Apple has confirmed that Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook will step down after 15 years in the role, moving into the position of Executive Chairman of the Board from 1 September. John Ternus, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering, will succeed him as CEO. The transition was unanimously approved by the company’s board of directors as part of what Apple described as a long-term succession planning process.
Tim Cook's Apple
When Cook succeeded Steve Jobs as CEO in 2011, Apple's market capitalisation stood at approximately $350 billion. Today, the company is valued at $4 trillion, which is a more than 1,000 per cent increase under his watch.
Annual revenue nearly quadrupled over the same period, from $108 billion in fiscal year 2011 to more than $416 billion in fiscal year 2025. Cook oversaw the launch of entirely new product categories, including Apple Watch, AirPods, and Apple Vision Pro, while expanding Apple's services division with iCloud, Apple Pay, Apple TV+, and Apple Music into a business generating over $100 billion a year, equivalent to a Fortune 40 company on its own.
Under Cook's leadership, Apple's global headcount grew by more than 100,000 employees, its active installed base surpassed 2.5 billion devices, and the company expanded its retail presence to more than 500 stores across 200 countries and territories. He also oversaw Apple's historic transition to its own silicon, a strategic move that delivered significant performance and efficiency gains across the entire product lineup.
Cook, a longtime advocate for privacy as a fundamental human right, also reduced Apple's carbon footprint by more than 60 per cent below 2015 levels even as revenue nearly doubled.
"It has been the greatest privilege of my life to be the CEO of Apple," Cook said in a statement. "John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honour."
Who Is John Ternus? Meet Apple's Next CEO
Ternus is not an outsider or a surprise pick; he is arguably the most important hardware mind Apple has produced since Jony Ive.
He joined Apple's product design team in 2001, became a Vice President of Hardware Engineering in 2013, and was elevated to Senior Vice President and Apple's executive team in 2021. Over a 25-year career at the company, Ternus has had a hand in shaping nearly every major product Apple makes, from iPhone and Mac to iPad and AirPods.
His fingerprints are on some of Apple's most recent launches like the razor-thin iPhone Air, the powerhouse iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, and the MacBook Neo, a new laptop designed to broaden the Mac's global appeal. He also led the engineering push that turned AirPods into a full hearing health system capable of functioning as over-the-counter hearing aids.
Ternus has championed durability, repairability, and sustainable materials including a new recycled aluminium compound now used across multiple product lines and 3-D printed titanium in Apple Watch Ultra 3.
Before Apple, he worked as a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. In a statement released Ternus said:
"I am profoundly grateful for this opportunity to carry Apple's mission forward. I am humbled to step into this role, and I promise to lead with the values and vision that have come to define this special place for half a century."
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According to the tech giant's website the transition is structured to be deliberate and stable. Cook will remain CEO through the summer, working alongside Ternus to ensure a smooth handover before his new executive chairman role begins in September. In that capacity, Cook will continue to engage with policymakers globally, a role he has played prominently throughout his tenure. Board member Arthur Levinson praised the decision, calling Cook's leadership "unprecedented and outstanding" and describing Ternus as "the best possible leader to succeed Tim."
Apple's Next Era
Apple shares fell over one per cent following the announcement, a signal that investors were caught off guard. But the unease runs beyond the share price. Adrian Stalham, Chief Change Officer at Sullivan & Stanley, argues that the succession narrative being spun around Ternus is tidier than it is true.
"Apple's succession story is being framed in the usual shape - Steve Jobs the artist, the visionary, the showman, the man who believed a computer could be a bicycle for the mind. Cook the soldier, the operator, the supply chain savant who turned a beautiful company into a four-trillion-dollar one. And now Ternus, we're told, is the engineer, a hardware guy, close to the product, who will bring Apple back to what it does best. It's a tidy story. It's also, I think, the wrong one."
Stalham draws on Safi Bahcall's book Loonshots to make his case, arguing that enduring companies are not led by artists or soldiers, but by "gardeners" who balance both.
"Cook inherited that balance and scaled it brilliantly. But over time, the artist side has thinned, most visibly with the departure of Jony Ive and with that the design language that had defined Apple has drifted into refinement rather than reinvention."
It is the next detail, however, that Stalham believes should give every Apple watcher pause. The man now designing OpenAI's AI hardware device is Jony Ive. The man running hardware design under Ive at OpenAI is Tang Tan, a former Apple VP. The team, Stalham notes, is filled with engineers poached from Apple's iPhone, iPad, Watch, and Vision Pro programmes.
"Ternus is an engineer and therefore close to the product, and there are arguments that this is what Apple needs now. But engineers are focused on the craft. They can spend years perfecting the fit and finish of a device while the platform shift is happening somewhere else entirely. There is a risk that having a leader whose artist wing has been hollowed out, you do not get a new era. You get the old era getting more efficient at what it already does."
Stalham stops short of a verdict and says:
"Ternus may well be the right leader for the future Apple thinks it is building. But the unanswered question is whether that is the future it is actually heading into. Apple has repeatedly defied its critics, but the absence of any clear 'artist' alongside John Ternus is what makes this transition feel less like strategy and more like assumption and that silence may be the most telling detail of all."
For investors and Apple watchers, the main question now is if Ternus, a technical, hardware-focused leader will maintain Apple's services momentum while continuing to push the boundaries of its devices. His track record suggests a CEO who will keep engineering and product quality at the centre of Apple's identity, even as software and AI become increasingly central to the company's competitive position.
Apple's next chapter starts in September.
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