Who is John Ternes, the new CEO of Apple after Tim Cook?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\nTim Cook was 50 years old when Steve Jobs handed him Apple. John Ternes is also 50 years old. On September 1, he will become only the third CEO in Apple’s history and the first to take the helm of the company at a time when artificial intelligence is rewriting the rules of consumer technology.<\/p>\n
Turnus has never run a company before. His Apple reputation shows him as an engineer who adhered to precise details to deliver products with complete quality control, which helped Apple during its hardware operations but will face challenges in the software intelligence era.<\/p>\n
Who is John Turnus and how did he get here?<\/h2>\n
Ternes began working at Apple as a product design engineer in 2001, around the same time the original iPod was launched. He began his career at the Hardware organization and worked there for twelve years until becoming Vice President of Hardware Engineering in 2013. He achieved the position of senior vice president of hardware engineering in 2021, reporting directly to Cook as a member of the executive team.<\/p>\n
Before joining Apple, he was a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems and earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. Right from the beginning of his professional life, everything about him has been defined by his mechanical engineering background.<\/p>\n
Turnus’s fingerprints are on the products that defined Apple’s last decade. He oversaw the transition from Intel chips to Apple silicon, M-series processors, which gave the Mac an unusual competitive edge in a laptop market that had been stagnant for years. The Mac gained meaningful market share during that period, resulting in industry analysts directly supporting the chip change, which Ternus supported.<\/p>\n
More recently, Ternes was the public face of the iPhone Air, which was described internally as the most significant iPhone redesign since 2017. His willingness to appear on stage at major product events, unusual for a hardware engineering major, indicated that Apple’s board had been viewing him as a potential public leader for some time.<\/p>\n
Cook went on to make Apple one of the most valuable companies on earth. He will remain as acting chairman, a structure that mirrors the Jobs-to-Cook transition in its intent, if not its circumstances. The challenge Ternus inherited is more acute: Rivals are deploying AI at the hardware level in ways that are beginning to erode Apple’s lock on the premium consumer market.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n