While Tim Cook's legacy and John Ternus's effectiveness will be studied for years, right now Apple is making a change of CEO seem effortless. But never doubt that this will be a sea change for the company, eventually.
No question, John Ternus really became Apple's CEO long before his official start date of September 1, 2026. It's not as if Tim Cook went on gardening leave but this is not a job with a simple cutoff date.
Instead, it's parallel running for a time, then it mixes from all Tim Cook to all John Ternus over at least many months. There is no possibility, for instance, that it was Tim Cook's decision to lay off Apple Vision Pro staff.
Even if Cook had soured on the whole spatial computing lark, you do not make major decisions on the eve of handing over to a new CEO. But if you are that incoming CEO, you can make some changes before the contract dries because you know what you want to get started on.
Apple is spectacularly good at transitions
Normally when you think of Apple's transitions, you actually don't think about them. Motorola 68000 to PowerPC, PowerPC to Intel, Intel to Apple Silicon, it was all done so incredibly smoothly that each one seemed unremarkable and easy.
None of them were that at all, as they went to the heart of all of Apple's devices and they were exceptionally difficult transitions. Microsoft hasn't managed it once, despite trying, and Apple keeps on doing it.
The move from Cook to Ternus is potentially as big a transition. Certainly the one from Steve Jobs to Tim Cook was, although that is a transition that Apple arguably fumbled.
The transition from Steve Jobs (right) to Tim Cook was not done as well as the latest handover of CEOs - image credit: Apple
Compared to this latest handover, Apple didn't seem to be ready. Shareholders asked where the succession plan was and customers saw Steve Jobs looking ill.
Apple of course had a succession plan but that only became known when Jobs resigned and Cook was appointed at his recommendation. But then the comparisons between the two men never really stopped, and they were never once in Cook's favor.
Even by 2019 when Cook had been CEO for eight years, suddenly it was revealed that Jobs had admitted to concerns about him. Jobs had said that Cook just wasn't a "product person."
Compare that to this new handover and also to the styles of Jobs and Cook. There is absolutely no chance whatsoever that Tim Cook will criticize John Ternus because Cook always focus at what will look good and bad for Apple overall.
Although compare the difference between how Jobs and Cook approached retirement. Jobs left because of ill health where Cook is just stepping down, but neither of them were upfront about the change.
Jobs may have not admitted to retirement plans because he didn't want to go. Then Cook wouldn't admit it early because a change of CEO has a big impact on a firm's stock market price, and Cook knows about timing and about managing expectations.
Tim Cook did always look as if he really enjoyed his job - image credit: Apple.
Even so, Cook made an unnecessarily odd statement about retirement near the end. For some reason he chose to deny having ever said anything about leaving, when it's a matter of record that he did.
Announcements
The announcement that Tim Cook was to become CEO was overshadowed by how the announcement was really that Steve Jobs was leaving. It was one of those surprises that you somehow expected, but it was still a jolt.
Whereas it is true that the particular day that the news broke that John Ternus was to take over, that was a surprise, but not in the same way. This one was a surprise only because of the timing, and only because no one predicted the day it would happen to be announced.
What wasn't remotely a surprise to anyone was who Cook's successor was to be. There had been plenty of speculation that included just about all of the Apple senior staff, although not head of personnel Deirdre O'Brien. Including Ternus, Apple has had eight CEOs and none were women.
There was also speculation over the odd rogue outsider, such as "father of the iPod," Tony Fadell. But surely nobody lost a bet because it was Ternus who got the job.
Background L-R: Craig Federighi, Greg Joswiak, John Ternus. Foreground: Tim Cook. Some of the many names who various people predicted would replace Cook. Images credit: Apple.
That was not an accident. Whatever process Apple went through internally, externally it has always had its ways of letting things be known. It does this all the time with products, helping the word get out when something is about to be launched, or whether it won't be.
There's little doubt, for instance, that the iPhone Ultra will finally be launched because if it were delayed, Apple would have made sure that the news got out somehow. Apple is very good at controlling the story it wants to be told.
Apple isn't doomed
Also before Ternus was announced, there was a lot of press coverage about how Apple could survive the loss of Tim Cook. That was despite so much press coverage having previously said Apple couldn't survive the loss of Steve Jobs, but then business analysis has always been subject to a bit of clickbait.
When Ternus was announced, there were no proclamations of disaster, no commentary that Apple is doomed. There were proclamations by people who said they knew precisely how Ternus was going to revolutionize Apple, and other people who know for certain that he won't rock the boat.
John Ternus - image credit: Apple.
Ternus knows best what he will do and Cook knows second best, but actually not even they can really be sure. No job is quite how you expect until you get it.
No plan survives contact with the enemy, or the customers, or the shareholders, or more recently also politicians. Apple's CEO position is now part technology leader, part politician, part logistics expertise, and more.
Whatever Ternus pitched in his interview, he will be trying to implement it all in a world that cannot be under his control. Cook couldn't have predicted COVID, Cook couldn't have imagined Trump, and Ternus cannot know how the global chip shortage will pan out.
So what Ternus wants to do and what he will get to do are inevitably two different things, though hopefully with a lot of overlap.
Which way Ternus could go
We will not know for years just what route Ternus plans to take Apple down, and he won't know for years whether he's got the company to there or not. But very broadly, there are two potential routes that have both been predicted by reports of dubious accuracy.
One is that Ternus, if not exactly going crazy, will immediately be a radical departure from Cook because he very definitely is a product person. This translates to him spending time with the company's design teams, which seems likely.
But his being a product person does not translate to him being able to lead Apple toward a next device as staggeringly successful as the iPhone.
The other route is that Apple continues on pretty much precisely as it would have done under Tim Cook. That's based on the unfortunate fact that people tend to hire people who are like themselves.
It's usually just one manager hiring one worker, but it scales. This is why corporations like Apple, Microsoft, and Google, can have distinctly different personalities.
The MacBook Neo was reportedly John Ternus's idea.
First you hire someone with a similar background and interests to you, then eventually it tends to be that it's mostly people like you who are drawn to your firm. The pool of job applicants trends to a limited type of person, unless you take active steps to seek out others.
That's one of the many reasons that Apple's refusing to dismantle its DEI programs is laudable. Ternus is not wildly different from Cook himself, but he leads a company that is less blinkered than it could be.
So Apple has tremendous resources in people as well as money. And they are now under John Ternus's control.
What will probably happen
There will of course continue to be updates and new products from Apple. The company has multiple years of devices planned and underway.
It does look as if that won't include an significant update to the Apple Vision Pro in the near future. There are some technologies even Apple has to wait for, so while the company is shifting its focus away now, it will probably return.
That might be especially so since Ternus played such a large part in developing the existing Apple Vision Pro.
Something else he reportedly more than led, though, was the MacBook Neo. It's said that this lower-cost device may have been his idea, and certainly that he championed it.
Its success, far greater than Apple expected, will have come too late to be what won him the CEO role. But if it had gone badly, it might have been a different story.
As it is, Apple has demonstrated — to itself as much as to everyone else — that it is capable of making high-quality devices at lower than usual costs. It's not going to abandon the higher profit margins of most of its range, but this has opened up new markets and new audiences.
It was also clever. Let's not forget that the MacBook Neo was a clever idea.
Anyone can say that Apple should make cheaper laptops, and possibly everyone has. But it took seeing how to turn binned iPhone chips into usable Mac processors.
It took a product person with an engineer's eye to just see that possibility, and then act on it. Whether that was John Ternus himself or one of his team, we should surely see more of this kind of thinking.
That type of thinking will become visible as new products launch under Ternus's aegis. Other moves such as where Apple ultimately comes out over AI, will be a little harder to assess, but still possible.
What we may never know is all that Ternus must do now about keeping Apple thinking of the long game. Cook was criticized for not being Steve Jobs, then he was criticized for letting Apple fall behind on AI, but all the way through he refused to react to headlines and instead committed to the kind of long term plans that both distinguish Apple, and make it prosper.
Back in 2011 when Cook was taking over, the then-Apple board member Al Gore revealed how Steve Jobs had seen succession. "[He] used to talk about initially about how after Walt Disney died, the company always got in trouble about asking 'what would Walt do in this situation,' said Gore. "And he made it very clear 'I don't want that.'"
"He made it clear to Tim Cook and everyone else 'Don't ask what Steve would have done,'" continued Gore. "'Follow your own voice.'"
Tim Cook often referred to Jobs as his mentor so he will of course know of this opinion and he doubtlessly benefited from not asking what Steve Jobs would have done. It's going to be interesting, though, to see if he can resist telling Ternus what to do when he's just in the next office at Apple Park.
