John Ternus to become Apple CEO
apple.com1643 points by schappim 11 hours ago
1643 points by schappim 11 hours ago
This is one of the more broadly normal HN-reaction threads to large public news event I've seen in a while. A lot of love for Apple, respect for the decision, and respectfully stated nuance. Surprising and good.
I still haven't scroll down to the bottom, I don't want to spoil my impression. But it's great to see a positive reaction. Good way to mark the moment. Tim has been CEO for 15 years roughly, since Steve's passing. This guy seems much younger than Tim was when he ascended. I hope he really takes it to the next level.
Got a feeling that Apple has some Amazing new hardware category-making products coming out of the 'skunkworks' over the next 3 years.
Wow. Hopefully, Ternus will bring what he brought to Apple's hardware to their software. The hardware is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else, but their software gets worse and worse every generation. I'm glad to hear this.
Ternus recently gave an interview where he said this about the initial flop of Apple Maps:
> “When we started out with maps, it was an ambitious undertaking. It was bumpy,” said Ternus. “But the team had just been over the years just pushing and pushing and pushing. And Apple Maps today is absolutely amazing. If you have the vision and you're persistent and you keep working at it, you can take something you know that has a rocky start and turn it into something great.”
Here's hoping he recognizes that Apple's current generation of software is in the "rocky start" phase, not the "pushing and pushing" phase and definitely not the "absolutely amazing" phase. Time will tell...
https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/apples-joz-and-ternus-on...
>And Apple Maps today is absolutely amazing.
Perhaps that is the case in the US, but in Poland, I haven't had a single app guide me into the literal bushes as many times as Apple Maps does. The straw that broke the camel's back was when, I shit you not, the navigation aspect literally expected me to drive through a lake.
There's some irony there in that the whole maps fiasco lead to firing of Forstall which allowed Ive to become head of design, which basically led to the current state of macOS design.
I do wish that some day someone will tell the story of what happened during that time. Maps was bad at launch yes, but it also wouldn't get better without people contributing more data, and the fact that it took a decade to slowly improve implies that there's nothing anyone could have done to get it right "off the bat". It still feels to me Forstall was set up as the fall guy, especially considering no one was fired for antennagate.
> Maps was bad at launch yes, but it also wouldn't get better without people contributing more data, and the fact that it took a decade to slowly improve implies that there's nothing anyone could have done to get it right "off the bat".
Absolutely.
Was the choice to release way way way too early the right choice in the end? Needed telemetry, or even more time, to beat Google? Also taking the data from Google must have had significant ramifications.
Reportedly, Forstall wasn’t liked by the other senior execs but was kept “safe” as Jobs’ protégé, they thought alike and shared the love for skeuomorphism design. Ive in particular disliked Forstall, and Tim Cook made a choice.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apples-minimalist-ive-assume...
Could Forstall potentially return under new Apple leadership?
He produces Broadway shows these days. Never say never but that kind of thing screams an “I’ve got all the cash I need, now I’m following my passions” mindset. You certainly don’t do it for the money…
And met his co-producer for the (Tony-winning!) show at Lars Ulrich's birthday party! He's doing something right. https://archive.is/ZcTJm
What? No. Why would he even want to?
Forstall fired an engineer I had worked with (and who I respected a lot) to take the fall for Apple Maps.
I’m sure it’s amazing in California or the US. So often I think how much better products would be if the people responsible would have to use them for a week outside of the happy path.
Example: Taking the airport train instead of a private driver and realizing there’s no luggage racks, staying in a regular hotel room and realizing there’s no light in front of the mirror, only behind you. So many examples like that on a daily basis.
Another huge exemple : in most big cities in Europe you have special parking lots around big public transit hubs outside of the city where you can park for free as long as you continue your journey by public transit.
In a lot of cities, that’s either the fastest or the most comfortable way to go somewhere in the city when you come from the outside.
Not any single navigation app support this (tbf, the few European ones don’t support it either)
Staying in a holiday rental and there are no hooks on the walls!
I’ve started buying cheap self-adhesive hooks on AliExpress and placing them myself. Not sure if they last long but hopefully owners get the message.
“When we started out with maps, it was an ambitious undertaking. It was bumpy…”
And I know many engineers within Apple that had been testing Maps before it shipped and they were filing bugs about it. It shipped anyway.
> It shipped anyway.
“Real artists ship”
No product worth using is bug free.
No product is bug free. Are all products worth using?
"No product worth using is bug free" is not the same statement as "all bug free products are worth using". Come on man, this is basic logic.
You’re right. But your statement was that no product worth using is bug free. I said that no software exists that is without bugs. Your statement uses the presence of bugs to indicate a product is worth using. But since all software has bugs, that applies to every product ever made. It doesn’t have any discriminating power. So it’s not fallacious on its face but it’s not useful either, and that’s what I was trying to point out.
> Your statement uses the presence of bugs to indicate a product is worth using.
This is not correct; "If a product is worth using, then it has bugs." (P→Q) does not imply its converse "If a product has bugs, then it is worth using." (Q→P). Buginess is presented as a necessary condition of being worth using, not a sufficient one.
It does, however, imply "If a product has no bugs, then it is not worth using.".
> It doesn’t have any discriminating power.
That was exactly my point. The presence of bugs in a product (in this case Apple Maps) does not mean it should not ship. “No open bugs” cannot be the criteria for whether a product is ready to ship.
Apple Maps is pretty fantastic
It’s gotten a lot better, but I still find the address database better in Google Maps, which helps when you have only a fragment of an address. I also find that the Apple Maps database has a lot of roads that read the same. For instance, in Texas where I live, we have a lot of “Ranch Roads” that are numbered. Think of them like state highways in other state (which we also have; don’t ask). For whatever reason, most of the Ranch Roads are spoken by Maps as “Ranch Road,” not with the number. So, if you have a spot where multiple Ranch Roads intersect, Maps will just say “turn left on Ranch Road” instead of “turn left on Ranch Road 123.” It’s tremendous annoying. In another state, imagine it saying “turn left on Interstate,” without a number. Anyway, Google Maps does better.
Google is not without its errors.
I used to work to resolve addressing disputes and google just doesn't expose (maybe even store) the relevant information for a lot of parcels of land.
It’s all available freely from the government in simple formats but for Joe Public they don’t know that much less how to access it and it’s the case that technicians on the ground don’t always have it in their SOP either. Google has a level of market dominance that means their errors can be, for a small individual or over an aggregation of small individuals, costly.
Addresses are hard. OSM Nominatim struggles with them all the time. Probably the biggest hurdle to OSM adoption, imo
Yep, they all have flaws. I just fine that when I want to drive somewhere, Google does better for me than Apple, though certainly Apple has improved a lot recently.
actually a sign of our times that we can gripe about this. i remember how annoying it was to rent a car on a business trip without anything other than a road atlas. you had to dedicate a fair bit of cognitive load you really didnt want to use.
In the 80s I rented a car from the Minneapolis airport. Drove to my hotel visually navigating with respect to the tall buildings of downtown. Eventually realizing I was in St Paul.
Indeed. I remember flying to Atlanta and arriving at midnight. I rented a car and had to try to find my hotel in the dark with one of those one-page maps the rental car company had. So, yea, we’ve come a long way for the better.
Google Maps often picks the non-idiomatic thing. It'll say the road name when no sign uses that, and it's a US highway that you have been following for a while. Or it will tell you the state highway number when it is a major named artery, and nobody knows that it is a state highway at that point or uses the highway number. This makes it hard to know if it is carrying you along on the same route or if it has come up with one of its weird shortcuts to save 1 minute.
It has absolutely no clue about roundabouts. On a journey in England or France on a road that has a roundabout every mile it will constantly spam you with "take the second exit onto wailing street" every minute, when a human would say "go straight at the next 20 roundabouts staying on the A38".
Here in Australia Apple Maps names everywhere by local council, which isn’t used at all, we use localities. I have reported this as a bug repeatedly but they just keep at it.
It just means nothing here except who you pay to collect the bins.
Salt Lake City roads are amusing
"Turn right on East one hundred and twenty three thousand South"
On macOS there are so many basic things you’d want to do - share itineraries, annotate places, keep lists of things, but there’s not even a document concept. With the exception of guides, anything you do is ephemeral. It’s excellent at planning a route, but doing anything with that route, including getting back to it later is useless.
All true, but you have to measure it against how enshitified Google Maps has become.
I primarily use Apple maps and bounce back to google sometimes because I think the browser experience is so much better and it is faster to just type my terms right into ironically safari. Every time I do I think it is still simpler and snappier. Especially true if I have recently tried to use the MacOS maps app… that never behaves how I would imagine it should if I go beyond a simple location search. There are things about the ios app that make me crazy too. No qualms about the maps themselves these days.
I don't agree with that assertion. Just because google maps has become one thing, doesn't excuse Apple maps flaws. They can exist on their merits.
The app on macOS is terrible, like all Catalyst/SwiftUI ports. Fisher-Price software.
Maybe elsewhere it is. Here, it's terrible.
In general, for all it benefits from globalization, Apple disappoints on global markets.
90% of my usage of it is because it actually displays the map on my Watch, whereas Google Maps & Citymapper only show directions.
If it weren't for that, I'd use Citymapper for practically everything.
it was far inferior to its competitor when it was released
That was, what, twelve years ago? Hardly seems relevant.
it's relevant in the context of this conversation:
> Ternus recently gave an interview where he said this about the initial flop of Apple Maps:
While it is great now, it did flop because it was terrible.
That's worrying, because Apple Mpas is still a borderline useless hot mess.
What is he smoking?!? Apple Maps was fine a few years ago, but these days it routes me to the wrong place about as often as organic maps, and siri is completely broken. It renders a blue dot showing where I am, and responds “I do not know where you are”.
Also, the UI for it keeps getting more cluttered, and they announced that in-map ads are coming Q2-3 2026.
Hardware people, in my very direct experience, are terrible at software. But we can hope.
Software people, in my very direct experience, are terrible at hardware... While in jest, I do think most software engineer's understanding of hardware abstractions is pretty poor and does disservice to the hardware they run on.
I know between Moore's Law and Gate's Law which one I would prefer to be the industry standard... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
Generally speaking, I think both are true. Most people seem to have an affinity for either hardware or software, but rarely for both. Those who do are extremely unique. I don't mean that as an insult to anyone, just as an observatin having worked in both (and personally am much better at software than hardware, even though I enjoy both).
I agree - at university there were software people and hardware people and a small number who studied mechatronics (hardware and software). But even the mechatronic people were really hardware people who just tolerated software.
I find both interesting but have been working in software for over a decade now.
Honestly, the thing that pushed me into software dev was the fact that hardware tools were absolutely garbage. Verilog felt like a joke of a language designed to torment rather than help the user.
Yeah at university we had to do some hardware stuff in our software course. I know there were better debug tools available as some students purchased them but playing with microprocessors was no fun.
Verilog is not the best and that’s not even the worst part - tools like ISE/Vivado and Quartus are even worse!
It’s really amazing that at least there are some fully open flows for FPGAs these days, unfortunately they don’t support system Verilog. (I think this is still the case?)
I am deeply aware of software people being crap at hardware having worked in embedded for much of my career.
I've worked for 40+ years with a hardware guy and he's great at software, for one reason: attention to detail. In hardware, you have to test, test and test. There's no "fixed it later with a patch" (for the most part).
I don't have a lot of samples, just one. So, YMMV.
It's more the hope that he can bring the culture embedded in the hardware division over to software, which hopefully results in better software.
What they need is a culture of UX focus, and I don’t think it’s present in the hardware team either.
They’ve coasted too long on consistent visual identity, and even that’s been slipping. Time to focus on actual user needs.
Well, and aspect of hardware dev that lacks in software dev is testing. A mistake in hardware is much harder to correct once it leaves the factory vs a mistake in software. A large portion of hardware budget is ultimately spent on QA.
I have to think some of that attitude would be good for apple's software division.
It's not as if ternus will be writing code directly, he's managing managers. Hopefully that means he'll demand and budget more for QA.
The whole idea of (good times) Apple was hardware and software made coherently by the same people though.
“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware" —Alan Kay
In many cases, yes, but it really depends a lot on the person. I have a computer hardware degree but have led both software and UX teams. If you have a hardware background, you’re going to have to acquire a software background before you can lead software teams. What you can’t do is lead a software team like a hardware team (or vice versa).
This is actually one thing I think will be great as AI coding agents get better. Companies whose main expertise is hardware might start producing better software.
There are so many little bugs in consumer-facing apps that hit the ‘sweet’ spot of being incredible little annoyances that just aren’t worth putting an engineer on for a week to fix, but which are totally worth having an engineer throw an agent onto them.
How? Coding agents are trained on every copy of every tutorial that skips error checking and implements the least resistance path.
I mean I would hope at least one person actually reviews the code before it goes out, but yeah we all know what hope does :)
This is actually one thing I think will be great as AI coding agents get better. Companies whose main expertise is code reviewing might start producing better software.
Yeah, like fixing a annoyance while introducing one or two SEV-1 for sure is going to be great progress.
I really hope they fire whoever is in charge of Liquid Glass. Whoever is leading Apple software has run out of ideas. Of all the countless things they could be doing in software, we got the useless Liquid Glass refactor.
I hated liquid glass at first, but now i've come to appreciate it. It grows on you
Regardless of your opinion of its present iteration, the whole push is for their AR/VR layered UI/UX shift - not just another random redesign they threw at the wall.
VR/AR is a gimmick. Gimmicks have no place on a work tool (macOS). No one is gonna use VR/AR with a laptop. Liquid Glass is Apples Metro UI.
I'm still on 18.x thats insecure by now and switching to Asahi as soon as something breaks.
> VR/AR is a gimmick. Gimmicks have no place on a work tool (macOS). No one is gonna use VR/AR with a laptop. Liquid Glass is Apples Metro UI.
What technological advance is there for high quality complex software?
The advances that made Apple Silicon possible were, fundamentally, TSMC and ARM. These were the material conditions that had to exist in order for a tech company to capitalize on a new generation of vertically integrated chip design. Now what's the conditions for next generation Mac OS? What research advances or software engineering paradigms that are mature enough for adoption? The state of Apple software isn't just due to mismanagement, it is, but the success of the hardware entails technology nodes as a confounding factor.
Short-term, I'm just hoping this means the AirPods Max (and Vision Pro too, I guess) get a redesign that ditches all the uncomfortably heavy metal shells.
Granted I have a big ol' head, but I like the metal frame in all its heft - they feel ultra durable and I don't worry about throwing them in a bag.
I tend to disagree to a point: their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.
They are leaps and bounds above any other laptop on the market. Who wants a plastic chasis and nub in 2026 over a modern Macbook Air.
They are leaps and bounds ahead for people who want their specific formula or don't really care about computers.
Apple has always been a "our way or the highway" brand, we can at least keep in mind that 3 laptop formulas only differenciated by size and thickness won't cut it for everyone on the planet.
> their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
I don't know about Thinkpads, but the utterly pleasant glass trackpad is still one of the things I cannot find on most non-Mac laptops, despite every manufacturer being able to copy it for years.
The closest I've found are the Surface laptop/cover trackpads, but they have their own set of reliability and repairability issues.
As a MacBook user, I very rarely want to use a mouse except for gaming. THe trackpad is delightful enough for the bulk of my use cases.
You might be sleeping on trackpoint. I don't remember the last time I used a trackpad once I onboarded on trackpoint - all that hand waving is so tiring when you can achieve the same action even faster by just moving two fingers couple of milimeters. You just move your index from H to trackpoint and thumb from space to mouse buttons which is basically the smallest movement you can do on your keyboard.
I haven't used a touchpad in recent years that wasn't "good enough", I really don't obsess about those (but I acknowledge that many do here), but I profoundly dislike MacBooks' keyboards. Anyhow, let's not pretend that it matters as much as the broken mess of a desktop environment/windows manager that the OS sitting on top is.
> I don't know about Thinkpads, but the utterly pleasant glass trackpad is still one of the things I cannot find on most non-Mac laptops, despite every manufacturer being able to copy it for years.
I was never a trackpad person until I finally got a Mac at work maybe 10 years ago. But since the trackpads stopped really clicking in favor of haptics, they're a lot worse than they used to be. I get false/double clicks and inconsistent feedback.
ThinkPads have nicer keyboards, but they stopped doing the more traditional IBM layout several years ago, which is really unfortunate. I'd be willing to pay for a more traditional keyboard layout with a slightly smaller trackpad and/or a sizeable bottom bezel (which is actually preferable for me because of my posture when I use a laptop most of the time).
Interestingly enough the Neo went back to a clicking trackpad; you might want to try one and see how it feels for you.
> I tend to disagree to a point: their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
> But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.
And I would disagree with the idea that I should be running Linux on my primary machine. As a developer, I've faced enough "death by a thousand cuts" situations from running Linux on my personal router and servers to let it anywhere close to my main computer.
Don't even get me started on the hardware quality of Mac laptop including their stellar trackpads, screens and the smallest details like the quality of the hinge. I can still open my 5 year old Mac with a single finger and the hinge is as solid as the day I bought it.
As someone who's also particular about user experience, Linux always fails at this. If you have good UX, that means you can critically think for what a user wants from a computer, and can determine what should and shouldn’t be prioritized. UX is never a first-class citizen on Linux, and for all the issues with Tahoe, macOS still has enough residual quality left in it to not feel like I'm constantly fighting the operating system.
Simple example: I want HDR on Linux. Should be easy right? Just switch to Plasma under Wayland? Then do a one time config so mpv can play HDR. Oh and no browsers support it so good luck. Games need gamescope and flags to be set.
I want my computer to work, not for me to work as an integration engineer. So I use my Mac and it just works™. So I just let Linux live where I feel it works best, in servers and headless environments.
did you tried nix home-manager for linux software setup? i never was able to use linux until nix.
hardware - afaik only lenovo(some say asus is worth to try - but no official linux support, framework is sturdy but feels cheap) is well know for quality hardware - others are questionable.
unfortunately AMD AI Max 390/2/5+ nor Qualcomm Elite 2 Lenovos are not here.
if you use nixos you end up feeling like you need to spend more time developing your personal computer's configuration than developing your actual projects, ime.
it kind of 'just works' if someone already wrote the nix code to do what you want it to do and put it in nixpkgs and you manage to find it and figure out how to use it. but if that isn't the case, good luck. i once spent almost a week trying to get a program to build and run properly under nix that could probably be installed in around 20 seconds on a osx/windows machine.
This might have been the case a couple of years ago, but it is certainly not true any more, if you use AI [even occasionally] to manage some of your default.nix and flake.nix files. I learn by getting AI to edit it (default.nix for example), and then study what it did. It helps.
The quality of the managed / packages software, however, is still a bit subpar compared to Debian and Redhat.
How do you feel about their trackpad? I think they’re the best on the market.
I wish the trackpad on my macbook were smaller, because my thumbs constantly hit it and smite me into a different reality.
They're pretty good, but you can find other good trackpads too. The main thing about Apple is that their trackpads are consistently pretty good, while with other brands it can be hard to figure out what you'll be getting until you try it yourself.
There's also software component. It has improved by now, but early libinput was giving some good trackpads bad rep.
I think Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon. If you think about the last 15 years, Apple has really become the biggest possible version of itself without losing its values.
Tech in general has changed quite a bit though. I don't know how Steve Jobs would have reacted to AI, and I don't know where tech itself would be if Jobs were still around. But I do think the next evolution is due and yet to be seen. It's not clear that Tim Cook would be the one to effectively see that through. And so I think his timing is impeccable and probably aligned with what is best for Apple. I have a lot of respect here: time has shown that a lot of leaders don't let go until its too late.
I'd also add that from the perspective of an employee in the industry, Tim Cook has had a remarkably steady hand throughout multiple business cycles in the industry that have made Apple a much better place to work than many of the other very large tech companies: no massive over-hiring after covid, no massive layoffs to correct for that, average tenure at the company BLOWS other companies out of the water, a reputation for a strong engineering culture
I say this as someone who hasn't worked there, but has a large number of friends and peers who currently do or have in recent years.
Agree. With the cash balance that Apple has, CEO's usually get tempted to make moves that let them flex, but he was very disciplined in that sense.
> a reputation for a strong engineering culture
We’re talking about the company that shipped the storage bug?
> I think Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon.
I vehemently disagree with this. I think Cook's logistics and business-focused goals are, if not diametrically opposed to Job's product obsession, at the very least orthogonal to it. Almost everything about Apple the product, over the past 15 years, has either coasted (e.g. stayed at par with the rest of the industry) or gotten worse. The one exception is arguably Apple Silicon (and I'm sure their board is acutely aware of it).
In Steve Jobs biography, I read that he was obsessed with the factory they built to mass produce devices. I think he was in some way also obsessed with logistics of how things were made, and Tim Cook came in and not only helped Apple but also helped transform the global supply chain.
I also think most products apple makes are in the top tier of their respective category, if not the best.
I find this critique extremely odd. Sure, Apple isn't perfect, but literally every thing they do is top tier in the category they enter.
I started writing out a list of Apple's products and it was simply [x device] in [y category] is either the best or consistently rated in the top of that category.
Airpods? They make more than most SaaS decacorns. How can you not credit that as a massive success that came out of nowhere?
It's a stealth subscription product. People are losing those things all the time.
Yes, what about airpods? Little reason to buy them if you are not in the Apple ecosystem, and if you are, and you are a careful buyer, you'll probably settle with other brands which are technically ahead (in either of build, sound or ANR quality, or all, Apple being on the Pareto front of neither). I'm not dismissing the marketing forces behind airpods selling by the millions as a "status symbol", but that's very much a "high cost of living country" thing, Apple is inexistent elsewhere, which is most places.
This comes off as a quite dismissive and incurious take. Are you quite sure that of the ~500 million consumers who bought a pair, nobody considered utility and it was simply a fashion choice? Or is it more likely that some consumers judge the utility differently from you?
> you'll probably settle with other brands which are technically ahead (in either of build, sound or ANR quality, or all, Apple being on the Pareto front of neither)
Like what? In the true wireless camp, the Sony's are much less comfortable (and more expensive), the Bose are not as good (and more expensive)...
There's cheaper options, sure, but you're sacrificing build, ANC, battery life, etc.
Except we can’t discount the fact that Jobs chose Cook as his successor. So there’s something Jobs clearly saw there, past being “diametrically opposed” to Jobs’ product obsession. Maybe Jobs felt there were enough product people.
Hacker News? More like MBA news.
I'm not just being snarky — I don't think it's reasonable to say the profit-maximizing service-oriented Apple is the best possible version of itself without losing its values of personal computing and individual empowerment.
Steve Jobs existed in an era where he could show us new technology when new technology brought a sense of joy and amazement; whereas due to a multitude of factors, new technology no longer causes such emotions for a substantial portion of people.
The main factor is that the same people are 15 years older now. You can ask people who are 50+ now whether they felt "a sense of joy and amazement" when iPhone was introduced.
There's nothing like that reveal of the first MacBook Air, where he whips it out of a manilla envelope. I loved that first one at the time. Maybe less so on my lap when it turned into a stovetop - but it was innovative and cool and exciting, and the stuff now is not.
The fact they figured out how to transition all their laptops to ARM so it won’t be a stovetop on your lap is amazing
Agreed - once the ad-based profit model took off that no longer became possible.
To a point I think the blame lies on the tech companies not doing their jobs. The iPad could have been that kind of joy and amazement machine for many, except it never was allowed to entrench on the mac or the iPhone.
The Steamdeck was a breath of fresh air, the whole Steam frames and cube could have been a big deal.
Which is the chicken and which is the egg here though? Maybe new technology that moves people isn’t coming because Tim Cook was the ceo.
Eh, it still could if anyone would make it a priority. I’m not a Jobs or Apple fanboy by any stretch, but I think this is selling him short.
Siri was under jobs. He saw AI before everyone else
I know it is actually AI, but calling Siri AI vs the current state of the art is... generous.
Siri was GOFAI (handwritten software) rather than a model written by a machine learning algorithm.
Honestly, I think Jobs would hate the fuzzy, unpolished results that AI gives you.
Cook did a great job. I was hesitant when Steve Jobs died and Cook took over. Jobs was so visionary and it wasn’t clear that a finance guy would be a good fit. He clearly learned what he needed to and he trusted those people around him in the organization who also had vision to do what they do best. So, kudos to Cook. He proved my fears unwarranted.
I despise the Cook hate from some Apple fans. No he’s not the visionary that Jobs was. But I think he was the best person to scale Apple up to what it is today while still keeping the soul of the company alive.
His letter (at the top of Apple's web site) is moving:
https://www.apple.com/community-letter-from-tim/
I understand Tim is a logistics genius and Ternus is a hardware genius, and that we all want better software and policy from Apple, but I'm glad that there seems to be good people at the head of one of the biggest and most consequential companies, and further that they seem to care about being good people.
As far as I can see, that's the only way to have a prayer of scaling without too much damage, which is the key issue humanity faces today.
Thank you for sharing the link, it's a good read.
Also want to second your point about the need for having good people leading large organizations like Apple. Especially so as things are changing so fast in technology, with a widening impact across more and more aspects and parts of lives of people and society. We certainly see the negative impact that comes with questionable and/or short term decisions (see social media), so I too am hopeful that above all else, Ternus is a good person and makes (for the most part) good decisions for people and society first and foremost.
https://www.apple.com/community-letter-from-tim/
Why share it as a quote rather than a link I can click?
I really wish they did more for free software. I know they contribute heavily to LLVM and are still the main stewards of webkit, but they've very much ignored darwin as a free software operating system, to the point it feels like they only keep it free out of legal obligation
> I understand Tim is a logistics genius and Ternus is a hardware genius, and that we all want better software and policy from Apple
While I agree with all these points, I'd still rather see a hardware guru leading Apple rather than a software-focused leader. The state of software zeitgeist has gotten fairly poor, and the types of formal and thorough "Acceptance Testing" that are common in hardware are more likely to produce great experiences for users than whatever most software leaders are doing today.
Before anyone mentions how all hardware groups seem to produce god-awful software (IoT, vehicles, etc)...I agree, though I have generally attributed this to a lack of budget and vision. I don't expect those two things to be an issue at Apple, but I could be surprised.
Ternus is not a hardware genius. He's a hardware engineer that rose through the ranks at Apple because, from what I've heard from Apple hardware engineers, Dan Riccio liked him "like a son."
I honestly don't know. tim@apple.com is unavailable for quite some time now (since I tried a few years ago), while lisasu@amd.com still works around that time frame.
It's always been tcook@ - and it will get looked at by someone at least
Yes! Can confirm. I emailed him in March 2020 after my 16-day old MacBook Pro had a logic board failure resulting in endless kernel panics. It was just past the return date so I couldn’t just return it and get a new one, so my local Apple Store had sent it in for repair. Then covid hit and everything shut down, so they couldn’t get it fixed and sent back either.
I had emailed with an explanation of what had occurred, and asked if I could get a refund so that I could just purchase a replacement. Within two hours of sending my email, an assistant from his office called me to arrange sending me a replacement. I was really impressed. I honestly figured I would just have to wait until the repair depot opened again, because I didn’t think I would hear back about my email.
Then a month or so later I got a call from the repair depot asking what address I’d like my repaired laptop sent to, since it was supposed to be sent back to the store for pickup (but stores were closed.) So I guess the right hand knoweth not what the left hand doeth in that case, because the person on the phone from repairs was pretty confused when I said no thanks.
I'm really curious how he manages to read through so many emails every day.
I would have assumed that some assistant goes through the inbox and only a (random or filtered) subsample of those mails actually gets read by Tim Cook.
>but I'm glad that there seems to be good people at the head
Wonder if he'll be as good as Cook was at kissing Trump's ass. Half serious, half /s.
For Apple nerds that pay close attention to company, this is no surprise. Third-party dev Marco Arment wrote a blog post speaking to Ternus earlier this month[0].
Marco has enough standing within our world that it's actually a clever idea to appeal to Ternus on these terms. He'll probably be aware that it was written and the appeal is somewhat generic in its call to reverse course on some Cook-era policies.
We're all very hopeful but there's not enough information available on the outside to predict with any certainty how he'll lead.
I've been critical of Cook at times because I feel his vision was a business vision more than the kind of futurism I felt from Jobs. Cook was the ultimate bean counter, hyper-optimizing Apple from a financial and operational perspective. I felt like he took less risks and was mostly squeezing every single advantage that Apple had to its limit.
But I cannot argue with the results the man achieved. Especially the transition to A-series and then M-series chips has been an incredible success. Perhaps the biggest flop was the Apple Vision Pro, but it is hard to really call him out on that since it wasn't that Apple lost a battle, it was that the product category just hasn't caught on (yet). Siri is another place where Apple has lagged but they could very easily catch up with the massive interest in local AI on the mac minis.
I think it will be difficult to look back on his legacy without giving him a large share of credit for Apple's continued success.
Strategic competence and playing to your strengths is ok to me. Avoiding lots of bad decisions can sometimes be just as good as making some really good decisions.
>massive interest in local AI
Gosh I just read a really hellish thread on what frontier LLMs will become as they're infected with advertising, I hope apple manages to break locsl LLMs (and training?) Into the public discourse
Bold futurism can work very well when you're the (relative) scrappy underdog. So long as you're too smart or lucky to make any huge mistakes.
Vs. when you're in the Top 10 of the Fortune Global 500, "steady as she goes" business vision is the far safer strategy.
The Vision Pro's failings are IMHO not software or hardware related but a poorly executed platform strategy for content. Apple's reflex to build walled gardens has crippled the effort. And it's not the first time. Their Apple TV strategy was held back for years as well. Great hardware. Very cheap. You can plug it into any TV. It's not a bad game console even. But it lacked games. And streaming TV channels. And for a long time also streaming content. Apple fixed that eventually but Apple TV remains a distant competitor to more main stream platforms such as Netflix, which works on just about anything. Just like Youtube, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, Disney, and all the rest. Apple TV at this point is an also ran that apparently is barely profitable. A few nice TV series but very much a niche player. The Apple TV hardware is more or less irrelevant at this point. And despite the name, Apple never made a TV or much of a dent into conquering the living room.
Macs are great for gaming in terms of hardware. But other gaming platforms dominate the market. And Apple's walled garden approach is so effective that Steam's proton doesn't work on its platforms (so far). And its attempt to convince game developers to use Apple specific SDKs like Metal and build platforms are not really making any dent in the overall gaming market, which now eclipses Hollywood in terms of revenue and budgets. From a developer point of view it remains a highly crippled platform. And the Apple tax isn't helping.
Seen against this background, the Vision Pro is a strategic content failure. Very few 3D games work on it. Very little new 3D content is developed for it. Apple's insistence on our way or the highway continues to have developers preferring the highway. There are a few decades worth of back catalog of VR games, 3D movies, etc. Most of which flat out won't work on the Vision Pro or aren't licensed for it. They could fix that but that would require investing in content/licensing deals, compatibility/emulation, etc. And by making the core product so expensive, it basically became a niche product. And without content that remains a hard sell. It does not make sense for productions with hundreds of millions of budget (i.e. most 3D games and movies) to be targeting such a niche platform. And it does not make sense for end users to buy the product if there is no good content and if most of the good content is never released for it.
It's a very fixable problem. Valve is leading the way with Proton currently. That strategy is very portable to macs and the Vision pro. There is very little technical reason to stop that from working. And Apple has been chipping away at their own portability kit. But they are so far not really committing to it fully. They should be filling the Apple store with decades worth of great content that just works on Apple HW. As it is there is only a relatively small collection of old content that has been ported.
Re: Apple TV (the studios and the content)... it is a bit of mystery: it's very worthy and good - arguably one of Tim Cook's finest achievements - but not a runaway success in a very competitive post-TV market. Steve Jobs shepherded Pixar into the world, and I'm sure he'd consider Apple TV (again the content arm) a comparable achievement.
Steve Jobs called the original Apple TV a "hobby", and, similarly for now there isn't any pressure for it to massively grow.
I wonder what Apple TV would look like if they didn’t have Ted Lasso to put out during peak Covid. That’s really their only large mainstream success and in my estimation that success was largely a product of circumstance.
I love their SciFi material but two seasons of severance in three years won’t keep people subscribed. The only reason I have Apple TV for more than a month or two out of the year is due to the bundle plan math working out with family sharing.
> Under Cook’s leadership Apple has grown from a market capitalization of approximately $350 billion to $4 trillion, representing a more than 1,000% increase, and yearly revenue has nearly quadrupled, from $108 billion in fiscal year 2011 to more than $416 billion in fiscal year 2025.
Quite successful.
I also liked the part about growing the company while reducing its carbon footprint by more than 60%.
Even if that figure might somehow be inflated, it is impressive nonetheless.
It's probably an even bigger reduction considering their growth.
But it's still a net deficit of nearly 15 million tons of emissions of which practically none are offset.
https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Pr...
Offsetting isn’t real. Buying a few trees doesn’t offset a factory full of trees that fills a river with poison.
Carbon offsetting is nothing to do with river pollution.
Carbon offsetting is risky. You plant a tree and you don’t know if it will die. You create a swampy area to absorb co2 and 10 years later it dries out due to global warming. Offsetting should be used if there is no other way to reduce emissions in the first place. Same is true for sucking carbon out of the air and storing it somewhere… it’s expensive and it should not be the default - we need offsetting and carbon segregation for the really unavoidable stuff
Sucking carbon out of the air using fully renewable energy (solar/wind) is a great thing to do! ... once we've fully decarbonized all other energy use and we have extra, left-over renewable energy.
This is what’s all bad with us stocks and completely disconnected with market value: Revenue jumped 4x but market capitalization got inflated to 12x.
The price over earnings (arguably an imperfect, but better way to compare stock prices against each other than using pure revenue) for Apple has been fluctuating within about a factor of 2 for the last 20 years. Since before the iPhone, people were nervous about the possibility of sustained growth of profits of the company, and the P/E was similar to today. Once Apple started making a lot more money under Tim Cook, the price was at a relative discount becauee 10 years ago people were certain (but wrong) that this run would end soon and badly. The long term stability under Cook was truly impressive. Lets see what the markets think abiut the leadership change tomorrow, but probably this is not an immediate event.
pe ratio under 10 in 2013 to ~40 in 2024. You can't deny the multiple expansion.
Investors are forward-looking, though, so it just means that they think the future looks brighter than the immediate past.
The real disconnect IMO is TSLA.
Equities as large as Apple act as stores of value like gold, so it could just mean there's more money to be invested. You would need to compare Apple against what happened to the market in general.
Yep. QE was a monumental mistake that killed economic mobility. Asset owners vs wage earners.
Some of that is debasement, but some of that is that there is no other brand like Apple.
Would you not own stock of the most valuable brand in human history?
It's not the brand - it's not like Apple's hit this valuation in isolation Meta, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft all enjoy similar.
It's the cash-money value of putting a fee on all digital goods and subscriptions and cash transactions in a world predisposed to forming and consolidating around monopolies. What does Apple's services revenue look like in another 20 years when Africa, China and India are paying their smartphone provider every time a dollar moves, a few billion more people paying one of two companies every time for their music, movies and tv, games, books, real-world transactions... in de-facto perpetuity.
True, but also Apple is in a far more dominant position today.
Alongside Nvidia they essentially monopolize TSMCs entire latest generation chip supply.
That’s a moat in hardware that is going to get even stronger over time. Given this hardware moat they can dip their toes gently into the B2B market they’ve never really cared about and pick up another few hundred billion in high margin revenue over the next 10 years no problem.
I’ve always found it weird that Apple’s entire org runs on Mac but no other Fortune 500 company on earth does. Seems like an opportunity to nibble away at Microsoft.
For the same period:
AMZN: +2100% META: +1700% MSFT: +1300% GOOG: +1400%
This is a specious comparison at best. Apple is, at heart, a hardware company. They have different growth profiles. A consumer hardware company getting that sort of growth is mind boggling.
Was meta a public company back then? Amazon, I think, was quite small, too.
You're right, Facebook didn't go public until May 2012, after the start of the period mentioned. Amazon went public in '97.
I’m curious Ternus’ views on services and the heavy hand Cook has had with them. I’d like to see Apple chill out a bit. Have them, but stop pestering users with in-OS ads and notifications to sign up. It’s been very off putting and cheapens the platform.
I hope they sell a higher priced monthly Apple One bundle which allows people to pay extra to not see ads in Apple Maps. Can even make it multiple tiers for no ads in Apple TV and Apple Maps, or maybe privacy plus tiers so they can earn more money by not selling search history.
Personally, I hope the lack of advertisements in Apple Maps comes bundled with the fact that I purchased an iPhone. A lack of ads is a selling point.
My comment was tongue in cheek. They are already here:
Which means the only other option is to hopefully be able to pay Apple even more to not have to see ads. Maybe buy more Apple shares to share in this "advancement".
God that's really disappointing, having ads in the app store was bad enough but in an app I use everyday lowkey makes me reconsider using an iphone. I know I can always install another app but I feel like apple's moat is their 1st party software and them cheapening it to make a few cents is really disappointing. It feels really dumb going to a nice apple store opening up the app store for the first time on your $1k+ phone and you're immediately served ads so apple can make a few cents. The customer experience downgrade does not seem worth it to me.
Just because they are hear doesn’t mean they can’t ago away.
Under Jobs they tried iAds. The idea was to make ads so high quality that people would want to interact with them, and they had to go through a vetting process to ensure there were no dark patterns that would make people scared to tap an iAd. After a while, it was decided it didn’t work and they pulled it.
A company is under no obligation to continue bad ideas.
Add Apple News to the list. Paying for Apple News and still getting paywalled by various sources was insane. I don’t know who approved that, but it turned me off the whole service.
Apple Maps really needs to up their POI game. They have some native data, but I’m still regularly seeing images from 3rd party sites and get prompted to download the app. I understood it in year 1, but we’re 13 years in now. This is the primary reason I keep Google Maps around.
It's remarkably annoying, as a business, to keep your Apple Maps data up to date. But, thankfully, they seem to have ended their partnership with Yelp.
> But, thankfully, they seem to have ended their partnership with Yelp.
I’m not so sure about this. Tapping around to some random businesses around me, I see photos being pulled in from Yelp, OpenTable, and Foursquare.
When I try to view the photos full screen, OpenTable and Foursquare images work seamlessly. Yelp prompts for an app download to jump me over to their world, which is a horrible user experience.
I just opened maps and took a look. Kinda shocking to me that there doesn’t appear to be an obvious or easy way to add POI data. Google Maps is huge on promoting users to supply UGC.
They should charge for it.
If you buy the 'iPhone Max' for $1500, you get ads, and if you buy the 'iPhone Max ad-free' for $3800, you don't get any ads in the app store, apple maps, apple news, or the various other apple services you use on only that one device. Similarly, you need to buy the ad-free edition of the iPad to not get ads there, and the ad-free version of the macbook for no ads there, and each of them can cost ~2.5x the cost.
I think that would be better than a monthly subscription since you'd just pay it once and then never think about it again.
There is no way they’re making that much per phone on adding ads.
YouTube’s who platform is built to show ads and run by an ad company. They are likely going to be much more profitable than a few ads in the App Store and Maps, and I’ve read Premium users are more profitable than ad-supported users. They are charging $160/year after a recent price increase. The fee you’re suggesting would be over 14 years worth of payments.
Amazon lets users remove ads on Kindle for a 1 time fee of $20, and people keep Kindles a long time.
The goodwill alone would be worth more than $20, considering iPhones already have margin (unlike most Amazon hardware).
Apple has been using security as the tent pole feature to try and differentiate themselves from everyone else. One of the reasons all the other platforms feel insecure is that ads imply data collection. If they really want to “think different” they need to stop following the crowd and operate a system that doesn’t create the compromised incentives that ads tend to come with.
They'd have to have an iron will to not do what every other leading platform has done, which is to:
- Gradually "make the line go up" by ramping up ad volume until the product is terrible (thereby ruining Apple's reputation among the 50-90% of users who aren't paying the ad-free prices).
- Periodically nerfing the premium ad-free tiers and putting ads into tiers that were previously ad-free.
- Purposefully making the lower tiers worse and worse in order to squeeze out marginal increases in conversion rates to the premium tiers.
Is the loyalty represented by the golden trophy transferrable? Or is it tied to each CEO, like Applecare+?
As long as he goes by "John Apple" he should be ok - usually the bribe gets credited to the surname.
John Apple, great guy people say he's the best at computers, business I don't know.
> As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.
It sounds like Cook will continue to get the dirty work of pleasing world leaders while Ternus can focus on actually running the company.
I believe these bribes/flatteries mostly confer a single-use benefit. Things like golden trophies seem to buy a victory in that moment, but they seem to have little relevance on decisions made even a month later, regardless of who gifted it and whether they're still at the helm.
I think you will have your answer if you consider which approach nets the recipient the larger number of golden tributes.
I commend Apple for hiring someone internally...someone who climbed up the ranks and understands the DNA of the company.
Also think it's cool that John Ternus has only a bachelor's degree with a very down to earth presence. I completely dig his LI page being really bare bones.
I suspect Apple is about to experience another Renaissance era...
Plus his degree is in mechanical engineering. I wonder how he climbed up the ranks of hardware engineering with a degree in mechanical engineering. Quite amazing.
> I wonder how he climbed up the ranks of hardware engineering with a degree in mechanical engineering. Quite amazing.
Given the level of mathematics I’ve seen involved in hardware, I’d assume the average mech eng. has a better chance than the average software eng.
What would mathematics have to do with internal company politics, a soft/people skill demanding job?
People skills are primarily learned through observation, interaction, and modeling the behavior of others who have already have cultivated social skills. You know, from being around and interacting with people. It's not like studying a certain discipline, such a mathematics, forbids you from ever cultivating these abilities.
Mech E. on the other hand, is perhaps the broadest engineering discipline in terms of foundational principles, application variety, and transferable skills. So shouldn't be all that surprising when it comes to hardware engineering.
Apple silicon has been an unmitigated success so it makes sense they’d go with Ternus. On a related note Apple needs to add Ternus to their spell check dictionary
Apple Silicon wasn’t under his purview, that would be Johny Srouji.
Not saying that Ternus wouldn’t have been involved in or part of the decision making process in moving the Mac to Apple-designed silicon, but I haven’t seen any indication he was any more involved than other execs at the company.
Ternus had essentially nothing to do with Apple silicon. That's all Srouji and his team.
they made a bet on EUV on better commercial terms than samsung and intel could do for themselves. another point of view is that TSMC's cost structure, of having highly educated, overworked, and wildly underpaid Taiwanese employees, is the real unmitigated success.
you could say apple silicon was almost 2 years ahead of its time, or you could say that intel lost years on bad bets. there are only 3 consumer-scale, leading node foundries in the world!
is apple a, "making good commercial terms with poor counterparties" company? yes, to their core. whether it is their employees whom they worked to the bone, their suppliers in the ASEAN trade network, or the US politicians who starkly are too broke to regulate giant US corporations, for whom too little money goes too long of a way.
my point is, who the hell knows! there are many, many points of view. it's not any one thing. but one thing's for sure, i don't think i'm upgrading my phone until it blows up anymore, and this is the simple, greatest risk to their business.
so they're going to become a company that breaks phones to get people to replace them, regardless of what they are today :)
So much of what Apple has lost over the last 10 years is a lower bar for what counts as good enough.
You see this most obviously in software and marketing - the kinds of decisions where only a few people sign off at the end, and where "good enough" is whatever those few people decide it is. You see it less in hardware and procurement where there's a powerful review cycle and scrutiny at every level of the stack. Work there is more immediately measurable: benchmarks for performance, dollars for cost.
The "vibe" of software, or of a PDF [^1], is much harder to catch that way. There's no benchmark that flags it and most conventional executives aren't drilling down in that level of detail to see it either.
You want distributed decision-making, of course. But that only works well if it's distributed to people who've cultivated their own taste and who will make good calls under pressure. I'm not sure how much of that gets fixed by leadership change at the top. Taste isn't really something a CEO can decree into a 60,000 person org. But I've only heard good things about Ternus, so I'm optimistic. Fingers crossed for a bright new chapter.
[^1]: https://www.apple.com/promo/pdf/US_FY26_Earth_Day_Promo_Tand...
I’m gonna keep my expectations in check, but this would be a good opportunity to get back to live presentations. I just watched a 1997 Macworld recording and the audience has really been something that I missed since COVID.
I hope Ternus can turn this ship. Apple wasted the last 5 years without any significant innovation/revolution or even without significant evolution. No groundbreaking change from iphone 12 pro in current iphone 17 pro.
Before we had many groundbreaking features that redefined how you use smarphone:
- gps
- flashlight (yes everybody with flashlight in the pocket!)
- front selfie camera + video calls
- compass + accelerometer + gyroscope
- good wide and ultrawide (video) camera
- nfc + apple pay
- fingerprint / faceid
- esim
- magsafe
Now you can have iphone 12 pro and don't miss much from iphone 17 pro.
Every time I see this argument, it comes across as lazy. iPhone (and smartphones in general) are a mature product, so of course it'll be iterative. But you can't compare the camera from the first few iPhones to the latest ones. I certainly didn't expect, when the first iPhone launched, that the camera on an iPhone would replace my dedicated camera for 90% of my use cases.
You make a good point, but at the same time, things are a bit stale if you look outside the Apple and Samsung bubbles.
For example, a Vivo X300 Ultra or Xiaomi 17 Ultra. Much better cameras, larger batteries, 90-100W charging, etc.
Those examples are still iterative.
OP is alluding to the fact that Apple hasn't created industry changing categories like the iPhone.
OP also complained about the "lack of significant evolution", that's why I gave those examples.
Like the brands I've mentioned, Apple buys their camera sensors (from Sony), battery, and display. And yet they don't have the best camera sensors, the newer higher capacity batteries, the latest display tech, etc.
You can go 2 or 3 iterations before seeing a real improvement, and it's not always because better tech doesn't exist. They're just not pushing hard.
I think you're looking far too narrowly at technology if you view it only through the lens of a smartphone.
> iPhone (and smartphones in general) are a mature product, so of course it'll be iterative.
That's the kind of thing people say when they are out of ideas. The reality is that the mobile phone market was already a mature market, with Nokia as the leader, even before the iPhone was released. Then Steve Jobs showed the world how to innovate.
Don't forget about the Apple Car. 100% of that failed, and Tim spent a decade on it. Quite a bit of attention on here, but it seems we've quickly forgotten all about it since it was never seen.
Really sucks we never got to see any of the prototypes or designs they built for it.
I forgot all about the Apple car when assessing Tim's legacy, too.
I guess if you are gonna fail, fail so deeply that it doesn't affect your legacy :P
Apple spent $1 billion over 10 years doing the ground work to see whether or not they wanted to get into making a car and that’s a problem?
Google is gonna spend between February and December 2026 $185 billion on their AI technology, and how much has Microsoft spent somewhere near 100 billion dollars or how about OpenAI (we don’t know yet) but that number will be my numbing or Meta which is some where in the $80 billion mark.
Tim Cook has nothing to worry about Apple didn’t squander billions of dollars they put the money where they should’ve put it in Apple Silicon and everything else they do well.
Google got a $1 billion refund and OpenAI got nothing. I’m sure Sam thought when he went into the meeting with Tim Cook that he was gonna come out with $50 billion and he came out with zip. Apple made the right choice.
> I hope Ternus can turn this ship. Apple wasted the last 5 years without any significant innovation/revolution or even without significant evolution. No groundbreaking change from iphone 12 pro in current iphone 17 pro.
I daresay the iPhone 17 Pro is a compelling enough upgrade, hardware wise. Not much innovation, but their phone hardware is very usable.
But I'd prefer if Apple gave up 2 years of trying to "innovate" nonsense like Liquid glAss and polish up their software first, just like the old days.
What about Apple Silicon?
yes they innovated with apple sillicon but I would say it only shines in macOS environment. On iOS / iPadOS it's completely untapped - like having ferrari with only gravel roads around.
>ferrari with only gravel roads around
sounds like a ton of fun to me. Just sending it rally-style everywhere :)
a better comparison is buying a Ferrari to drive around your town at 40 km/h
The level of power in the iPad, and the level of underutilization of that power due to it being handicapped by the OS is mindboggling to me. Although to some extent it makes sense - with Apple owning the whole supply chain it probably wouldn't actually save them much money to make a less powerful chip just to put in it, and they need selling points for the top end models.
And yet it is the best tablet you can buy on the planet top to bottom software and hardware, is it perfect no, what is this phantom alternative to an iPad M4 Pro? Note I already have a desktop computer. I don’t need two of the same thing in short I don’t need Mac OS on two devices.
I think the satellite connectivity is a pretty big deal and iPhone led with that. Also camera control literally changed how I use the phone.
Off topic, but it’s amusing to see that 3/8 Apple CEOs were Mike, 2/8 were John, and the rest are Steve, Tim, and Gil.
Apple is obsessed with minimalism so much that they refuse to hire any CEOs with first names longer than a single syllable.
15 years of supply chain excellence and the software running on that hardware quietly got worse every cycle. the m1 transition was so clean it made everyone else look like they were guessing. ternus thinks in tolerances and thermal envelopes - giving the keys to someone who's already pulled off the hardest platform migration in apple's recent history seems right.
The m1 transition was clean, and the hardware is amazing, don't get me wrong (I just bought a neo and I'm very happy with it). But the transition did look even more amazing than it should have because of just how dogshit Intel macs had gotten, especially around thermal throttling. Apple could have built much nicer systems on Intel already had they just made them slightly thicker and used sensible heatsink and fan designs for the hardware they were putting in them.
(We're seeing echoes of that again now where you can get 20-30% performance bumps in Neos and Airs just by sticking a thermal pad on the CPU - Apple is still allergic to cooling, they've just built amazingly efficient hardware that sidesteps the problem)
To make the M1 transition so clean took a lot of software excellence...one can argue Apple's compiler / virtualization / software languages team is the best in the industry (grumbling from Swift UI developers aside...)
Cook is known to be monk-like, so the relative quiet of this announcement is no surprise. Hopefully Ternus takes some risks and revisits some things from scratch (the OS layer)[0] rather than continuing down the path of more service add-ons that Cook seemed to be excitedly geared up for. Personally, it's worth noting that Ternus did -not- directly oversee the Vision Pro, which is encouraging.
[0] As Steve Jobs said in 2005: "OS X is the most advanced operating system on the planet and it has set Apple up for the next 20 years."
How incredibly prophetic that 21 years later, MacOS is suddenly showing its age.
>Cook is known to be monk-like
How so? Genuinely curious, I've got no idea what he's like as a person.
>"I've got no idea what he's like as a person"
Case in point? From what I've read he's reserved, keeps a very low profile, and is dedicated to his work. We know next to nothing about his personal life.
He reportedly had to essentially be dragged into a new home, as he was still staying in a small apartment nearby the HQ even after Jobs passed away. Dude just didn't give a shit about anything but Apple.
linux and windows are older.
and mac has ios, which with ipads goes desktopy. (capability based security)
I don’t know if I would go so far as to say “monk-like”. He’s a college football die-hard. But he is a very chill dude.
I wish more tech execs were in Cook’s mold. Reserved. Controlled. Calm. No Twitter beefs, no overt politics, no blow-ups behind closed doors.
> no overt politics
Excuse me? Giving a literal gold trophy to the God-Emperor Trump is not politics?
No, it's just a business tax. Do you see Cook getting on twitter and parroting the god emperor's topic of the day?
That's like saying going to Washington DC at all is "politics."
It'd be bad business stewardship if he didn't; bad for shareholders, ultimately.
It looks silly optically, but it's plain to see that Apple has trump nailed psychologically. And it worked! They knew what was needed to get an administration to support the company in meaningful ways.
May we do better on the next election.
So you think he is a Trump supporter, then? I would have guessed precisely the opposite. My assumption is that the trophy was his way of looking out for the best interests of Apple. In that regard probably a fairly good ROI.
Is this a reward for a job well-done? Because apple hardware for the last 5-years has been amazing. The software though has sucked - will it be more years of amazing hardware and shit software? In other words focusing on developers, especially of llm software? I'm fine with that. Maybe we'll get rack-mountable apple ai servers (joking - apple servers were great and lasted a decade+ but went nowhere)
Yeah, what's going on? I'm confused by this choice - I would have expected a marketer. Maybe they really are doubling down on hardware for the ai age?
Tim Cook’s experience in logistics built Apple into the global hegemon it is today. I hope John Ternus’s experience with hardware can kick off a renaissance in both Apple hardware and software design. Mind you, Apple hardware is already amazing, but hopefully it can be even better with Ternus at the helm. Apple software is terrible, and hopefully Ternus can turn that around. I’m also hoping, without any evidence, that maybe a change in leadership will change how Apple participates in US politics.
EDIT: I also want to say I really appreciate Tim Cook’s emphasis on user privacy and I hope John Ternus can continue this trend.
I too deeply appreciate the commitment to user privacy they've demonstrated. Their head of user privacy is a man of integrity and commitment.
At the same time, privacy on internet-connected devices is like true liberty and justice -- rare, precious, fragile, and easily lost without active pursuit and sacrifice.
I hope Temus has the courage and principle to keep fighting the good fight.
Curious as an outsider what you mean with US politics? Seems like Apple has a pretty strong stance when it comes to things like privacy that pushes back on some things (that could be smoke and mirrors though I guess).
The privacy is more of a market position thing than it is a political thing.
Apple has led the industry on hardware but is woefully behind on the software and services front. Focusing on device-level privacy controls turns what would be a gap into a moat, and it helps deprive Google and other services from monetizing their customer base.
Not to say that it's not something the company is passionate about - but it's also good for their business. Especially when you compare it to things like human rights, transparency, and security research where Apple could take a stronger stand but don't.
> The privacy is more of a market position thing than it is a political thing.
It is a market position, but companies do have some choice in which market positions they choose to take. And I wouldn't underestimate the effect of the personal views of the CEO in that.
> and it helps deprive Google and other services from monetizing their customer base.
The payment Apple gets from Google for being the default search might help explain this. It would be hard to turn down the sums Apple gets.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/03/just-one-word-in-the-google-a...
If you’re referring to their AI services being ‘woefully behind’, that’s just a market sector that they’ve chosen not to focus too much effort on. That was a sensible gamble too, given how unpredictable that sector is five years after it was released.
I’m not sure what else they are behind on frankly, as their current offerings have been extremely stable from day dot.
How many products has Google released and killed in the past 20 years? Apple managed to land on a good thing with Apple iTunes and iPhotos in the early oughts, and managed to transition those core services into Apple Music and iCloud with little to no disruption to users. iCloud is generally a pretty predictable service that delivers on a core set of user requirements very well.
Also, thief productivity suite isn’t meant to completely replace Office, and for a free package, it meets many users needs perfectly fine.
> That was a sensible gamble too, given how unpredictable that sector is five years after it was released.
Define sensible. Apple's B2C margins are peanuts compared to what Nvidia's commanding right now, and they're both ARM retailers competing for the same cutting-edge fab space.
>but is woefully behind on the software
iOS is ahead on software security compared to Android, Windows, Desktop Linux, etc.
If you think Ternus wouldn't do it, you are in for a bad time.
Well, I hope I'm not, but yes, I will be quite disappointed if so.
Apple is a multi-trillion dollar public company.
It would be unusual for a leader of such a thing not act in accordance w/ shareholders' best interests, as well to defy likely board guidance.
Most shareholders may not care beyond the next quarter, but CEO action that led to those results were made couple of years ago at least, and current action will do as much to determine not the next quarter, but one slightly further in the future. Hence Jamie Dimon, for example, making a different decision in a similar matter. As Dimon explained: “[…] we have to be very careful about how anything is perceived, and also how the next DOJ is going to deal with it. So, we’re quite conscious of risks we bear by doing anything that looks like buying favors or anything like that”[1].
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[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/05/business/video/jp-morgan-chas...
“Capitulating to the current regime on everything is in shareholder’s best interests” is neither a foregone conclusion nor a statement of fact. It’s economic myopia at best.
Let me be clear - I'm not happy about it. But ignoring such a reality reminds me of that quote comparing Job's best friend to a lawnmower.
That said, I'd love to enlightened to how it's myopic, or rather, what course(s) of action you would take, keeping in mind that Apple is a multi-trillion dollar public company.
I’m telling you that thinking a->b is myopic. It could be that shareholder value would’ve been higher had Tim Cook told Trump (or Biden, or Trump, or Obama) to go fuck himself. Perhaps the people who spend money on iPhones, specifically, would’ve been more inclined to buy a new iProduct, than they are now that he’s bent the knee.
Myopia is thinking “well he did it so it must have been good”. There are myriad other things he could’ve done, that have a strong argument towards higher shareholder value.
Edit to add: Think TSLA, if you want a concrete example. If that stock was at all trading on fundamentals (and if they had a remotely capable or competent board) and not Magic Memes, Musk’s hard right pivot was inarguably bad for the brand and shareholder value, even if it made the President temporarily happy.