Apple’s next CEO designed a mechanical arm in college that helped paralyzed people feed themselves using only head movements. That was 1997. Twenty-nine years later, John Ternus runs a $4 trillion company.
Cook joined Apple in 1998 to fix its supply chain. He became CEO in 2011. His big move was selling subscriptions like iCloud and Apple Music to people who already owned iPhones and Macs. Under him, Apple grew from $350 billion to $4 trillion.
Ternus is a mechanical engineer. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, where he swam on the varsity team. His first job was building VR headsets at a tiny company called Virtual Research Systems. In 2001 he joined Apple to design computer monitors. Yes, the screens you plug into a Mac.
He climbed fast inside Apple. By 2013 he ran the hardware teams for Macs, iPads, and AirPods. iPhone got added to his plate in 2020. Apple Watch in late 2022. And in January this year, Apple put him in charge of the design team itself, the famous group once led by Jony Ive (the British designer who shaped the look of every iPhone before leaving Apple in 2019). That last move made Ternus the most powerful engineering executive Apple has had since Steve Jobs.
His name is on a lot of products. Every iPad ever made. AirPods. Apple’s switch from Intel chips to its own custom chips. The Vision Pro headset. The new ultra-thin iPhone Air. The iPhone 17. The new affordable MacBook Neo. If you own anything Apple has made in the last decade, his team built it.
He doesn’t appear to have an X account. In his 2024 Penn commencement speech he told graduates: “Always assume you’re as smart as anyone else in the room, but never assume that you know as much as they do.”
Cook ran Apple like a business. Ternus will run it like a workshop. And right now Apple has a problem: it’s widely seen as falling behind in AI. They delayed their big Siri upgrade. They’re now paying Google to use Gemini, Google’s AI, to power the new Siri. The Vision Pro has reportedly sold under one million units since launching in February 2024. Apple sells more than 200 million iPhones every year. So the board’s bet is a hardware guy running the company that needs to fix its AI.
He inherits a company whose annual revenue went from $108 billion to $416 billion under Cook. Wall Street barely reacted. Apple stock closed Monday at $273 and slipped about 1% on the news because everyone had been expecting this for over a year. The 22-year-old who built that feeding arm now has to figure out what comes after the iPhone.