Apple’s new CEO spent 25 years at Apple and never switched jobs.

Cook has been at the helm for 15 years, and the company’s market value has risen from $3500B to $4T—more than 10 times.
The successor, John Ternus, is 50, a hardware engineer, and will officially take over on September 1.
This choice is pretty interesting.
Jobs defined what Apple is—an extreme product aesthetic.
Cook took Apple into markets around the world—an extreme supply chain and operations.
Now it’s Ternus’s turn to answer—what will Apple become?
With a hardware engineer taking the lead, the direction Apple is betting on is actually very clear.
What Ternus has spent these 25 years doing is to push hardware to the absolute limit, and the feeling is that once you’ve got the product in your hands, you just can’t bear to put it down—that’s his answer.
But the issue is right here, too: the biggest gripe of the Cook era is that Apple is too conservative—since the iPhone, no truly world-changing product has appeared. Vision Pro bombed, the car project was scrapped, and Apple pursued AI for two years and is still chasing.
If a different engineer takes over as head, can it solve this problem?
Jobs → Cook: the genius founder handing over to an operations master.
Cook → Ternus: the operations master handing over to a hardware engineer.
Every time Apple hands over leadership, it gets talked down to, but the difference this time is that in the AI era, with a hardware engineer at the helm—whether it’s the right direction or the wrong timing—remains to be seen.