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John Ternus, senior vice president of hardware engineering at Apple Inc., during an Apple event in New York, US, on Wednesday, March 4, 2026. Apple Inc. this week unveiled a slate of new products, including the $599 MacBook Neo – its first true low-end laptop – and the iPhone 17e. The company also announced updated versions of the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Studio Display and iPad Air. Photographer: Adam Gray/Bloomberg
Last week, when Apple announced that Tim Cook would step down as CEO in September and turn over the role to John Ternus, it was huge news, even if no one was really all that surprised. There have been rumors for more than a year that Ternus, who currently serves as SVP of hardware engineering, would be Cook’s successor. Still, when a $4 trillion company says it’s getting a new CEO, it’s a big deal.
Cook, by almost every way you can measure a CEOdid everything right. He took a $350 billion company and built it into one worth $4 trillion. He will go down as one of the most operationally successful technology executives in history, and that is not a small thing.
But Apple fans have a different way of measuring the company’s success. Sure, the Cook era produced cool new hardware, like the Apple Watch, AirPods, and Apple Silicon. But it also gave its fans a growing list of frustrations that compounded quietly over 15 years. Siri hasn’t been great. Software shipped with bugs that would have been unthinkable in an earlier era. Services grew so central to Apple’s strategy that the company started to feel less like one that builds remarkable things and more like a platform that monetizes them.
And, so, the moment Apple announced that Cook was stepping down and that John Ternus would take over in a few months, the internet did what it always does: started compiling all the things it’s been wanting to say for years.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Transitions are legitimately the best moment for change inside a large organization. The incoming leader gets a brief window of permission to break things, shift direction, and communicate a vision for what they see coming next. It’s the one time you can say “we’re doing this differently now” and have it land.
Of course, John Ternus has worked at Apple for 25 years. Whatever a “Ternus era” looks like, it’s going to have a lot of Cook in it, and a lot of Steve Jobs before that. He didn’t get this job by planning to tear anything down. There are, however, a few things Apple’s most loyal fans are hoping he does differently:
1. Fix Siri (and Apple Intelligence)
Siri is, at this point, mostly a punchline. That’s only become more true as other voice assistants get better. It also didn’t help that Apple made a bunch of promises about an Apple Intelligence-powered version of Siri, very few of which it has been able to deliver on two years later.
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