A Product Guy at the Top

Apple announced this week that Tim Cook is stepping down as CEO. John Ternus takes over September 1. I want to tell you why I’m happy about it, and why I’m trying to keep my expectations honest.

A few weeks ago I wrote a newsletter called “The Paint at 7 AM.” The point was that companies look like the people running them. When Walt Disney showed up at Disneyland on Saturdays to drive the trains, Disneyland got the attention it deserved. When Steve Jobs read his team the riot act over MobileMe, Apple learned what online services were supposed to feel like. The CEO is either a person who loves the product or a person who loves the business, and you can usually tell which one within five minutes of any keynote.

Tim Cook loved the business. That isn’t a slight. He built the supply chain that made the iPhone possible at the scale it reached. He brought us AirPods, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro. He grew Services into a real business and ran the company with a steady hand for fifteen years. Apple is in better shape because he ran it.

But Cook was also sometimes invisible on stage. You could tell which products lit him up and which ones he was reading off the cue card. The HomePod got the cue-card treatment for years. Big chunks of the iPad lineup got it too. The product half of the keynote always felt like it belonged to somebody else.

John Ternus is somebody else. He has been at Apple since 2001, running hardware engineering for the iPad and the Mac through the entire Apple silicon transition. When he steps on stage and talks about how an enclosure comes together, he sounds like a person who made the thing. He probably had a hand in it. Naming Johny Srouji as Chief Hardware Officer at the same time tells you the rest. This is a hardware-first transition from a hardware-first company.

That’s the part I’m happy about. My interest in Apple has always been as a customer, not a shareholder. I buy the things and use them. That’s my stake in all of this. A CEO who thinks about products the way I think about products seems like good news for people like me.

The cautious part is that Apple is too big to turn quickly. Ternus is going to spend his first year learning levers Cook has had his hands on for decades. Services is now a big part of Apple’s profit.

A hardware engineer running a hundred-billion-dollar services business is going to be tested in ways nobody can predict. The Siri saga is a reminder that Apple has problems that won’t get solved by a CEO who happens to like making iPads.

Even so, the things I’ll be watching are product things. Which Macs get greenlit and which ones quietly get killed. Whether the keynotes start sounding like the early years again, where you got the sense the people on stage actually used the things they were holding.

My bet is that the keynotes get more product-forward. The quiet pruning of half-committed products picks up speed. And a few years in, we find out whether a hardware engineer can also run a services business.

I could be completely wrong about this. Tim Cook had skeptics in 2011 too, and he ran circles around all of them. But the CEO who actually cares about what the company makes is the CEO who builds great products. Ternus feels like that pick.

The M5 Mac Studio Crystal Ball

Several Mac mini and Mac Studio configurations are “currently unavailable” from Apple. No delivery estimate. No order option.

The affected models include the Mac mini with 32GB or 64GB of RAM and the Mac Studio with 128GB or 256GB. Apple had already removed the 512GB M3 Ultra Mac Studio a few weeks prior.

Two things are probably driving this. Mark Gurman has Apple’s 2026 Mac roadmap including M5 and M5 Pro Mac mini models and M5 Max and M5 Ultra Mac Studio refreshes. I expected those to get released at WWDC in June, but that seems a ways off for them to stop selling it in April.

There’s also the global DRAM shortage, driven by AI demand. Both explanations are credible, and they’re not mutually exclusive.

My money was on the M5 refresh being the bigger factor. Maybe that was partially wish-casting because I’m thinking I’m about due to update my M2 Mac Studio. But Mark Gurman’s recent reporting says the Mac Studio may be pushed to October. The longer we wait, the more likely I expect Apple to raise its memory prices.

John Ternus at the Helm

Apple named John Ternus as its next CEO this morning. Tim Cook moves to executive chairman, and Ternus takes over September 1. Johny Srouji picks up an expanded Chief Hardware Officer role, combining Ternus’s hardware engineering job with his own hardware technologies work.

I have been on the Ternus bandwagon for a while. Back in November I wrote about why he felt like the obvious pick. The first time I saw him walk out on an Apple keynote stage, my initial thought was that “this guy looks like a CEO.”

In my years as a business attorney, I sat in on a lot of CEO transitions. Nearly every time that the transition happened in an ongoing, successful company, they landed on whoever was running their most successful division. If you want to predict a successor, look for the person responsible for the part of the business that is working. Ternus has been running Apple’s hardware engineering. Hardware is the business. The iPhone, the Mac, the iPad, and the Watch are the engine. You hand the company to the person running the engine.

So this choice is consistent. It is the least surprising CEO announcement Apple could have made.

What happens next is the harder question. Apple is too big to change direction quickly. New CEOs at companies this size do not reshape the company in their first year. They learn where the levers are. They keep the trains running. The real signal of Ternus’s hand on the tiller will come later, probably well into 2027 or beyond. What products get greenlit. What gets killed. How the company talks about itself.

I am eager to see this new chapter. Tim Cook was very successful in the short term. Time will tell what his impact was over the long term. Handing the job to an engineer who has been in the product trenches since 2001 feels right. Now we get to watch what he does with it.

Mac Power Users 845: Patrick Rhone

On this episode of Mac Power Users, David and Stephen welcome back their old friend Patrick Rhone after far too long. Patrick is a writer, an Apple consultant, the author of Enough, and the guy who taught David how to dress like a grownup. They get into why Patrick’s 2020 M1 MacBook Air still handles everything he throws at it, his “Amish approach” to technology as a long-term tester, and how he keeps his phone in his pocket on purpose. They also talk about the minimalist phone movement, raising kids around technology, and a healthy detour into vintage Apple gear and the Timex Sinclair.

Episode Links

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Small Experiments Over Drastic Changes

I was talking to someone recently who felt paralyzed by too many commitments. Work was consuming her. She knew what roles she wanted to focus on, but there simply wasn’t time. She knew things had to change. But looking at her list, she couldn’t see how to escape.

So she was stuck. Paralyzed.

This happens more than you’d think.

When you’ve been saying yes to everything for years, the idea of changing course can feel catastrophic. You imagine cutting a commitment and the whole thing collapsing. Your boss firing you. Your family disappointed. Your identity crumbling. So you stay in the system because at least the system is familiar.

There’s a trick to escaping this. Don’t revolutionize your life. Run a tiny experiment instead.

Pick one small part of something you’re doing and stop doing it. Just stop. Not forever. Not as a grand philosophical commitment. Just for a week or two. Nobody else has to know.

See what happens.

Maybe it’s email you’ve been answering that someone else can handle. Maybe it’s a meeting you attend but don’t really need to attend. Maybe it’s a project you volunteered for that drains you. Pick something small. Something reversible.

Then stop doing it, and you’ll discover the universe will not implode. Your life will not end. The thing you were afraid would happen probably won’t happen at all. Try it, and you just might break the spell.

Once you realize you can drop something without everything falling apart, you get bold. You try another experiment. You cut another thing. You add something back that matters more. You adjust.

But the key is starting small. Baby steps. Reversible moves.

The reason people fail at change is that they go too drastic. Monday they decide to quit their job and move to Costa Rica. By Wednesday, they’re terrified and back to the old way. Or they commit to cutting five big things at once and it feels so overwhelming they don’t cut any.

Experiments are different. An experiment feels safe. You’re not making a permanent decision. You’re just testing something. And tests generate data you can use.

When you drop one thing for a week, you learn whether your fear was justified. You learn what fills the space. You learn whether people actually depend on you the way you thought they did.

The catastrophe isn’t real. Go find out.

Capto: One App to Record, Edit, and Share Your Screen

This post is sponsored by Global Delight, makers of Capto.

If you’ve ever tried to put together a screen recording to explain a workflow, a feature, or a concept, you know how quickly it turns into a multi-app job. One app to record, another to edit, a third to annotate, something else to share. By the time you’ve bounced between all of them, you’ve usually lost the thread of what you were trying to explain.

Capto does all of that in one place.

It’s a screen recording, capture, and editing app for Mac that handles the whole process without you ever switching apps. You can record your full screen or a selected region. Add a webcam overlay and voice narration while you record. Then edit, annotate, and share, all from within Capto.

The annotation tools are where Capto earns its keep for instructional content. You can add arrows, text, highlights, and blur out anything you don’t want visible. The scrolling capture feature handles full-page and long-interface captures. These are the kind that are awkward to document any other way.

Beyond annotations, Capto has video editing built in. Trimming, cropping, cutting. The basics you need to remove a fumbled intro or a section where you lost your train of thought. Nothing fancy, but it covers what most recording projects actually need.

The use cases are broad. Remote teams walking colleagues through processes, trainers building onboarding materials, educators recording lessons. Any situation where you need to explain something visually and get it cleaned up fast. Capto keeps that whole workflow inside one app instead of five.

If that sounds like your kind of tool, Capto is worth a serious look. It’s available on the Mac App Store and the Global Delight website.

Lab Report — April 17, 2026

The Artemis II crew returned from humanity’s farthest journey since 1972, with iPhone 17 Pro Max selfies taken 270,000 miles from Earth. Apple Business Platform launched in 200+ countries, iOS 26.5 public beta 2 landed, and high-RAM Mac mini and Mac Studio configs went completely out of stock.

This is a post for MacSparky Labs Members only. Care to join? Or perhaps do you need to sign in?