John Ternus, Apple’s new ‘wicked calm’ CEO

“Hello,” Apple’s new chief executive John Ternus wrote on X on Tuesday, marking his debut on the social media site and his first public statement as CEO. Responses to the one-word post were overwhelmingly positive. By Friday, Ternus had gained almost 1mn followers.

The laconic message was fitting for the 51-year-old hardware engineer and Apple veteran who has managed to reach the pinnacle of corporate America without building a large external profile and who is known within the company for being both highly competent and unshowy.

“It was very obvious from the earliest days that John was super-talented,” says Wendell Weeks, chief executive of longtime Apple glass supplier Corning, who started working with him during the development of the iPad nearly two decades ago. Weeks describes Ternus as a humble “good guy” but adds that his hobby of racing cars might give an insight into another side of his character.

“There are not many non-passionate people that drive race cars . . . but at the same time, you have to be wicked calm and really dedicated to excellence if you’re good at it. And John is good at it.”

Those reserves of calm will be of use to Ternus as he ends Tim Cook’s 15-year reign as CEO. Apple is now a $4.7tn company and one whose supply chain sits at the centre of geopolitical tension. While the share price is up 18 per cent this year, in part thanks to Apple’s decision to sit out the costly race to build AI infrastructure, product sales growth has slowed and investors are clamouring for exciting new devices.

Given the scale and complexity of its business, “Apple today is just a different beast”, says Wamsi Mohan, senior analyst at Bank of America. “To really grasp everything . . . it’s a really hard job.”

Ternus may be largely unknown outside of the fanatical world of Apple Kremlinologists but people familiar with Cook’s thinking say he has been considering how to execute the perfect succession since the early days of his stint in the top role, believing it was one of the most important things he could do for the company. His own experience had been difficult and drawn-out due to Steve Jobs’ illness.

Cook will remain at the company as executive chair and the official four-month CEO transition has involved Ternus quietly accompanying him to a handful of public appearances, including Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting. “It’s probably important for Ternus to have Cook around for some period of time . . . that’s what kept people happy,” says Mohan.

While Ternus is the first product engineer to lead Apple, his 25-year career at the company also offers a comforting sense of continuity. He belongs to the generation mentored by co-founder Jobs and is fluent in Jobsisms like “the Mac is the bicycle for the mind”.

“He’s relatively unknown outside the hardware organisation,” says one former Apple executive. “But it was all handled very gracefully with Tim Cook giving the market and the company plenty of warning — and if Tim says John is the right pick as CEO, few will question it.”

Still, for investors, the April announcement of a new CEO came as a surprise. The company had done relatively little to promote Ternus’s profile and even within the secretive glass walls of Apple Park, he is not a completely known quantity.

Evidence of his life outside the company is fragmentary. He is married, has children and was born and raised in California. School classmates recall that he was a great swimmer. He studied mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 1997 (the same year as Elon Musk). After a stint at a virtual reality company called Virtual Research Systems, he joined Apple’s product team in 2001.

“To be honest, I wasn’t sure I belonged there,” he said in a 2024 commencement speech, recalling his first day at the company. Unlike Cook, who was poached by Jobs for a top operational role, Ternus’s career has been marked by steady internal progression, including a role in the transition of PCs from plastic to sleek metal and the development of AirPods.

One significant early mentor was Dan Riccio, who shaped the original product design team for the iPhone and went on to become senior vice-president of hardware engineering. In 2021, Ternus replaced Riccio in this role and led Apple’s successful effort to integrate its own Mac chips.

Reports that he was sceptical about Apple’s expensive Vision Pro VR headset, which proved a commercial flop, imply an engineer’s instinct for devices that people want to use instead of risky new ideas. But in his first note to staff he seemed keenly aware of the need to rekindle the excitement of the product-focused Jobs era. He was, he wrote, excited about the products “we haven’t even imagined yet that we’ll dream up and create together”.

Ternus’s first major appearance as Apple CEO will come on Wednesday when he will appear on stage to lead the annual iPhone launch and is expected to unveil the first foldable iPhone.

Until then, the company is celebrating what appears to be a smooth handover. A party for Ternus at Apple Park on Tuesday included DJing from Apple Music’s creative director Zane Lowe. But not everyone was there. One employee said they were already so acclimatised to the change in CEO that they did not feel the need to attend.

[email protected]