John Ternus to become Apple CEO (opens in new tab)

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.

But somewhere in the mix, Apple could also really use another great product mind, like the other Steve. It has been too long since the last era-defining product from Cupertino.

I have no idea what that next big thing would be. And of course, a bad product mind in charge is worse than none at all! If the next big leaps come from other companies while Apple just keeps doing what it does best in the hardware categories that it already dominates, then I guess that's fine, too.

If they can make 50B from ads in the iPhone in 12 months why invent a new device that will make pennies.

Sorry folks, the math is brutal for the big corps. They cannot pivot and make cool things, the market demands to be milked until they bleed.

The privacy focus is why Apple is dominant today, keep that up.

When is the last time you used Windows 11? I begrudgingly have to run it on my gaming PC and almost every time it's a frustrating experience where I want to put my fist through my monitor. Absolutely awful, zero taste, that will-do software. Windows explorer I believe is still single threaded, the integration of OneDrive into everything (my desktop is stored in OneDrive for some reason) with little to no way to undo it. Don't even get me started on Copilot. My blood pressure just rose off the charts.

> As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.

This gives me the impression that at least for the near-term, Cook will still be the one groveling to the Trump White House. Whatever you think about that, that's probably helpful for Ternus' dealings with the next administration.

Apple also made some amazing hardware blunders.

My personal favorite is the force-touch home button on the previous generation iPhones and iPads wouldn't work if you were wearing a band-aid. I don't mean the fingerprint reader, it wouldn't even click. So don't ever cut yourself if you were planning to unlock your phone ever. It added basically nothing for the end user over the previous physical home button besides rendering the vibrate function wimpy and useless.

Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump. He is gaining significant political capital while giving up nothing that matters (feel free to correct if I am wrong). Contrast with every other tech executive, lawyer, and university dean in America, most of whom have been cowed into compromising on their deepest values, or even worse, have done so without hesitation. I cannot think of many tech execs whom history will be kinder towards.

But MacOS is excellent IMO, and Apple's office suite is still my favorite (and I've worked extensively on Win/Lin/Mac for the past 25 years). I can't say I have any more gripes about their SW than most others.

It used to be the other way around, nice software and mediocre hardware.

You're kidding right? News [1] just broke about how Apple's permanent notification storage (that they refuse to fix) undermines encryption and is being exploited by law enforcement. And they conveniently left out the fact that they were giving out push notification data to law enforcement without any warrants from their transparency reports [2]. And these are just from the top of my head.

Do we now presume all companies putting the word privacy on their ads are emphasizing privacy? Because Meta and Google does that too.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2026/04/10/fbi-pulle... [2] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-google-push-notification-s...

Sure it's gross but it does not necessarily signal an abandonment of values from Apple.

Don't count on it.

I killed a Finder process that was at 1.2 G ram consumed today...

And his "kind of glib"

No, Zuck, you're just mad Apple introduced fine grained control so you can't constantly scrape people's credentials

How many renaissances does one company need? Apple hasn't had enough? lol

The Vision Pro software team did an incredible job. Its software is more impressive than its hardware.

That's a wild claim.

I think you're attributing a lot more agency to a CEO role (for a publicly listed company, at the least) than they actually have.

> “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...

There are literally no PC laptops with the quality or hardware offered by even the cheapest MacBook - the software, while fine for general consumers, creators, and some developer workloads, tragically holds back its potential something fierce.

Right to repair with aftermarket parts and app installs from any source without Apple's permission. Then I'll consider using an iPhone.

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.

Since 26 upgrade it is unusable with 100+ notes. It looks like they merged iOS variant with Macos one. Constant freezes, random unsaves, device gets boiling hot. No fix with factory reset. I love the HW but SW needs more love.

It's not that the hardware is horrible, but I think if it weren't for the ecosystem and chips most Apple products would seem quite unremarkable.

But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.

Bertrand Serlet, Avie Tevanian, Scott Forstall were all great with software directions.

Craig feels like a people pleaser. Which may be great for modern or current Silicon Valley where everything has a softer approach. But pleasing everyone means there is no unity and direction. Software stack that is less cohesive.

I still to this day do not believe Swift is the right path, in both technical and philosophical approach.

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.

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).

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.

This is something Tim and John both deserve credit for.

Jobs was all about bold innovation, hugely risky bets on gamechanging products.

Cook is a timid logistics optimizer, and he's good at that. We reliably get an iPhone with slightly more RAM, slightly faster CPU on schedule every year. No category changing products.

Innovation has stopped -- after Jobs, there is only minor incremental improvement

He only carried what was left from Steve Jobs. But nothing special or groundbreaking came from him. Apple Vision failed, the transition to AI failed, many people still dislike what is done with the MacBook, he agreed to have the horrible glass UI design just like what Windows did a decade ago, and he failed to find the next Jony Ive, etc... Sure he was an awesome COO. But as a CEO, he was certainly way below Steve Jobs and even less taking his vision "to the moon".

I would disagree here. Apple actually did lose their values, or they are in the process of doing so.

Ads in App Store results, Ads in Maps (coming soon!), constant upsells and pushes of subscriptions and services, forced upgrade of Numbers/Pages/Keynote with annoying nags that can't be turned off, things are getting worse.

Also, when the word "values" is mentioned, one cannot forget about Tim Cook's donations to Trump and his overall support of Trump and cozying up to him.

I could not disagree more. Apple has become increasingly just another tech company shipping products that are great but not insanely so.

The level of insanely great coming out of Apple has been in steady and constant decline since Jobs’ death.

The “I wish Steve were still around so he could have vetoed this” that I get have been steadily increasing on a y/y basis for the last 5-10 years.

I’m not talking about big obvious macro stuff like the Airpods Max being super mid or how much my face hurts after wearing the ridiculously heavy Vision Pro for a while, but the constant subscription nags for $5 after buying a $1500 phone and a million other little paper cuts, culminating lately in the polished turd of an OS that is 26.x. Apple is the most un-Apple it has ever been in its history. Their contempt for their users is now palpable.

Such as Think Different, where you don't need to comply with the standard ways of doing things?

From a Steve Jobs interview in relation to this statement:

> When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your job is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.

> That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is - everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

(Via Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different)

I couldn't think of a company to whose hardware "your job is just to live your life inside [someone else's] world" applies more, though maybe that's because Oracle doesn't make consumer hardware products

Edit: I should probably add that this isn't meant as a purely negative statement: many people want to hand over digital control and have someone else be bothered with keeping the hardware running and curating what software they're allowed to run. It's not me, and it's not what Steve Jobs said Apple was about, but it's not that I don't understand why someone's grandma would choose it

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.

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.

Why share it as a quote rather than a link I can click?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelsandler/2020/03/25/tim-co...

Well he is, but I cannot forget being completely blown away by the lack of, I don't even know what to call it.

On a moment of worldwide shortage, this move didn't move masks to the US that were shelved in forgotten warehouses, they raised the price and left medical workers from poorer countries exposed.

As an aside, I absolutely love the minimal elegance of that web page.

Sorry, but this is pretty naive. You simply can't infer the real personality of a CEO from a (well)crafted public letter.

If he really cared about being a decent person, he wouldn't have sucked up to Trump.

Wonder if he'll be as good as Cook was at kissing Trump's ass. Half serious, half /s.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=apple+car

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.

* Apple Silicon, the most far-reaching technical transformation in the company's history (probably a bigger deal than macOS itself)

* Apple Pay

* The Watch and Airpods product categories, both of which Apple now dominates.

All while holding on to its position in phones and improving (drastically) its computers.

It feels like a pretty successful term.

Tim oversaw the launch of the Apple Watch, Airpods, Airtags, Apple Pay, the Beats acquisition (which lead to Apple Music) and the launch of the M series chips.

He's had quite a few product launches under his belt, many of them company-defining products.

https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2025/06/17/g-s1-72...

We’ll see how the new CEO sees it.

But he is not an aestheticist as much as Jobs was. See how Cook has been destroying the faces of iPhones and Macs, which had a huge dent or what is ironically called a "dynamic" island on the top of the screen. Back of iPhones is desparetely ugly.

Also he has not been presenting what makes us exicted. Apple's Siri is forgotten so that he has to rely on Google's Gemini instead of developing their own. While Samsung's Galaxy has been deploying its 7th foldable phone, Apple has done none. Leaks are usual so we can tell what he will show at its annual conference well before he acutually does and it gives us no surprise at all.

In a short term, "what Cook's Apple has innovated?" -- I guess zero. Rather, deteriorated.

As a long-standing user who started computer life with Performa 5220, keep using Macs as main machines and now run M3 MAX Macbook Pro to develop web apps, current Apple is never what I think it should be.

Making the company bigger is great. But what about their products and services? These are also where Cook has been leading to. He seems to forget Job's aphorism, "Stay hungry, stay foolish."

So I hope the new CEO changes the course.

I don't think this is true. Apple Watch is basically in a market of its own. iPad might have existed before Cook but he turned it into something people actually use for stuff. Vision Pro may not be a financial success but the tech is impressive and it's clear that work will pay off in the near term in other wearables. Apple Silicon is a phenomenal success. Apple TV is no longer a hobby and he's been at the helm while they've developed their entire services business. AirPods rule the headphone market. Not mention the numerous Mac variants he presided over.

It sounds like Cook will continue to get the dirty work of pleasing world leaders while Ternus can focus on actually running the company.

Now I think we need to see Apple remake categories the way they did under Steve. If that can happen again, the future is bright.

Vs. when you're in the Top 10 of the Fortune Global 500, "steady as she goes" business vision is the far safer strategy.

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

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.

Even if that figure might somehow be inflated, it is impressive nonetheless.

AMZN: +2100% META: +1700% MSFT: +1300% GOOG: +1400%

This growth comes from rent seeking. Greedy fees and lock-in they can sustain due to control of the platform and cultivated duopoly.

Apple narrative around security is patronising and deceptive, used as an excuse for removing users' freedoms (by not letting users replace Apple's services with competing ones Apple protects users from their bad choices). Very conveniently the supposedly most innovative company that is great at UX can't do better than Vista.

Apple's response to pro-consumer laws was petty, vindictive, malicious compliance.

To me Apple morphed from having premium products with excellent integration to having cross-product lock-in that maximizes money extraction from users.

And then there's Cook sucking up to Trump with a golden turd to protect next quarter's revenues. This showed that Cook had no principles more important than profit.

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.

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 :)

That people are still judging someone by their school performance (or, less charitably but how I experienced the difference between "poor" and "good" students in about half of the cases: their willingness to deal with arbitrarily set requirements) after being in the workforce for this long says a lot about society. I'm not sure it's a factor when one is comparing devices in a store, which ultimately is what they created right? Shouldn't we judge them by their work?

Also considering this is HN

> Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture

"Only a bachelor's" is a ridiculous comment, and incredibly out of touch.

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.

How so? Genuinely curious, I've got no idea what he's like as a person.

and mac has ios, which with ipads goes desktopy. (capability based security)

As for Ternus' timing:

A)Not very Apple to have the CEO do one last launch while on the way out the door (want the full throated, 1000% commitment in execs)

B)Gives John stage for first time as CEO at September Keynote (historically a BFD)

C)It felt right, among all the other time-slots and factors to consider

D)John gets to announce the next One More Thing, and own it. Would be odd for Tim to announce the One More Thing and then resign.

"Tim Cook took Apple from $350B to $4T"

So? That's a 11X market cap increase. In the same time, MSFT saw a 14X increase, Google saw a 20X increase, Amazon did 28X, Facebook did 35X. We're not even going to talk about NVidia.

Cook led Apple through a period where every tech company expanded. Yay for him?

(It keeps going at https://x.com/politicalmath/status/2046428057255211032 )

i highly doubt he will ever want to take over primarily what is an ad/small time hardware company in favour of taking away focus from his ai company

It is not a tongue in cheek remark, I am genuinely curious

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.

Software is easier given the shorter cycles. Caveat is, the shorter cycles also benefit competitors.

The main problems regular people have when it comes to their phones/macs today isn't that they're boring, it's that the software is buggy and inconsistent, and generally just seems a disservice to the otherwise industry leading hardware.

I'd rather they fix that first than cater to the hardware enthusiasts yearning for some breakthrough new-paradigm design.

Apple's big win was that consumer basically became enterprise. There was lots of noise around formal BYOD but in many/most places it just happened whether IT was on-board or not.

Over the time I developed the instinct to not take pundit's opinions too seriously.

I also love the Vision Pro, actually, I think it’s brilliant, so that was an exception to the rule too.

    I would have expected a marketer.  

Apple's hardware and silicon divisions are considered good not because they're competitive, but because they're uncompetitive. They keep cranking out products that far surpass their competitors. Apple is reduced to announcing the fastest CPU core in the world in a press release spec bump, every year.

Even if Tahoe is a regression from the high bar Apple set with Sequoia, it's still the best OS for regular people (sorry Linux but you know it's true). Apple's software is bad because it's merely best-in-class and not light years ahead.

Maybe I'm being too hopeful but the MacBook Neo was announced at live presentations in a few cities around the world, and Ternus did the presentation at their New York event. Perhaps the guy is also partial to live presentations? It's not impossible that Apple mostly stuck with the prerecorded presentations because Cook didn't like the old way. I wouldn't say he's the most natural presenter, he always seemed a bit uncomfortable on stage.

As it happens with most big corp c-suite transitions (see: Amazon), a lot of powerful executives will have to make way for the new CEO's chosen ones, and what those chosen few do (in lieu of asserting new found power) will dictate the short-term.

I bet that was just good message management. The steadiest approach to a CEO transition is to make it seem a long way off until the moment it happens. Markets don’t like any wobbling at the top.

It's also the year the iPod was launched, which capitulated Apple from near bankruptcy a few years before to then having the cash it needed to invest in R&D on things like transitioning to Intel, creation of iPhone, etc.