A new CEO who has only dealt with hardware for 25 years takes over Apple's 4 trillion dollars.

Author: David, Deep Tide TechFlow

Apple, the world’s most valuable technology company, has just handed over the CEO role to someone with almost no public profile.

On April 20, Apple announced that Tim Cook will step down as CEO on September 1 and transition to Executive Chairman. His successor, John Ternus, is 51 years old this year. He has been with Apple for 25 years; his previous title was Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering.

After the news was released, Apple’s stock price dipped slightly by less than 1% after hours. The market reaction was calm—perhaps everyone had already guessed it would be him.

Over the past year, Ternus has been appearing more and more frequently at Apple’s product launch events. When last year’s iPhone 17 launched, the man welcoming the first batch of customers outside the London flagship store was replaced by him.

According to Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, Apple’s PR team has, since last year, been deliberately shifting the spotlight toward this person.

But if you don’t follow Apple’s hardware launch events much, you can hardly have seen him. He has no social media account, rarely gives interviews, and when asked about succession rumors, he has only said five words:

“I like my current job.”

Among CEOs who have left a mark in Apple’s history, Steve Jobs was a blend of product intuition and marketing talent, while Cook is an expert in the supply chain and operations arena. The two have entirely different styles, but they share one thing in common:

Neither of them is an engineer.

But Ternus is. He has a background in mechanical engineering, and from day one of his career, he has been dealing with parts, molds, and production lines. Before joining Apple, he worked at a small company almost nobody had heard of, developing VR headset equipment that still has not been widely adopted today.

And the timing of his taking over Apple may be precisely about matters that have little to do with hardware.

A low-profile hardware engineer

In 1997, Ternus graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in mechanical engineering. He was a member of the school’s swim team and won championships in the 50-meter freestyle and the 200-meter individual medley.

Public records show that his senior project was a mechanical feeding arm that allowed people with quadriplegia to control the robotic arm with head movements in order to eat.

After graduation, he went to a company called Virtual Research Systems and worked as a mechanical engineer for VR headsets.

In 1997, the VR industry was still more than twenty years away from Meta spending hundreds of billions on the metaverse, and even further from Apple releasing its own Vision Pro. The company later didn’t make much of a splash, but Ternus spent four years there, spending every day working with display technology and hardware for human-computer interaction.

In 2001, he joined Apple, entering the product design team.

That year, Steve Jobs had just pulled the company back from the edge of death; the iPod had not been released yet, and the iPhone was still six years away. Ternus’s first real project was the Cinema Display, Apple’s external display product line at the time.

According to the New York Times, his first boss at Apple, Steve Siefert, recalled that after Ternus was promoted to management, he was assigned to a new floor where he could have his own private office, but he chose to stay in the open workspace with the team instead.

When Siefert retired, he left his office to Ternus, and he refused again.

Starting from displays, Ternus climbed the ranks. According to Apple’s official introduction, he participated in the development of the iPad from zero to one and all subsequent generations, and he also led the hardware engineering of AirPods. In 2013, he was promoted to Vice President of Hardware Engineering; in 2021, he took over from his predecessor to become Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, officially entering Apple’s highest management tier.

I checked his LinkedIn and found that Ternus’s low profile is terrifying—there isn’t even a profile photo or any posts. Perhaps before today, he hadn’t cared much about maintaining an external image, and had been more focused on working with hardware.

Internally, he also led a matter that has far-reaching impact on Apple: migrating the Mac product line from Intel chips to Apple’s own in-house chips.

In 2024, he returned to his alma mater, Penn, to give a speech to graduates of the engineering school. He said one line; the author thinks that, seen in today’s context, it’s worth pondering.

“Always assume you are as smart as anyone in the room, but never assume you know more than they do.”

This sounds like humility, but for someone about to take over the world’s largest technology company, it may be closer to an engineer’s instinct for survival—you can’t know everything, but you must know who does.

And the company he’s taking over now leaves him with a legacy far more complex than just an office.

After Cook

Cook served as Apple’s CEO for nearly 15 years, and his record is legendary by any company’s standards.

According to CNBC, when he took over from Jobs in 2011, Apple’s market capitalization was about $350 billion. Today, that number is $4 trillion—more than ten times.

Based on Apple’s latest fiscal year data, the company’s annual revenue exceeds $400 billion, nearly four times what it was when he took office. He also turned Apple’s services business—software revenue including the App Store, iCloud, and Apple Music—into a business generating more than $100 billion in annual revenue.

An operations-oriented CEO who turned a product-driven company into the world’s most profitable machine—the author believes that, on that alone, Cook has already proven that the prophecy “Without Jobs, Apple is finished” was wrong.

But he also left some questions unanswered.

In 2024, Apple made a high-profile launch of Apple Intelligence, the company’s official response to the AI wave. At the time, the focus of the promotion was a brand-new, smarter Siri voice assistant.

But this promise has not been delivered to date. Siri has been mocked for years across the entire AI race. Users asking it to set an alarm might even make it fail, while competitors’ AI assistants can write code, do research, and help manage your schedule.

In January 2026, Apple made a decision that says a lot.

According to CNBC, the company announced a multi-year cooperation agreement with Google, using Google’s Gemini large model as the technical foundation for Apple’s base model to power the next-generation Siri. According to multiple media reports previously, Apple pays about $1 billion per year for this.

Before this, Apple also tested technologies from OpenAI and Anthropic, but ultimately chose Google. A company known for “everything done in-house” decided, in the AI matter, to pay for outside help.

What’s even more awkward is that this outside-assistance plan itself has been delayed.

The new Siri with Gemini was originally planned to launch on iOS 26.4, but some functions may be postponed to be released this September alongside iOS 27. Since 2024, Apple’s promised core AI features have landed none of them.

Cook also made another big bet—Vision Pro. After the mixed reality headset, priced at several thousand dollars, launched in 2024, the market response was lukewarm. Consumers are not very willing to spend that much money to strap a computer weighing over a pound to their face.

What Cook couldn’t make happen in this category now falls into the hands of someone who understands this hardware even better than he does. But problems with VR headsets can be solved gradually; in front of Ternus, there are two more urgent matters.

On June 8, Apple will hold its annual developer conference, WWDC, and the outside world expects this to be the stage for the official debut of the new Siri powered by Gemini. This is Apple’s most important public exam in the AI arena, and the person handing in the paper will be an engineer who has spent a lifetime doing hardware.

In September—the same month Ternus formally assumes the CEO role—Apple plans to release the company’s first foldable-screen iPhone, with a price that could exceed $2,000.

According to Bloomberg, the product’s mass production plan has already been delayed, with tight supply chains likely limiting the initial supply.

A software exam and a hardware exam are both being set to put this new CEO under pressure.

Scared of “soft” issues?

Apple hands two exams at the same time to someone with 25 years of hardware experience. So, for the hardware exam, you probably don’t need to worry too much.

The delay in mass production of the foldable iPhone is a supply-chain issue, and Ternus has been running back and forth between Asian factories and production lines since 2004—that’s his most familiar battlefield.

Choosing him instead of someone with a finance background or software background sends a very clear signal. It shows that the board believes that in the coming years, the physical form of products will remain Apple’s most critical competitive advantage.

But the other exam is different.

AI is Apple’s biggest shortcoming right now, and it is turning into a survival-level problem. The harshest lesson the tech industry has learned in recent years is that AI’s impact on software companies is happening far faster than anyone expected.

Apple is not yet on the list of companies that will be replaced, because what it sells is fundamentally hardware. But the problem is: if the AI experience running on iPhone is always behind Android by a gap, consumers will eventually vote with their feet.

And in Ternus’s entire background as the new successor, there is no experience related to software or AI. He is the kind of person who can take an iPhone screen magnetic attachment solution from concept to mass production, but he is not the kind of person who can decide how Siri should understand a sentence.

Every product he has handled at Apple—iPad, AirPods, Mac, and the Apple Silicon migration—has been a hardware-defined win. Whether the software is easy to use has never been the question he needs to answer.

After September 1, that question will be his.

Apple’s arrangement indicates that the company also understands this risk. After taking office, Ternus handed over hardware engineering to Johny Srouji, a veteran who has been working on Apple chips for nearly 20 years, with an upgraded title of Chief Hardware Officer.

Cook stays on as Executive Chairman, continuing to oversee global policy and government relations. Ternus is taken out of the specifics of hardware, and his focus must shift toward AI and overall strategy.

What the CEO must answer is the question of direction. What role will AI play in Apple’s products? Will it be like a camera—an accessory to hardware—or will hardware become the carrier for AI?

Cook has not answered this question, or rather, the market does not accept his answer. Apple’s stock price has barely risen this year, while Google’s has increased by more than 20% in the same period.

Cook leaving at a critical moment in Apple’s AI transformation is itself something that raises questions.

Now this question is handed to Ternus. A person known inside Apple as “the executive closest to the product” suddenly has to think about a question farthest from the product.

But the author is actually not pessimistic about this choice.

Engineers have an underestimated advantage: they are used to admitting what they don’t understand, and then finding someone who does. In an era when CEOs compete to perform “I understand AI better than AI,” someone who is willing to say “I don’t understand, but I know who does” may actually move forward more steadily.

Of course, the market and consumers won’t give him much time to test this hypothesis.