John Ternes will be the next CEO of Apple. And while outgoing CEO Tim Cook was praised for his approach to logistics, Ternus has a history of being a product person.
Turnus, Apple’s SVP of hardware engineering before he was officially chosen to take over the top job, has increasingly been in the public eye for helping Apple announce its latest products. Turnus helped introduce the iPhone Air last September, the most exciting new iPhone of the 2025 lineup. He has also been the face of announcing new Macs over the years, including Apple’s first Mac with Apple silicon in 2020, which profoundly changed Apple’s computer lineup, continuing through a 15-inch MacBook Air in 2023 and a suite of M4 Macs last year. Now, Ternes, who is 50 and has had a 25-year tenure at Apple, is going to be in charge of everything.
Turnus’s time at Apple spans both the Steve Jobs and Tim Cook eras. It began in 2001 when he joined Apple’s product design team after a few years as a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems. Steve Seifert, Turnus’s first boss at Apple, told the new York Times That Turnus became a manager at Apple just a few years after being hired. Seifert described him as “a man of the people”, recalling how Ternes refused to go to his own office when he was promoted and instead insisted on sitting with his team. In 2013, Turnas was promoted again, this time to VP of Hardware Engineering. In 2021, he became Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, replacing Dan Riccio and officially joined Apple’s executive team.
In the 13 years since Turnus rose to the leadership ranks of the hardware engineering department, Apple has seen significant changes to the company’s product lineup, including the launch of entirely new devices. Notably, Turnus oversaw the development of the original AirPods, launched in 2016. Over the past five years in Turnus’s SVP role, Apple has transitioned the iPhone lineup to USB-C, redesigned the MacBook Air to move away from its old “wedge” look, revamped the iPad Pro with a thinner design and launched the Vision Pro. Apple is rumored to launch its first foldable iPhone this fall.
But not everything he worked on was a hit. A bloomberg In a March profile about Apple’s successor, he was called the “driving force” behind the MacBook Pro’s ill-fated Touch Bar and their “next typing fiasco,” the butterfly keyboard.
Some of Turnus’s contributions have been less public, but still significant. Apple’s announcement that he will be stepping down as CEO says Turnus has also “driven much of Apple’s innovation in materials and hardware design” to help reduce its carbon footprint, such as the use of 3D-printed titanium in the Apple Watch Ultra 3 and “repairability innovations that have extended the lifespan of many Apple products.”
Ternes has big shoes to fill: He certainly followed in the footsteps of Steve Jobs, but Tim Cook carried on Jobs’ legacy to build the company into the hardware and services giant it is today. Apple is rumored to be bringing a bunch of interesting new products down the pipeline to shake things up, including new smart home hardware, long-delayed improvements to Siri, an OLED MacBook Pro with a touchscreen, and even smart glasses. Starting September 1, all those products — and Apple’s future — will become Turnus’s responsibility.
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