1989 and runs services, is one of the few remaining. Bloomberg also reports that Phil Schiller is stepping down from his role overseeing the App Store and Apple's events, though he will keep his Apple Fellow title. Schiller joined Apple in 1987, became head of marketing in 1997, helped launch the App Store in 2008 and took charge of the store itself in 2015, before handing the marketing job to Greg Joswiak in 2020.

What lands on the new CEO's desk

The Verge identifies artificial intelligence as Ternus's first big problem. Apple faces AI on two fronts: catching up on features such as a reworked Siri, and competing for RAM and other components that AI data centre buildouts have made scarce. The company also faces a political and economic situation that The Verge describes as only getting more complicated — one Cook managed by balancing relationships in Washington and Beijing, a diplomatic role the publication suggests may not vanish with his new title.

The Verge also marked the handover with a clearly satirical day-one briefing for the new CEO, a fictional inbox memo that nonetheless sketches the real pressure points: EU app store rules about to take effect, developers unhappy with the commission structure, a Siri effort that has slipped before, morale questions around Vision Pro, and smart glasses whose testers, in the memo's telling, keep using the word creepy. Jokes about a camera-equipped AirPods "sensor" and a smart home lab inherited from the car project aside, the memo poses a serious question: is Apple still a hardware company, or a services company now run by a hardware guy?

Where the roadmap points

On product direction, The Verge reports that Ternus could begin his tenure with a push into smart home hardware, with new devices potentially arriving this fall — a category where Apple has been notably slow to ship. His earnings-call remark pointedly covered products and services together, and services has become Apple's main growth engine now that iPhone saturation has set in.

Why it matters

This is Apple's first CEO transition in 15 years at one of the world's most valuable companies. Choosing a hardware engineering veteran signals how Apple wants to present itself as it fights for relevance in AI, manages shortages driven by other companies' data centre spending, and absorbs regulatory pressure in Europe. It is also a generational handover: the executives who built the iPhone era alongside Jobs and Cook are departing, and the coming product cycles will show whether Ternus's engineering-first background translates into the software, services and AI execution where Apple is most exposed.