John Ternus, the hardware man who will steer Apple in the AI era
The new chief executive takes over from Tim Cook, who will continue to lead diplomatic relations from the executive chair
John Ternus’s salary as Apple’s new chief executive will be $3 million a year, plus a $55 million stock package. It’s a lot — a great deal — but it falls far short of the $1 trillion Elon Musk is set to receive over the next decade, or the $300 million a year Cristiano Ronaldo earns playing in the Saudi soccer league. It’s true that if there is anything Ternus is not, it’s a star. His is more of a reserved profile, one of those executives you like to have close by because they seldom make mistakes.
He replaces Tim Cook, who stepped in to fill the vast void left by Steve Jobs (the company’s founder, visionary, and spiritual leader), and who is retiring after multiplying Apple’s value 13-fold, leaving a nearly equal-sized gap. In this case, the transition will be smoother. Cook will remain as executive chairman and handle diplomatic duties, which include staying on good terms with Donald Trump and traveling occasionally to China and Europe. That arrangement is expected to remain in place, in principle, until the next presidential election in 2028.
The company Ternus inherits is worth around $4.7 trillion by market capitalization and has just posted a record quarter of net profit. Still, it faces several open fronts, and two of them involve artificial intelligence (AI). Ternus will encounter a chip and memory market very different from that of a few years ago: data centers have become priority customers for manufacturers because they buy huge quantities and pay more. The second front concerns Apple’s own role in this revolution. If OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google build the most powerful models, Apple’s job will be to find the simplest, most elegant and most useful way to put that intelligence into the hands of millions of people.
The first thing that stands out about Ternus, 51, is how little is known about him. No one knows who his parents were, or whether he is married or has children. Of course many people must know these things, but not the media, which have had to cling to details such as that he was a college swimmer or that on one occasion he got quite angry because someone hadn’t put some screws in the right place. He has no social media presence either. In reality, this opacity — far from being deliberate — is relatively common among executives who have spent their entire careers at the same company.
The fact that we don’t know the name of his high‑school girlfriend, if he had one, or whether he prefers a savory or sweet breakfast does not mean we don’t know why he was chosen. Ternus is a hardware expert (physical computing devices) who built a solid relationship with veteran executives. He does not have Jobs’s product design vision, nor is he a supply‑chain guru like Cook, but he probably knows Apple’s products and the internal machinery that makes them better than anyone.
He studied mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He was on the swim team and, according to local newspapers at the time, a fairly competent competitor. Paul Feehery, a friend and college roommate, remembers him as diligent and work‑focused. “He was always just a very low-key guy. He’s very driven academically, very deliberate, and never, never made rash decisions,” he told The Daily Pennsylvanian.
Ternus graduated in 1997 and went to work for a virtual reality technology company. In 2001, he joined Apple’s product design team. Jobs had just returned to the company. They likely crossed paths in hallways and meetings; whether there was any moment of connection between them is unknown.
Long career at Apple
Over 25 years, Ternus left his mark, slowly and relentlessly, across much of the company’s catalogue. Media profiles portray him as a “stand‑up guy” and a meticulous, sensible engineer. He is not, on paper, a revolutionary. Yet when he has shown caution, he has usually been right: he opposed the development of the Apple car and the Vision Pro headset, two projects that ultimately failed, each in its own way.
Outside of Apple, Ternus is behind the wheel. He’s a regular at the Laguna Seca circuit, where he laps his Porsche in under one minute and forty seconds, and sometimes he takes coworkers to the forests of Washington State for off-road rallying. He also follows the racing action from the stands as a Formula 1 fan.
Another decisive factor in his selection was age. Apple turned 50 last April. When Cook took the reins in 2011, there were still executives from the Jobs era with careers ahead of them. But 15 years later, and after becoming wealthy from Apple shares, those executives are cashing in on the rest they’ve earned. Ternus belongs to a later generation and, with a view to a mandate as long as those of Jobs or Cook, one of his first tasks will be to complete an overhaul of the leadership team.
Soon after he took office, Apple unveiled the first foldable iPhone, the most significant physical transformation of the device in years. But the decisive battleground is artificial intelligence. On one hand, it remains to be seen whether Apple’s bet on staying on the sidelines of large‑model development will prove wise. On the other, there is the risk that in the new era inaugurated by AI, humanity will finally find another device to fall in love with. It should not be forgotten that Jony Ive, Apple’s legendary designer, is working with OpenAI in search of the device that might dethrone the smartphone par excellence.
Perhaps Ternus’s best chance of success lies in his meticulousness — the trait that provoked a major outburst early in his career. His first project was the Cinema Display, a monitor whose casing was fastened with stainless‑steel screws. One night at a supplier’s facility, he was found, magnifying glass in hand, counting the grooves on the head of one screw and arguing because there were 35 instead of the 25 expected. “What the hell am I doing? Is this normal?” he remembered thinking, according to a speech he gave at his alma mater. He decided that perhaps it wasn’t normal. But also that it was right. “Make no mistake — it’s hard to put that much of yourself into something. It’s stressful, it requires sacrifice, but it’s worth it because our time is finite.” Now he will have many more details to focus on.
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