CUPERTINO, Calif. — John Ternus took over as chief executive of Apple on Tuesday, ending Tim Cook's 15-year run atop one of the world's most profitable companies and putting a hardware engineer in charge of an artificial-intelligence effort that Apple has spent the past two years falling behind on.
Ternus, previously senior vice president in charge of Apple's hardware, is only the third person to hold the CEO title at the Cupertino, Calif., company since 1997. He inherits a business valued at more than $4 trillion that has sold more than 3.1 billion iPhones under Cook and whose share price has climbed more than 2,000 percent since Cook succeeded Steve Jobs in 2011, according to Deutsche Welle. He also inherits a Siri overhaul more than two years behind schedule, a $250 million settlement over how that overhaul was marketed, and a services business that generated $100 billion last year but is being reshaped by rules Brussels is still writing.
The handover is scripted; the strategic questions are not. Ternus's first public act as chief executive will come at an autumn product event Apple is calling "Surprise and Shine," scheduled for Sept. 9 at company headquarters, where he is expected to introduce the company's first foldable iPhone and an AI-powered version of Siri. That keynote — planned largely under Cook — will be scrutinized less for what it launches than for what it signals about how Ternus intends to close the gap with Alphabet, Meta Platforms and OpenAI.
The leadership reset
Cook will remain as executive chairman of Apple's board and, according to The Verge, retain responsibility for the company's Washington portfolio, including its relationship with President Trump. In a farewell letter to employees, Cook wrote: "This place is proof that culture triumphs over everything. We share a belief that what we build matters, and that we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to leave the world better than we found it."
The exit is not Cook's alone. Phil Schiller is stepping down from day-to-day leadership of the App Store, according to Bloomberg reporting cited by The Verge, though he will keep his title as Apple Fellow. Katherine Adams's role as senior vice president of government affairs has been eliminated; parts of the portfolio have been split between Jennifer Newstead and Cook. Former chief financial officer Luca Maestri, who moved to a vice-president post in 2024, is no longer listed on Apple's senior leadership page.
The AI gap
The company Ternus takes over has been the most visible laggard among American technology giants on generative AI. Apple's plan to rebuild Siri around large-language models was unveiled in June 2024 and delayed in March 2025; the AI-upgraded assistant, powered by a custom version of Google Gemini, is now on track to launch this fall, more than two years after its debut, The Verge reported. Apple agreed to pay $250 million to settle allegations it misled customers about the assistant's readiness and replaced its AI chief, John Giannandrea.
Francisco Jeronimo, vice president for data and analytics at research firm IDC, told Deutsche Welle that Sept. 9 will be "quite an important milestone for the company around foldables and around innovation," but cautioned against reading a strategic pivot into a keynote Cook helped script. "I don't think we have seen anything that could indicate that Apple is behaving in a different way or is showing a different kind of strategy because Tim Cook is not in the job anymore — yet," Jeronimo said. He expects the shape of Ternus's Apple to become clear only in 2027.
The structural problem Ternus faces, in Jeronimo's telling, is that Apple no longer controls its stack the way it does in silicon and operating systems. Jeronimo noted that "even if Apple built their own AI technology, the reality is that they still depend on someone else," a reference to Apple's reliance on outside model-makers and the hyperscalers whose data centers train them.
The unfinished business
Ternus is also inheriting the unresolved pieces of Cook's ambitions outside the phone. Apple's $3,499 Vision Pro headset, launched in 2024, is being wound down: the Financial Times reported in December 2025 that Apple had cut Vision Pro production and marketing over weak sales, and Bloomberg reported the company had laid off staff and largely shut down a team dedicated to headset gaming. Project Titan, the car effort into which Apple sank more than $10 billion, was disbanded with its 2,000-person team dispersed, Bloomberg reported at the time.
The view from outside
All of the reporting available on the transition Tuesday came from center-of-the-dial technology and international outlets; no critical or dissenting institutional voice on the succession was on the record. Apple did not make Ternus available for outside interviews to mark the handover, and rival chief executives at Alphabet, Meta and OpenAI had not publicly commented on the change as of Tuesday morning. Cook remains the company's chief interlocutor with the Trump administration, an arrangement that will be tested the first time trade or antitrust policy demands a response from the corner office rather than the chairman's chair.
Ternus's next public appearance is the Sept. 9 keynote in Cupertino. The European Union's new App Store rules, which Apple has been fighting, take effect Oct. 1.