By Maurice John<\/p>\n
Tim Cook is stepping down. On September 1, 2026, he hands the keys to John Ternus, Apple’s longtime senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, and slides into the executive chairman seat. After fifteen years and roughly four trillion dollars in market value, Cook says it’s the right time \u2014 citing strong performance, a strong product roadmap, and a successor who is ready.<\/p>\n
I’ll say upfront: I was, and still am, a Steve Jobs fan. I loved his vision. I loved that he took big swings, missed sometimes, and kept swinging.<\/strong> <\/em>Apple under Cook became something else \u2014 a money-printing machine of staggering efficiency. Services, supply chain mastery, Apple silicon, and the global rollout of the iPhone into every corner of the planet. He earned the chairman’s seat. But somewhere along the way, Apple’s innovation started feeling responsive<\/em> rather than leading<\/em>. Catching up to AI. Catching up to foldables. Catching up to spatial computing in a form people actually want to wear.<\/p>\n So I’m watching this transition with real hope.<\/p>\n Ternus is not another operations executive. He’s a mechanical engineer. He earned his degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, and before Apple, he spent four years designing virtual reality headsets at Virtual Research Systems \u2014 yes, VR, in the 1990s. His senior project at Penn was a mechanical feeding arm for people with quadriplegia, controlled by head movements. That tells you something about the man.<\/p>\n At Apple, he has overseen hardware for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods, and Vision Pro. He led the Apple silicon transition. Colleagues describe him as obsessive about mechanical detail. Cook called him a person with “the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and honor.” Handing a four-trillion-dollar company to a hardware engineer is a deliberate signal: Apple knows the criticism, and Apple is responding.<\/p>\n Good. Now here is what I want to see.<\/p>\n 1. Lead in AI \u2014 stop chasing it.<\/strong> Apple has a Neural Engine on its chips, and has had one for generations. That is a hardware lead almost no one else has. Yet Apple ended up licensing Google’s AI to power Siri. That is upside-down. The story Apple should be telling is on-device, private, fast AI that runs natively on the silicon they’ve been quietly perfecting since the A11. Ternus knows this stack better than anyone. The lead is sitting there. Use it.<\/p>\n 2. Rethink the car.<\/strong> Project Titan was killed, and I understand why \u2014 building a car is brutal, capital-intensive, and the margins are nothing like an iPhone. But the world is changing. Autonomy is real. Software-defined vehicles are real. The car is becoming a computer with wheels, and that is exactly the kind of product Apple should own a piece of. Killing the ambition entirely was the wrong answer.<\/p>\n 3. Make the Apple TV actually innovative \u2014 and consider a real TV.<\/strong> The Apple TV box has been the same idea for over a decade. Meanwhile, the living room is the most contested space in tech, and Apple is barely showing up. Make a TV. A proper one, with the panel, the silicon, the spatial audio, all of it integrated. And while you’re at it, take the gaming pivot seriously. Apple Silicon is genuinely powerful. The Mac is finally a credible gaming platform. Pair that with a TV and a controller, and you have something Sony and Microsoft should be worried about.<\/p>\n 4. Wearable AI, light enough to actually wear.<\/strong> The Vision Pro feels like a swing and a miss to me \u2014 brilliant engineering, wrong product. Wearable AI is coming whether Apple leads it or not. The form factor that wins will be light, all-day glasses, earbuds, or something even less intrusive. Not a 600-gram ski goggle. Ternus, of all people \u2014 the man who shipped AirPods and worked on VR headsets when most of us were still on dial-up \u2014 should understand this better than anyone in the industry.<\/p>\n Cook’s Apple was a brilliantly run business. Ternus’s Apple needs to be a brilliantly imagined<\/em> one. Steve once said the people crazy enough to think they could change the world were the ones who did. The board has just put a hardware obsessive in charge of the most valuable consumer technology company on earth. The roadmap is reportedly stacked. The silicon is ready.<\/p>\n Now we find out if Apple still takes big swings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Maurice John Tim Cook is stepping down. On September 1, 2026, he hands the keys to John Ternus, Apple’s longtime senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, and slides into the executive chairman seat. After fifteen years and roughly four trillion dollars in market value, Cook says it’s the right time \u2014 citing strong performance,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":45381,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-opinion"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy Ternus is interesting<\/h2>\n
Four things<\/h2>\n
The bet<\/h2>\n