Cook officially announces his resignation; Apple once again chooses the "least like him" successor

Author: Zhang Yongyi

Early this morning, I opened the Apple China official website and saw a letter signed by Tim. The first half of the letter discussed Cook’s habit over the past fifteen years of reading user letters every day—someone was saved by Apple Watch, someone took a perfect selfie on a mountain peak they couldn’t climb with their iPhone. Until the middle part, he wrote a light, breezy sentence: “Today, we announce that I will take the next step in my journey with Apple.”

Cook is leaving. He will step down as CEO on September 1 and become Executive Chairman. His successor is named John Ternus.

This name might be unfamiliar to ordinary people, but over the past decade, every generation of iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and AirPods you hold has basically gone through him. He’s an engineer who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Mechanical Engineering Department, retired from the school’s swim team in 1997, worked for four years at a small VR headset company, and joined Apple’s product design team in 2001, never settling down.

My first reaction upon seeing the announcement wasn’t “Who is Ternus,” but another thought—this is the second time in Apple’s history that a CEO has been replaced, and the second time the key has been handed to someone who is “the least like themselves.”

Cook back then was also not a “natural extension” of Jobs

Let’s rewind to August 2011. Jobs resigned due to illness, and Tim Cook was appointed as his successor.

Looking back today, it seems obvious—Cook had been COO for six years and was one of Jobs’ most trusted deputies. But if you put yourself back in that moment, you’d realize that choice was actually quite counterintuitive at the time.

It was the era when Apple was most “Jobs-like”: the iPhone 4 had just been released, the iPad was beginning to reshape personal computing, and the App Store had become the foundation of a new industry. Everyone was asking the same question: without Jobs, would Apple still have that “one more thing”?

The most natural successor should have been someone like Jobs—obsessed with products, meticulous about details, able to stand on stage and recite those industry-shaking words. At that time, there were two people inside Apple who fit that profile: Jony Ive (design) and Scott Forstall (iOS). Either of them was more “Jobs-like” than Cook.

But Jobs didn’t choose them. He chose a man from Alabama who was quiet, never stole the spotlight at keynote speeches, and whose resume was full of stories about supply chain optimization.

Jobs’ choice this time wasn’t about finding someone to continue his story, but about finding someone who could keep the machine he left running smoothly. In 2011, Apple’s biggest deficiency was never product insight—Jobs’ product lines were nearly perfect and clear. What was truly scarce was someone who could make this precise machine earn ten times more every year amid globalization, trade friction, and supply chain battles.

It proved Jobs was right. When Cook took over, Apple’s market value was about $350 billion; today, it’s $4 trillion. He integrated new product lines like Apple Watch, AirPods, and Vision Pro into this machine, turned Chinese factories into Apple’s lifeline, and fought for multiple key exemptions during Trump’s tariff battles. His fifteen years as CEO were not only Apple’s most profitable but also its most “non-Jobs” period.

Here’s a often-overlooked detail: Jobs chose Cook not to continue his era, but to end it.

Now, Cook has made a nearly symmetrical move.

Inside Apple, there are actually candidates for “Cook 2.0.” Jeff Williams—former COO—has a resume almost a mirror image of Cook’s: a supply chain master, calm and steady. He was long considered the most likely successor to Cook.

But in the end, it wasn’t him who stepped up, but Ternus.

The two are almost mirror images: Williams is 62, Ternus is 50; Williams comes from operations, Ternus is a hardware engineer; Williams excels at process management, Ternus prefers bypassing middle management to work directly with engineers in labs on details.

In Apple’s official announcement, Cook’s comment on Ternus was: “John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honor.”—“The mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator,” these eight words clearly aren’t describing someone “like Cook.”

What Cook is doing this time, just like Jobs did back then, is choosing someone who can fill the unresolved issues of his era, rather than someone to continue himself.

The machine Cook left behind is already running very well—$400 billion in annual revenue, stable gross margin above 45%, and Services business hitting new highs every quarter. The machine isn’t lacking in operations, scale, or cash.

What it’s missing is someone to redefine the product.

Since Jobs’ departure, hardware innovation at Apple has relied more on iteration than on definition. iPhones upgrade generation after generation, but none have made people go “Wow, just a second.” After Vision Pro’s release in 2024, sales have remained sluggish, widely recognized as lacking a real use case. Apple Watch and AirPods have long entered the routine of “annual updates.”

More critically, Apple has already fallen behind in AI publicly. Apple Intelligence repeatedly delays, and the major Siri upgrade was ultimately handed over to Google Gemini; the AI executive was replaced last year by a veteran from Google; after Jony Ive left in 2019, he sold his startup to OpenAI for $6.4 billion in 2025—an essence that should have belonged to Apple is now helping its most dangerous rival with hardware.

This machine doesn’t need a CEO who is better at operations. It needs someone who can reclaim the power to define products. The reason Cook chose Ternus is exactly the same logic Jobs used when choosing Cook: not to find someone to continue his chapter, but to open the next one.

But Ternus’s challenge is even greater than Cook’s was

Although both choices are counterintuitive, the difficulty Ternus faces is much higher than Cook’s was.

When Cook took over in 2011, the question was: can the products left by Jobs continue to sell more and make more money? The answer was simple—just run his expertise in supply chain, channels, and pricing to the extreme. He succeeded, no doubt.

Ternus’s question is: In an era where AI rewrites all endpoints, is Apple still the company that defines the next endpoint?

This isn’t a problem that supply chains can solve, nor is it one that hardware engineering alone can handle. It involves model capabilities, data strategies, hardware-software integration, and product imagination—any weak link would break the chain. Ternus understands hardware, but he has not publicly demonstrated the model and product definition skills.

Looking only at his resume, there are some concerns. What is his biggest original product? The Touch Bar—one of Apple’s most criticized designs in the past decade. More often, he plays the role of “product enhancer” rather than “product creator”: the transition to Apple’s own chips for Macs was along a predetermined route, and the definition of Vision Pro has little to do with him. Inside Apple, some say he’s more of a “keeper of the status quo” than someone like Jobs or Ive, who dared to hit the brakes and overturn existing plans.

But from another perspective—if the next real endpoint isn’t a large model, nor a screen, but a hardware form, interaction, or wearing method that needs to be completely reimagined (AR glasses, embodied robots, or some as-yet-unnamed device), then Ternus might be the right person. In the AI era, Apple’s moat, if it’s not models, then the few millimeters of stacking in hardware, the few grams of weight, or the hours of battery life—someone who has gone from product design team to SVP might be more suitable than an AI scientist to judge this.

Whether this judgment is correct will only be revealed when Ternus launches Apple’s AR glasses, home robots, or any other “new endpoint” he truly leads to market.

Fortunately, he isn’t facing this alone. Cook remains as Executive Chairman to handle “diplomacy”—tariffs, policies, major clients, which he’s most skilled at. Chip executive Johny Srouji has been promoted to the newly created Chief Hardware Officer, also taking over Ternus’s previous hardware engineering responsibilities. Tom Marieb directly manages daily operations. These people, plus the AI leader recruited from Google, are the key support points Ternus will rely on.

But ultimately, the one who presses the launch button is still him alone.

August 31 was Cook’s last day as Apple’s CEO. On September 1, Ternus took over.

There won’t be a dramatic, Jobs-style handover—no moment where “I point at someone and say, you come.” Apple probably only has that one time. This handover is more like Apple’s signature move: a precise, well-practiced gear shift. The sentence in Cook’s letter, “This is not a farewell,” is quite accurate—he will continue to handle those relationships and issues that Ternus can’t yet manage as Executive Chairman.

But for someone who has written about Apple for over a decade, this moment still carries weight. That Tim who disappears into keynote within the first 15 seconds of every launch, that Tim who calmly discusses Services growth on earnings calls, that Tim who bargains with Trump over tariffs—starting September 1, will truly step back from the spotlight.

It’s his turn to sit in the back of the room, after 25 years in Apple’s labs.

What Jobs left for Cook was a product machine ready to be scaled; what Cook leaves for Ternus is a product machine that needs to be redefined. The transition between two generations of CEOs spans fifteen years. The shape of the next Apple will probably be slowly sketched out in this time gap.