Tim Cook may be getting ready to leave his position as Apple CEO.
That’s according to the Financial Times, which reported on Saturday that the tech giant was conducting succession planning with the expectation that Tim Cook could resign from his post as soon as next year.
Cook, who turns 66 next year, took over the helm of Apple from founder Steve Jobs and led the company for more than 14 years amid record market valuation spikes and controversies worth its trillion-dollar fortune.
Many are curious to know who could be the third head to lead the company after Cook’s departure. Over the years, many names have come up, ranging from Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi (famous for his presentations and his full hair) to Greg Joswiak, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, and Apple’s chief operating officer Jeff Williams, who used to top that list before resigning from his position earlier this year.
Now the Financial Times reports that the frontrunner is John Ternes, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering.
Ternes, aged 50, is currently Apple’s youngest top executive, and has been with the tech giant for nearly 24 years.
His name first came into constant conversation when a 2024 Bloomberg report claimed that Cook thought Ternes “could give a good presentation.” According to an unnamed source close to Bloomberg’s executive team, that report said Turnes is “very mild-mannered, never puts anything controversial in an email, and is a very reticent decision-maker.”
They have also played a more central role at Apple events, from the unveiling of Apple’s first in-house silicon chip, the M1, in 2020 to the announcement of the highly anticipated iPhone Air earlier this year.
Compared to Cook’s operations-heavy background, Turnus is more engineering-focused. Armed with both a bachelor’s in engineering and an MBA, Tim Cook rose to the position of chief operating officer at Apple, focusing on sales and supply chain management.
Turnas, on the other hand, earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. Before joining Apple’s product design team in 2001, he worked on virtual reality headsets as an engineer at Virtual Research Systems.
He worked his way up to a leadership position in the company’s hardware team in 2013 and was promoted to lead all hardware engineering in 2022. AirPods, Macs, iPads, iPhones, you name it, Ternus has had a hand in producing it.
Turnus has the potential to be a breath of fresh air for some Apple fanatics who have blamed Cook for a perceived slowdown in innovation. Under Cook’s leadership, Apple has released many new products, but upgrades to said products have been considered incremental rather than revolutionary and sometimes even boring.
The company has also been criticized for the failed launch of Apple Vision Pro and its self-evident failure to catch up to competitors in the AI race, this has become even more flaring in light of the delayed launch of AI-augmented Siri. Bringing in an engineer-first executive who has participated in nearly all of Apple’s most significant product launches over the past 24 years could perhaps help address some of these failures.