Posts Tagged → apple management

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.

On Recent Apple Management Changes

There’s a lot of head-scratching going on outside Apple right now with all the management changes over the last few weeks. Many of these changes were predictable.

As people get older, they tend to retire and want to spend some of their Apple wealth enjoying life. John Giannandrea’s departure was also predictable, given the public criticism following the problems with Siri.

The only real surprise has been Alan Dye. The reaction from the cheap seats has been mixed. The more traditional press sees this as another feather in Mark Zuckerberg’s cap as he continues to poach Apple employees. Apple fans aren’t necessarily sad to see Alan Dye leave.

I’m somewhat mixed on that. I think Alan Dye and his team did a good job on visionOS but a subpar job on the Mac over the last few years. (My wife is still giving me grief over her Safari tabs all looking the same.) I have to admit, when I heard he’d left, I felt a general sense of relief. Not that he’s the villain, but perhaps it’s time to turn over UI design to someone else at Apple.

The bigger picture is all the hand-wringing that takes place when Apple gets management changes. My advice: cool your jets.

In a prior life, I was a business attorney and represented many companies. None of them were Apple’s size, but I can say that in all those years, I never saw anyone leave who couldn’t be replaced by someone else who may have had a different view on things, but was still able to keep the company on track and, with a little time, maybe even improve things.

If Apple could survive Steve Jobs leaving, they can certainly survive these changes. So, as an outsider, don’t get too upset as Apple changes management. It will always happen, and it will continue to happen.

The bigger question should be: what is the overall company ethic toward its products and customers? And do they care enough about you and the things important to you for you to continue caring about them?