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After 15 years, Tim Cook will hand off the Apple CEO role<\/a> to John Ternus, the company\u2019s senior vice president of hardware engineering. Starting on September 1, Ternus will lead one of the world\u2019s most valuable companies, but if you\u2019re not a dedicated Apple enthusiast, you\u2019ve probably never heard of this man, who has largely remained out of the spotlight until now.<\/p>\n Ternus has worked at Apple for nearly half of his life \u2014 now 51 years old, he has been with the company for 25 years.<\/p>\n He joined Apple\u2019s product design team in 2001 as only his second job out of college (his first was at a small maker of virtual reality devices called Virtual Research Systems). By 2013, Ternus was a VP of hardware engineering, and was promoted to the SVP role in 2021. Ternus \u2014 who is 15 years younger than Cook \u2014 was among the youngest of top Apple executives who had been rumored<\/a> as a possible successor, implying that Apple could be looking for someone to lead the company for a long time. After all, Apple has only had two CEOs in this millennium, so it seems that leadership continuity is important to the company.<\/p>\n Ternus reports to Cook, whom he considers a mentor, and leads all of hardware engineering at Apple. That\u2019s a pretty big deal for a company that\u2019s known for ubiquitous hardware like the iPhone and the MacBook.<\/p>\n In his 2024 commencement speech at his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania\u2019s engineering school, Ternus reflected on the lessons he learned at Apple, which perhaps can tell us a bit about his character \u2014 or at least a sanitized version of it. <\/p>\n \u201cAlways assume you\u2019re as smart as anyone else in the room, but never assume that you know as much as they do,\u201d Ternus said in the speech<\/a>. \u201cWith this mindset, you\u2019ll find the confidence you need to push forward, but more importantly, the humility to ask questions.\u201d <\/p>\n In a tech ecosystem populated with abrasive egos, it\u2019s refreshing to hear Ternus utter the word \u201chumility.\u201d Better yet, he doesn\u2019t appear to have an X account.<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA<\/span> Ternus\u2019s earliest project at Apple involved scrutinizing parts for the Apple Cinema Display, an early desktop monitor.<\/p>\n \u201cAt some point in my first year, I found myself at a supplier facility. I was far away from home. Well past midnight, I was using a magnifying glass to count the number of grooves on the head of a screw [\u2026] and I was arguing with the supplier because these parts had 35 grooves. They were supposed to have 25,\u201d Ternus recalled in his commencement speech. \u201cI distinctly remember stepping back for a minute and thinking, \u2018What the hell am I doing? Is this normal?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n As Ternus climbed the corporate ladder, his responsibilities grew. He may no longer spend as much time analyzing screws, but he still seems to take pride in getting the little details right. In a recent interview<\/a>, when Ternus was asked about his favorite memory of Steve Jobs, he mentioned the former Apple co-founder\u2019s attention to craftsmanship.<\/p>\n \u201c[Jobs] was moving a piece of furniture, a chest of drawers, and pulled it away from the wall and looked at the back and was just reflecting on, you know, that the carpenter who made it had made it beautiful,\u201d Ternus said. \u201cIt finished the back as beautifully as the rest of it, even though nobody was going to see it, right? And I think about that all the time because I think that perfectly exemplifies what we do here.\u201d<\/p>\n From there, he went on to lead the hardware development behind products across the Apple ecosystem, overseeing launches like AirPods, Apple Watch, and the Vision Pro. He also had a hand in major technical upgrades at Apple, like Apple\u2019s transition from Intel chips to its own proprietary Apple silicon<\/a>.<\/p>\n Most recently, Ternus was involved in the production of the MacBook Neo<\/a>, Apple\u2019s new, more affordable laptop model that lowers costs through some clever tradeoffs in hardware design, like using an iPhone chip to power the device.<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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 building something completely new from the ground up [\u2026] leveraging both the technologies we\u2019d been developing like Apple silicon, but also the kind of expertise that we\u2019ve developed over many, many years of building Macs, and building phones, and building iPads, and all of these things,\u201d Ternus told Tom\u2019s Guide<\/a>.<\/p>\n As CEO, Ternus will have to steer Apple through its challenge to catch up in the AI race and figure out what to do with the underlying tech behind the Vision Pro.<\/p>\n Ternus was on the swimming team at Penn. For his senior project, he built a feeding arm that people with quadriplegia could control with head movements.<\/p>\nHow long has John Ternus worked at Apple?<\/h2>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\nWhat projects did John Ternus lead at Apple?<\/h2>\n
What else do we know about John Ternus?<\/h2>\n