John Ternus: The making of Apple’s new CEO

During his first year at Apple in 2001, John Patrick Ternus found himself at a supplier facility late one night, far from home, with a magnifying glass for company. He was counting grooves on the heads of screws meant to be packaged with the Apple Cinema HD Display, which would eventually launch in early 2002.

There were 35 grooves. Apple ’s specification called for 25. Ternus argued. He won. The supplier changed the screw design to have exactly 25 concentric grooves.

On September 1, Ternus, 51, will no longer simply be one of the people who builds Apple’s products, but the person responsible for all of them. After 25 years at the company, including the last several years overseeing its hardware engineering, the engineer will succeed Tim Cook as chief executive officer, while Cook moves to the role of executive chairman.

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When the time comes to write an origin story for the Ternus era at Apple, it may well begin with that night in 2001. The details nobody sees are worth getting right. That has long been Apple’s philosophy. It appears to have become Ternus’s as well.

Speaking at the University of Pennsylvania ’s engineering commencement in 2024, Ternus recalled finding his first days at Apple intimidating, surrounded by colleagues who seemed to know far more than he did. He told the graduating class that he learned the importance of asking for help rather than pretending to have all the answers. “I wasn’t sure I belonged there,” he said. The argument over the screw grooves was an early indication that he did.

Ternus, who grew up in California , went east to study at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1997. He began his career as a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems, a small company building early virtual-reality headsets.

He joined Apple in 2001 and rose steadily through the organisation, becoming a vice president in 2013 and senior vice-president of hardware engineering in 2021, the top job in the division. Over the following years, Ternus’s hardware organisation was responsible for products spanning the iPhone, Apple Watch , iPad, Mac and Vision Pro.

One of the defining technical bets of that period was Apple’s transition of the Mac from Intel processors to its own Apple Silicon. The transition, which began in 2020, was completed across the Mac line-up ahead of the company’s previously announced two-year transition timeline. The shift reshaped Apple’s approach to personal computing and gave it greater control over the performance and power efficiency of its devices.

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Not bad for someone nicknamed “Crash” in his senior year at Penn after nearly destroying a CNC machine. Ternus has not publicly disclosed much about the incident.

His work at university, however, was considerably more serious than the nickname suggests. Ternus and his classmates developed a device intended to help people with quadriplegia feed themselves, translating movements of the head and neck into those of a mechanical feeding arm.