As Key Talent Abandons Apple, Meet the New Generation of Leaders Taking On the Old Guard

Start music. Players move clockwise in a circle. When the music stops everyone sits on a chair. Big Tech is accelerating its plans for the next generation of leading designers, engineers, AI heads, and even CEOs.

In Cupertino, Apple executives with familiar faces are retiring or reducing responsibilities. Who is in and who is out? Well, Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams retired in November, and there is speculation that CEO Tim Cook may follow him in the near term. Lisa Jackson, who has led Apple’s sustainability efforts since 2013, is also now set to retire in January.

There is also a contingent of Apple employees who have been lured to work with OpenAI, most notably Apple’s former chief design officer Jony Ive, who worked at LoveFrom after his freelance stint. In 2024, Molly Anderson was named Industrial Design Leader, leading a team of mostly new faces. Others have moved into the meta, such as Apple’s vice president of human interface design, Alan Dye, who this week was appointed head of a new Reality Labs design studio. At Apple, he has been replaced by longtime UI designer Stephen LeMay. Oops.

In this era of changing talent, John Ternes, who has worked for Apple since 2001 and has served as SVP of Hardware Engineering for the last four years, reporting directly to Tim Cook, is reportedly emerging as the frontrunner to replace Cook as Apple’s CEO by next year. WIRED asked for comment from Apple but did not receive a response before publication.

From 2023 onwards, Ternus has been given greater prominence at product launch events, with frequent “leaks” on succession planning and Ternus’ position at the front of the pack. He announced the iPhone Air on stage last September, and has appeared with other senior Apple leaders in press interviews and in-store Apple events.

“I think they’re testing to see what the sentiment is. Apple likes to control the narrative. So these ‘leaks’ aren’t happening unintentionally,” suggests Anshel Saag, principal analyst at Moore Insights & Strategy. “Apple has lost a lot of people. I think this could actually be a positive outcome because it will create a new generation of people who now have more power than they had before.”

new names worth knowing

It’s always difficult to understand an individual’s contributions to Apple beyond the odd detail, such as John Ternes himself reportedly being behind the MacBook’s TouchBar. Bertrand Napview worked on the Apple Vision Pro team from 2017 to 2021, after Apple acquired his VR headset startup Vrvana, and now runs Montreal-based VC firm Triptyq Capital. During his three and a half years, working mostly on the pass-through capabilities of Vision Pro, the team grew from 300 to nearly 1,200. “John Ternes, even though I never worked with him, the feedback I got is that he’s a great product person,” he says, “and I think that’s what’s needed for the next phase of Apple, especially with AI and XR.”

With this future in mind, Napview sees the combination of Turns-as-CEO working well with other personnel at Apple, including the news in March that Rockwell was taking over development of Siri from head of AI, John Giannandrea. In another major reshuffle that may be expected in the future, Giannandrea was replaced this week by Amar Subramaniam, who spent 16 years at Google, including work on Gemini and DeepMind, before a six-month stint at Microsoft.

“Mike Rockwell, I worked with him at Vision Pro Group, I think he’s the right person for this because he [XR and AI] Work together,” says Napview. “He used to joke that Siri was crap. I liked him because he didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. I was happy when I saw that he got promoted. I think teaming up with someone who is more product-focused [Ternus]This is the way to go for Apple.