The AI Chapter
John Ternus takes over as Apple's chief executive on Tuesday, inheriting a company that towers over the smartphone market but trails its rivals in artificial intelligence. One of his biggest challenges will be balancing the company's dependence on China while parrying acute political pressure from the White House. The handover ends Tim Cook's 15-year run, replacing the operations specialist who built Apple's supply chain with the engineer who built its hardware.
Ternus, 51, joined Apple's design team in 2001 and worked his way up to senior vice president of hardware engineering. He leads the engineering teams behind Apple's entire product lineup, including the iPhones that generate most of the company's revenue. He gets barely a week to settle in, with Apple holding its annual iPhone event on September 9, where it is expected to unveil its first foldable handset.
Hardware first
"Tim Cook left the house in phenomenal order," said Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives and Co. "But now it's about Ternus defining the AI chapter." Some analysts had argued software chief Craig Federighi was the more logical pick for a company scrambling to catch up on AI. Carolina Milanesi of Creative Strategies disagreed: "Consumers are still buying hardware first, and it's going to be like that for a long time. You're not going to discover the value of AI if you're not interested in the hardware."
Cook echoed that sentiment in his final memo: "Few people understand what it takes to build products that change the world the way John does." Inside the company, Ternus is credited with driving a push to make products more durable, reliable and resilient, and with design work that cut their carbon footprint.
Learn on the job
The harder question is what kind of leader he becomes. "Even people that know him now don't know him as a CEO," Milanesi said. "You might know him as the head of engineering, but once you're CEO, things change. Your responsibility is bigger, your power is bigger. You're dancing a different kind of dance." Nowhere is that gap wider than in the geopolitical role Cook excelled at, courting both Beijing and the White House to protect a supply chain that runs largely through China.