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Apple’s (AAPL) Tim Cook is stepping down from his role as CEO, turning the reins of the $4 trillion company over to senior vice president (SVP) of hardware engineering John Ternus.
Rumors have been swirling since at least 2024 that Ternus was up for the chief executive position, and that will become reality on Sept. 1.
While Ternus holds one of the larger leadership roles at Apple and makes appearances at the company’s high-profile product launches, including the debut of the MacBook Neo last month, he’s still a relative unknown for those who haven’t been following the company closely in recent years.
Ternus joined Apple in 2001 as a member of the company’s product design team, before being elevated to VP of hardware engineering in 2013. He was named SVP of hardware engineering in 2021.
The future CEO graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in mechanical engineering and worked at Virtual Research Systems before moving to Apple.
He’s the kind of perfectionist Apple is known for.
John Ternus, Apple Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, introduces the new M2 microprocessor at Apple’s WWDC 2022 developer conference at the company’s headquarters, Apple Park, in Cupertino. (Photo by Christoph Dernbach/picture alliance via Getty Images)
· picture alliance via Getty Images
During his keynote address at The University of Pennsylvania’s Engineering Commencement in 2024, Ternus recounted arguing with a supplier over the number of grooves in the heads of screws that would sit in the back of his first Apple product, the Apple Cinema Display. The screws the supplier offered had 35 grooves, but Ternus demanded they stick to the 25 grooves Apple wanted.
“I distinctly remember stepping back for a minute and thinking to myself, ‘What the hell am I doing? Is this normal?’ And I thought about it, and I realized it might not be normal, but it’s right,” he said.
“It’s right because I’d already spent months working on that product, and if you’re going to spend that much time on something, you should put in your very best effort. Maybe a customer notices, maybe they don’t. But either way, whenever I saw one of those displays on someone’s desk, it mattered to me to know that my teammates and I had considered everything about it.”
In announcing the future leadership transition, Apple credited Ternus with a variety of recent successes, including helping to make the Mac lineup the most popular it’s ever been, introducing the iPhone 17 lineup, and improving the AirPods.
Ternus, Apple said, also helped drive Apple’s push to create a recycled aluminum compound that the company uses across a number of products and worked on the 3D-printed titanium in the Apple Watch Ultra 3.
In his new role, however, he’ll be heading up the company during a time of major upheaval in the tech industry driven by artificial intelligence.
