- Tim Cook to step down as CEO in September
- John Ternus will assume the CEO role
- Cook to become Executive Chairman
The whispers were true. Long-time Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down in September of this year, and Apple Hardware lead John Tenrus will become CEO.
Apple announced the news that Cook would step back after 15 years as CEO on Monday, in a press release in which Cook said, “It has been the greatest privilege of my life to be the CEO of Apple and to have been trusted to lead such an extraordinary company.”
Of Ternus, he said, “John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honor. He is a visionary whose contributions to Apple over 25 years are already too numerous to count, and he is without question the right person to lead Apple into the future.”
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Ternus, who has increasingly moved from the background to become a visible presence at product launches (such as the recent MacBook Neo launch) and WWDC, said in the release, “I am profoundly grateful for this opportunity to carry Apple’s mission forward.”
Though rumors have been swirling for a year or more about who would succeed Cook and, lately, if it would be Ternus, today’s announcement comes as something of a surprise. Just weeks ago, Cook was opining in interview after interview about Apple’s 50-year history, his time with the company, and his potential future. It sounded like he might be at the helm for another few years at least.
Now, while Cook may speak at the upcoming WWDC in Cupertino, California, in September, it will be Ternus who will introduce the expected iPhone 18, rumoured iPhone Fold, and hoped-for AR glasses, rumoured to be called Apple Glass.
Just last month, Cook told Good Morning America’s Michael Strahan that he “can’t imagine life without Apple,” which many took to mean that Cook was hoping to remain as CEO for the foreseeable future. However, viewed in retrospect that comment aligns with his new reality. By moving to Executive Chairman when Ternus take over as the new CEO in September, Cook gets to step back from the intense pressure of being CEO of one of the world’s most valuable and high-profile companies, while still being a part of a business he clearly loves.
The Cook era
Apple’s announcement means we can now start to fully assess Cook’s tenure as CEO. One news anchor asked me to grade him. I gave Cook a “B+,” but in truth it might be an A-.
From a revenue and company-value standpoint, Cook over-delivered, transforming one of the buzziest tech companies from a $350bn success story under Steve Jobs, who died in 2011, into a $4 trillion monster.
Cook’s legacy will surely be Apple’s expansion of its Services operations, once a relatively small part of the company but now a fast-growing multi-billion-dollar revenue engine that might someday eclipse iPhone revenues. Cook can also be credited with shepherding the Apple Watch into existence, and steering Apple toward a health and wellness focus.
From a management perspective, Cook has been nothing like the mercurial Jobs, and his openness about the need for Apple to embrace diversity and inclusion, and his revealing of his own sexual orientation, proved a watershed moment for C-suite executives at Fortune 50 companies.
Where Cook has stumbled has been in the area of eye-popping innovation. The Apple Vision Pro headset was his biggest swing, but it hasn’t proven to be a commercial success, although its influence might be seen in the highly anticipated upcoming ‘Apple Glass’ AR glasses, which will still have Cook’s fingerprints all over them (even if Cook was reportedly never one to get into the nitty gritty details of device-building like his predecessor).
Cook has also not managed to wrangle the AI beast for Apple. Even though the company launched Apple Intelligence, it has fallen far behing Google, OpenAI, and others in the pure-play AI race. Again, we expect this to change at WWDC 2026, when the company finally launches the revamped Siri, albeit built on Google foundational models.
Ternus is well known as a hardware maverick, and I’ve had conversations with him on and off since 2015 or so. He’s engaging, smart, and Apple to the core. Will he steer the company more toward bigger hardware swings, or will he take the lesson of the wildly successful MacBook Neo and look to give Apple consumers more of exactly what they want?
I guess we’ll be waiting until September, and likely beyond, to find out.
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