Name three Apple CEOs.
You can probably rattle off Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, and maybe throw in John Scully. But—and I know the Michael Spindler Stans will sound off in the comments after I say this—Apple has had way more forgettable CEOs than you probably realize.
John Ternus, who will replace Tim Cook as Apple CEO in September, could become a celebrity CEO like Steve Jobs and Tim Cook. Or he could be another Gilbert F. Amelio. Here’s what to know before you place any bets on which kind Ternus will be:
Inside Apple, he has a reputation for being a sweetheart
Steve Siefert, Ternus’ first boss at Apple, said in a New York Times profile that when Ternus had the opportunity to move to a private office from an open plan workspace where he sat with his underlings, he declined. Siefert called him “a man of the people.”
Another ex-Apple employee who worked with him, Cameron Rogers, said in that same profile that Ternus is “someone you want to hang out with,” and that, “Everyone loves him because he’s great.”
To the people working within the company, would niceness from the CEO mark a vibe shift for Apple? After all, Steve Jobs was supposedly an ogre when he didn’t get what he wanted from his employees, and Tim Cook has a reputation more as a profit-generating wizard than for having oodles of personality, good or bad.
But Apple has maintained a relatively cuddly reputation as a workplace, even in our tech-critical era. It has an above average Glassdoor rating (if you find that meaningful), and it tends not to have big, headline-grabbing rounds of layoffs. So as far as internal vibes go, a nice guy CEO would be more continuity than break.
Apple will now be led by an engineer.
Ternus can talk at length about which chips are in which gadget and why:
According to Apple, Ternus studied mechanical engineering at Penn, got a job as an engineer at a virtual reality company, and then switched over to Apple, where he started off as an engineer focused on external monitors. He oversaw the creation of the original iPad and AirPods, and has taken point on new generations of Mac, Apple Watch, and iPhone.
According to Bloomberg, an anonymous Apple veteran who reportedly worked at Apple under Jobs and Cook noted that Cook doesn’t get into the nitty gritty of product development, but that Ternus is “a real engineer.” That article’s portrait of Ternus is as an exacting technical wiz with a deep understanding of the inner workings of Apple’s devices, which allowed him to reverse a decline in product quality. He also, that profile notes, has a more creative side, and has overseen the development of an as-yet unreleased tabletop robot device.
This will contrast sharply with Cook, who is famously a master of silicon supply chain logistics, not silicon itself.
But Bloomberg’s profile also says Ternus has a quality in common with Cook: risk aversion. Some of Apple’s timidity around AI and smart home devices are chalked up to Ternus, according to Bloomberg. However, that article includes a claim from an anonymous Apple insider saying Ternus is aware of the criticisms around a need for exciting new products and (supposedly) stronger AI implementation.
Apple’s future is a mystery
Yes, this point is almost too obvious to bring up, but I mention it because so much is up in the air right now. Apple has been knocked for timidity on AI, but depending how the next few years go, if Ternus goes down in history as the CEO who resisted putting all the company’s eggs in the AI basket before AI turned out to be a bubble, that could prove to be a masterstroke rather than a mistake.
Ternus also takes the reins amid new uncertainty around the U.S.-China relationship. Tim Cook’s tenure at Apple was defined from the beginning largely by U.S.-China trade. Apple was already a U.S. company with products assembled in China, but Cook made it a company increasingly reliant on China as a customer base. One side of this equation is holding firm: Apple has shifted some manufacturing to Vietnam and India, even while it can’t shake its reliance on Chinese factories. There are signs the other side is getting shakier: the iPhone is losing market share in China.
Moreover, political realities change. Here in 2026, Cook has a tendency to show up in the Oval Office and pal around with the seriously unpopular, far-right president, either out of sheer corporate convenience, or because President Trump’s politics align with his own, or some mix of the two—Cook is very private, so it’s not clear. Twelve years ago, however, Big Tech was in a different political universe, and Cook’s reputation, deserved or not, was as a progressive corporate hero who claimed that witnessing an anti-Black hate crime “permanently imprinted in my brain, and it would change my life forever.”
Ternus, for his part, boasts a rather moving origin story too. According to the New York Times, his senior project at Penn was “a device that allowed quadriplegics to use head motions to control a mechanical feeding arm.” Right now is not a good time for believing in the possibility of tech corporations being benevolent, but if a a vibe shift for the better happened to come along, Ternus seems—based on the information currently available—like he makes that unlikely event incrementally less unlikely.
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