After 15 years, Tim Cook will hand over the position of CEO of Apple to John Ternus, the company’s senior vice president of hardware engineering. As of September 1, Ternus will lead one of the world’s most valuable companies, but unless you’re a die-hard Apple fan, you’ve probably never heard of this man, who has remained largely out of the public eye until now.
How long has John Ternus worked at Apple?
Ternus has worked at Apple for nearly half his life — now 51, he’s been with the company for 25 years.
He joined Apple’s product design team in 2001 as his second job out of college (his first was at a small maker of virtual reality devices called Virtual Research Systems). Until 2013, Ternus was vice president of hardware engineering and was promoted to the role of SVP in 2021.
Ternus — who is 15 years younger than Cook — was among the youngest of Apple’s top executives touted as a possible successor, hinting that Apple could be looking for someone to lead the company for the long haul. After all, Apple has only had two CEOs in this millennium, so it seems that continuity of leadership is important to the company.
Ternus reports to Cook, whom he considers a mentor, and leads all hardware engineering at Apple. That’s a pretty big deal for a company known for ubiquitous hardware like the iPhone and MacBook.
In his 2024 commencement address at his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania’s engineering school, Ternus reflected on the lessons he learned at Apple, which might tell us a little about his character — or at least a sanitized version of it.
“Always assume you’re as smart as anyone else in the room, but never assume you know as much as they do,” Ternus told the speech. “With this mindset, you’ll find the confidence you need to pitch, but more importantly, the humility to ask questions.”
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In a tech ecosystem filled with abrasive egos, it’s refreshing to hear Ternus utter the word “humility.” Even better, he doesn’t seem to have an X account.
What projects did John Ternus lead at Apple?
Ternus’ first project at Apple involved testing components for the Apple Cinema Display, an early desktop computer monitor.
“Sometime in my first year, I was at a supplier’s factory. I was away from home. After midnight, I was using a magnifying glass to count the number of grooves in the head of a screw … and I was arguing with the supplier because these parts had 35 grooves. They were supposed to have 25 reps,” Ternus. “I distinctly remember stepping back for a minute and thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ Is this normal?”
As Ternus moved up the corporate ladder, his responsibilities increased. He may not spend as much time analyzing screws anymore, but he still seems to pride himself on getting the little details right. In a recent interviewwhen Ternus was asked about his favorite memory of Steve Jobs, he cited the former Apple co-founder’s attention to craftsmanship.
“[Jobs] He was moving a piece of furniture, a chest of drawers, and he pulled it off the wall and he looked at the back and he was thinking, you know, the carpenter who made it had made it beautiful,” Ternus said. And I think about it all the time because I think that’s a perfect example of what we’re doing here.”
From there, he went on to lead the development of hardware behind products across the Apple ecosystem, overseeing releases such as AirPods, Apple Watch and Vision Pro. He was also instrumental in major technical upgrades at Apple, such as Apple’s switch from Intel chips to Apple’s own proprietary silicon.
More recently, Ternus has been involved in the production of the MacBook Neo, Apple’s new, more affordable laptop model that keeps costs down through some clever trade-offs in hardware design, such as using an iPhone chip to power the device.
“We never want to ship junk. We want to ship great products that have that Apple experience, that Apple quality. To do that with the Neo required us to build something completely new from the ground up … leveraging both the technologies that we’ve been developing, like Apple silicon, but also the kind of expertise that we’ve developed over many, many years of making Macs and phones and making iPads and all that stuff.” Guide to Vol.
As CEO, Ternus will have to steer Apple through its challenge of getting ahead of the AI race and figuring out what to do with the underlying technology behind Vision Pro.
What else do we know about John Ternus?
Ternus was on the swim team at Penn. For his senior project, he built a power arm that people with quadriplegia could control with head movements.
According to public records of political donations, Ternus donated $2,900 to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in 2021.
Otherwise, Ternus has kept a relatively low profile.
