Commentary--The Ternus Era Begins With a Hardware Engineer in the Big Chair, and That's the Point

On September 1, John Ternus became the fourth chief executive of the modern Apple, and the first since Steve Jobs whose whole career was spent building the products rather than running the company that sells them. Tim Cook moved to executive chairman, and Arthur Levinson stepped to lead independent director, in the transition Apple announced in April. Ternus joined the product design team in 2001, ran hardware engineering from 2013, and has been the senior vice president over every Mac, iPhone and iPad since 2021, per his Apple bio.

We have been reading Apple press releases since the Performa days, and we cannot remember one that said anything as plainly as Cook's line in April: "John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honor." Strip the sentiment and it is a description of a job. Cook's fifteen years were about supply chain, services and a stock price that went up roughly tenfold; the products were somebody else's department. Now the products person runs the place.

Why does that matter to Mac users? Because every decision we have complained about since 2016, the butterfly keyboard, the Touch Bar, the 2019 Mac Pro that shipped and vanished, was a hardware call, and Ternus was in the room for the fixes as much as the mistakes. He presented the Apple silicon transition. He is the executive who told NPR on his first day that Apple is "a products company first." The reporting from Al Jazeera and the Associated Press on transition day was about continuity. We hope it is not.

What we will watch. First, whether the Mac gets the attention the iPhone gets on stage; today's keynote will tell us something. Second, whether Apple Intelligence stops being a checkbox and starts being a reason to buy an M5 over an M2, which is a hardware-and-software problem and exactly his background. Third, whether the Mac Pro comes back as a real product or quietly follows the Xserve. MacRumors counted the day down; we will count the products.

A CEO who has personally shipped a laptop is a good thing for people who buy laptops. Give the man a year. [Macs Only!]