John Ternus to become Apple CEO

"The market sees all, knows all and will be there from the beginning of time until the end of the universe (the market has already priced in the heat death of the universe)."

whalesalad• 3 months ago

that's a rounding error

dnnddidiej• 3 months ago

which news? this one or the daily middle east blunder.

ribosometronome• 3 months ago

Look like it briefly went down to above what it started today at.

platevoltage• 3 months ago

That is not terribly significant at all.

visviva• 3 months ago

Suggest changing the title to include both parts, if they fit: "Tim Cook to become Apple Executive Chairman, John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

airstrike• 3 months ago

I'd go with "John Ternus to become Apple CEO[, replacing Tim Cook]"

the bit in brackets ain't even necessary since we all know Tim is the CEO

oofbaroomf• 3 months ago

Wow. Hopefully, Ternus will bring what he brought to Apple's hardware to their software. The hardware is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else, but their software gets worse and worse every generation. I'm glad to hear this.

foobiekr2• 3 months ago

Hardware people, in my very direct experience, are terrible at software. But we can hope.

mihaelm• 3 months ago

It's more the hope that he can bring the culture embedded in the hardware division over to software, which hopefully results in better software.

trsohmers• 3 months ago

Software people, in my very direct experience, are terrible at hardware... While in jest, I do think most software engineer's understanding of hardware abstractions is pretty poor and does disservice to the hardware they run on.

I know between Moore's Law and Gate's Law which one I would prefer to be the industry standard... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

Fr0styMatt883• 3 months ago

This is actually one thing I think will be great as AI coding agents get better. Companies whose main expertise is hardware might start producing better software.

There are so many little bugs in consumer-facing apps that hit the ‘sweet’ spot of being incredible little annoyances that just aren’t worth putting an engineer on for a week to fix, but which are totally worth having an engineer throw an agent onto them.

coldtea• 3 months ago

The whole idea of (good times) Apple was hardware and software made coherently by the same people though.

cogman102• 3 months ago

Well, and aspect of hardware dev that lacks in software dev is testing. A mistake in hardware is much harder to correct once it leaves the factory vs a mistake in software. A large portion of hardware budget is ultimately spent on QA.

I have to think some of that attitude would be good for apple's software division.

It's not as if ternus will be writing code directly, he's managing managers. Hopefully that means he'll demand and budget more for QA.

drob5187• 3 months ago

In many cases, yes, but it really depends a lot on the person. I have a computer hardware degree but have led both software and UX teams. If you have a hardware background, you’re going to have to acquire a software background before you can lead software teams. What you can’t do is lead a software team like a hardware team (or vice versa).

e40• 3 months ago

I've worked for 40+ years with a hardware guy and he's great at software, for one reason: attention to detail. In hardware, you have to test, test and test. There's no "fixed it later with a patch" (for the most part).

I don't have a lot of samples, just one. So, YMMV.

Kon5ole2• 3 months ago

Ternus is foremost a manager though. Maybe he is also a hardware guy and that's the secret behind the success he had with Apple's hardware team, but I hope it's transferable to getting the most out of the software teams too.

necovek4• 3 months ago

I tend to disagree to a point: their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!

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

iluvcommunism• 3 months ago

How do you feel about their trackpad? I think they’re the best on the market.

ValentineC4• 3 months ago

their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!

I don't know about Thinkpads, but the utterly pleasant glass trackpad is still one of the things I cannot find on most non-Mac laptops, despite every manufacturer being able to copy it for years.

The closest I've found are the Surface laptop/cover trackpads, but they have their own set of reliability and repairability issues.

As a MacBook user, I very rarely want to use a mouse except for gaming. THe trackpad is delightful enough for the bulk of my use cases.

the_lucifer• 3 months ago

I tend to disagree to a point: their laptops have great internals but are terrible from a usage perspective — I like to imagine their system board in a Thinkpad X1 Carbon chassis with native Linux!
But HW is at least improving (eg. they added anti-reflective screen option), and SW is very much not.

And I would disagree with the idea that I should be running Linux on my primary machine. As a developer, I've faced enough "death by a thousand cuts" situations from running Linux on my personal router and servers to let it anywhere close to my main computer.

Don't even get me started on the hardware quality of Mac laptop including their stellar trackpads, screens and the smallest details like the quality of the hinge. I can still open my 5 year old Mac with a single finger and the hinge is as solid as the day I bought it.

As someone who's also particular about user experience, Linux always fails at this. If you have good UX, that means you can critically think for what a user wants from a computer, and can determine what should and shouldn’t be prioritized. UX is never a first-class citizen on Linux, and for all the issues with Tahoe, macOS still has enough residual quality left in it to not feel like I'm constantly fighting the operating system.

Simple example: I want HDR on Linux. Should be easy right? Just switch to Plasma under Wayland? Then do a one time config so mpv can play HDR. Oh and no browsers support it so good luck. Games need gamescope and flags to be set.

I want my computer to work, not for me to work as an integration engineer. So I use my Mac and it just works™. So I just let Linux live where I feel it works best, in servers and headless environments.

ericzawo• 3 months ago

They are leaps and bounds above any other laptop on the market. Who wants a plastic chasis and nub in 2026 over a modern Macbook Air.

crooked-v• 3 months ago

Short-term, I'm just hoping this means the AirPods Max (and Vision Pro too, I guess) get a redesign that ditches all the uncomfortably heavy metal shells.

crims0n• 3 months ago

Granted I have a big ol' head, but I like the metal frame in all its heft - they feel ultra durable and I don't worry about throwing them in a bag.

LexGray3• 3 months ago

They were touting ultralight ultra light thin metals for a while there, but never really followed up past the SIM ejection tools.

The main reason I haven’t purchased a Vision Pro is they have all sorts of glass on the front. I live alone and don’t need to share my eyes with an empty room, and even I did I would rather have a screen I could control to make a funny mask with. That screen is a step too far with not giving users control.

btown3• 3 months ago

Ternus recently gave an interview where he said this about the initial flop of Apple Maps:

“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...

fckgw3• 3 months ago

Apple Maps is pretty fantastic

JKCalhoun2• 3 months ago

“When we started out with maps, it was an ambitious undertaking. It was bumpy…”

And I know many engineers within Apple that had been testing Maps before it shipped and they were filing bugs about it. It shipped anyway.

krackers• 3 months ago

There's some irony there in that the whole maps fiasco lead to firing of Forstall which allowed Ive to become head of design, which basically led to the current state of macOS design.

I do wish that some day someone will tell the story of what happened during that time. Maps was bad at launch yes, but it also wouldn't get better without people contributing more data, and the fact that it took a decade to slowly improve implies that there's nothing anyone could have done to get it right "off the bat". It still feels to me Forstall was set up as the fall guy, especially considering no one was fired for antennagate.

hedora8• 3 months ago

What is he smoking?!? Apple Maps was fine a few years ago, but these days it routes me to the wrong place about as often as organic maps, and siri is completely broken. It renders a blue dot showing where I am, and responds “I do not know where you are”.

Also, the UI for it keeps getting more cluttered, and they announced that in-map ads are coming Q2-3 2026.

dewey• 3 months ago

I’m sure it’s amazing in California or the US. So often I think how much better products would be if the people responsible would have to use them for a week outside of the happy path.

Example: Taking the airport train instead of a private driver and realizing there’s no luggage racks, staying in a regular hotel room and realizing there’s no light in front of the mirror, only behind you. So many examples like that on a daily basis.

Mindwipe• 3 months ago

That's worrying, because Apple Mpas is still a borderline useless hot mess.

71bw4• 3 months ago

And Apple Maps today is absolutely amazing.

Perhaps that is the case in the US, but in Poland, I haven't had a single app guide me into the literal bushes as many times as Apple Maps does. The straw that broke the camel's back was when, I shit you not, the navigation aspect literally expected me to drive through a lake.

SanjayMehta• 3 months ago

Apple Maps is definitely not amazing in India. All it's good for is "Find My." Only Google is accurate and has good traffic data.

AbrahamParangi• 3 months ago

Oh I remember this quote. I thought it was quite a good one because he’s right. At least in the US, apple maps is better than google maps for most purposes.

LoveMortuus• 3 months ago

And Apple Maps today is absolutely amazing.

That has not been my experience, I've got a Honda CB125F which uses Apple Maps for their on screen navigation.

I live in Lisbon and I wanted to Almada which is directly South from Lisbon. For reasons beyond me, Apple Maps kept telling me to go North and North and North, I tried restarting the navigation multiple times, but in the end I had to switch to Google Maps which did mean that I didn't have on screen navigation, only the audio ones, but at least it immediately told me to go South.

In my eyes, this is a critical failure.

calf• 3 months ago

What technological advance is there for high quality complex software?

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.

saagarjha6• 3 months ago

AI?

fhub• 3 months ago

Their UX has been getting worse. No arguments there. But I feel the nuts and bolts under the covers slowly prods along in the right direction.

UltraSane2• 3 months ago

The Apple Vision Pro hardware is remarkable.

jinushaun• 3 months ago

I really hope they fire whoever is in charge of Liquid Glass. Whoever is leading Apple software has run out of ideas. Of all the countless things they could be doing in software, we got the useless Liquid Glass refactor.

DANmode6• 3 months ago

Regardless of your opinion of its present iteration, the whole push is for their AR/VR layered UI/UX shift - not just another random redesign they threw at the wall.

aurareturn2• 3 months ago

That guy left to join Meta I believe.

bushbaba• 3 months ago

I hated liquid glass at first, but now i've come to appreciate it. It grows on you

imhoguy• 3 months ago

This. I just want Freeform usable on iPadOS again.

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.

torginus• 3 months ago

When I bought a Macbook M1 years ago, then was forced to switch back to a PC and wanted to have something similar in quality - I realized there's NOTHING that compares at ANY price point, let alone $1000.

alluro2• 3 months ago

I switched from M1 MBP to Asus Zenbook S16 with Ryzen HX370. A bit better performance, better screen, design, comparable battery, ok keyboard... I switched mostly because I was missing my previous Linux setup. But that was only possible several years afterwards, and if you try to compare it to the M5 Pro...

Quothling• 3 months ago

I've got the smallest version of the m1 macbook air when they came out. It's still my daily driver when I'm not on my corporate T14 gen 6 I7 with 32gb of ram, and while it no longer outperforms my corporate computer it keeps up well enough while being cold to the touch and noiseless. It's also significantly lighter and has better battery life despite being old, though corporate does kill a lot of that on the pc.

Not being able to feel that it's turned on is basically the primary feature of a laptop for me. I've wanted to switch my personal device to linux for a while, but there just... isn't... one. I know I could run linux on the macbook, but the point here is that there is nothing which compares, not even at higher prices.

apatheticonion5• 3 months ago

My only hope, however unlikely, is that Apple will recognise that power users, engineers and gamers would really really appreciate running Linux on Macs and they write some drivers for it.

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.

schnebbau3• 3 months ago

Well, that certainly would be one way to wipe billions from their share price overnight.

The only way Linux on Mac will become a reality is if it's legislated.

silon42• 3 months ago

As a power user, ThinkPad T (maybe P also) series is better for me (and it's not that close). I run Linux on it.

egorfine3• 3 months ago

Apple will recognise that power users, engineers

They will not. Recognizing the value of power users and engineers looks deeply un-Apple to me.

randomeel• 3 months ago

I also hope they recognize power users it’s very limited customization they offer unlike Linux and windows . The only thing holding them back is their software . If they could try make games compatible or introduce more customization options and more options other than Xcode for swift it would be the most amazing OS

castillar76• 3 months ago

I doubt we'll see it, but one thing I'd really like is for them to release cleaner drivers or specs for the hardware in Intel Macs. Now that they're committed to removing Intel support from the OS, it would be really nice not to consign all of that functional, high-performing hardware to the bin.

At the moment, I have a 2018 Mac Mini with a 12-core i7 and 64GB of RAM that is more limited in OS choice and hardware support than the 2012 Mac Mini sitting next to it, because the inner workings of the T2 chipset in particular and various other components have to be reverse-engineered bit by bit.

alwillis4• 3 months ago

It's not what everyone wants but Apple supports Linux containers [1]. I've used it and it works well.

[1] https://opensource.apple.com/projects/container/

puelocesar2• 3 months ago

I also feel burned by that, but to be fair, is there any software in the world that's not getting worse and worse?

3form3• 3 months ago

I think lots of backend stuff is getting better over time, but I fail to think of a single thing facing a regular consumer.

tcfhgj4• 3 months ago

Typst

uyzstvqs• 3 months ago

I'm hoping that they'll finally ditch the sleazy anti-consumer tactics, and just focus on providing real value through real quality. They're definitely in a position where they can do so.

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

giancarlostoro3• 3 months ago

Agree, Microsoft needs to be next in my eyes. They have really degraded Windows. I do not know how Bill Gates uses a computer and doesnt lose his colossal shit at how garbage it is on high end Microsoft made devices.

giancarlostoro3• 3 months ago

For context, I have been a Microsoft fanboy for years, a .NET Developer for over a decade, my one Windows machine (I also love Linux ;) is a Microsoft made product, with all factory defaults, because Windows in the past has always been very stable for me if I don't go around tweaking things. For some reason however, my Windows copy on an official Microsoft device has been slowed to a crawl for like 3 years now, which is a bit concerning because I had it for a good 2 years before that. None of my Linux devices have this problem, and when I install Linux on any formerly Windows device, it brings new life to the device, and they last way longer than if I had just kept Windows.

YmiYugy• 3 months ago

I don' really understand where people's enthusiasm for the hardware comes from (aside from the chips). They have corrected many of the functional compromises of the Ive era, but it seems otherwise unambitous. The recent Pro iPhones have a certain unflattering chunkiness. MacBooks have also grown to an uncomfortable weight and lost some of the elegance of prior design. They also suffer from an unnecessarily huge notch. On top of that there are a number of products whose usability concerns never got addressed. AirPods Max and Vision Pro are too heavy to wear for a long time and the ergonomic travesty of using and ridiculousness of charging the Magic Mouse remain unaddressed. Apple Watches got a tenth of the standby time of Garmin and other sport watches.

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.

ksec3• 3 months ago

I really think Craig needs to go. I can't remember a single software decision under his tenure that is good. Having said that I don't know who can replace him.

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.

dcchambers• 3 months ago

"Tim Cook to become Apple Executive Chairman"

*John Ternus to become Apple CEO*

Talk about burying the lede, lmao.

arduanika3• 3 months ago

Yeah. Can we get a title change please?

Among the dup stories submitted, this one has the best content but the worst title.

detectivestory• 3 months ago

And John Ternus will be CEO

nalekberov• 3 months ago

If Apple really wants to keep their long term users in its ecosystem, it should really drop stupid Liquid glass design, stop making macOS look like its mobile OSs, and bring skeuomorphism back, which was removed by John Ive.

spockz3• 3 months ago

I disagree. They should bring quality back before reintroducing more changes. Okay, maybe that means dropping Liquid Glass. But also readopt the HIG. Increase stability and performance and reduce attack vector.

reddalo2• 3 months ago

John Ive was the catalyst for the horrible UX that macOS has now.

joshstrange• 3 months ago

Very glad to see this finally happen. It's been in the rumors for a while now that Ternus would be the next CEO but the timeline was uncertain.

I'm interested to see what Ternus' first few moves are and how much he will avoid (or hopefully embrace) reversing some of the things Cook is responsible for.

He has a long row to hoe when it comes to things like developer relations but from what I've heard, he is one of the best options we had for the next CEO.

ignoramous• 3 months ago

interested to see what Ternus' first few moves are

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.

walterbell4• 3 months ago

There were several exec departures in 2025, https://archive.is/JcYOY

Srouji stays to lead hardware, https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/20/srouji-chief-hardware-o...

  Johny is one of the most talented people I have ever had the privilege to work with. He has played a singular role in driving Apple's silicon strategy, and his influence has been felt deeply not just inside the company, but across the industry. He has always led his organization with remarkable deftness and judgment, and time and again, his team has delivered breakthrough innovations that have transformed our products. We are incredibly fortunate to have him as Apple's chief hardware officer.

kshacker• 3 months ago

Someone archive the leadership page :) to be referenced 12 months from when John takes over

Trung0246• 3 months ago

Maybe Mac Mini M5 this year?

Aboutplants• 3 months ago

Apple hardware has been a shining light for Apple for the past 5-10 years, even if a bit lucky. I’m curious how this effects the company as a whole going forward, hopefully positive

cocacola12• 3 months ago

Off topic, but it’s amusing to see that 3/8 Apple CEOs were Mike, 2/8 were John, and the rest are Steve, Tim, and Gil.

fckgw3• 3 months ago

Apple is obsessed with minimalism so much that they refuse to hire any CEOs with first names longer than a single syllable.

oidar• 3 months ago

situations like this should allow for relaxing the title rules to "unbury" the lede.

sacrosaunt2• 3 months ago

About time. Hopefully we can see some meaningful hardware improvements in the coming years.

Cider9986• 3 months ago

What is wrong with the hardware now? iPhone 17 series is great, Macs have no competition, Apple Watches lead in accuracy.

Me thinks Apple software is the problem—I put Asahi Linux on my Mac.

sacrosaunt2• 3 months ago

No issue performance-wise but I wish there was more innovation, especially with the iPhones. For example, I was really impressed with Samsung's privacy screen demo.

celsoazevedo4• 3 months ago

The iPhone is fine, but I find them to be... boring. The SoCs are very good, but they don't have the best cameras, the best batteries, the fastest charging, the most innovative displays, etc. Apple isn't pushing that hard there.

tencentshill• 3 months ago

Is the loyalty represented by the golden trophy transferrable? Or is it tied to each CEO, like Applecare+?

kashunstva• 3 months ago

I think you will have your answer if you consider which approach nets the recipient the larger number of golden tributes.

linkjuice4all• 3 months ago

As long as he goes by "John Apple" he should be ok - usually the bribe gets credited to the surname.

ch4s3• 3 months ago

John Apple, great guy people say he's the best at computers, business I don't know.

pupppet2• 3 months ago

I'm glad someone mentioned this.

nerdsniper3• 3 months ago

I believe these bribes/flatteries mostly confer a single-use benefit. Things like golden trophies seem to buy a victory in that moment, but they seem to have little relevance on decisions made even a month later, regardless of who gifted it and whether they're still at the helm.

kalleboo• 3 months ago

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

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

npunt8• 3 months ago

Basically. Tim is the ablative heat shield.

lukewrites• 3 months ago

Depends if you want a FIFA Peace Prize or not.

smeeth2• 3 months ago

I'm quite curious what Tim Cook's legacy will end up being.

There is no question many of Apple's business experienced significant, impressive growth during his tenure. Amazing capital efficiency.

There is also no question Apple lost product velocity. Few new products were launched, and those that were had mixed success.

Tim was, at the end of the day, an elite financial operator. Apple shareholders were lucky to have him. Customers like myself probably have mixed opinions, and it remains to be seen how he set the company up for the future.

tptacek• 3 months ago

Things he effectively presided over:

* 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.

smeeth2• 3 months ago

Tim was a great CEO.

I'm just pointing out product velocity slowed. I'm far from the first person to say it, it's just a fact. In the five years before Cook we got first generation Apple TV, iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air. Your list spans 14 years.

carefree-bob5• 3 months ago

Yes, a very successful CEO and he secured a great legacy. I was skeptical when Jobs stepped down, but under Cook innovation did continue, but primarily in hardware.

caycep4• 3 months ago

Also the discipline in not blowing massive R&D chasing AI; but having the machines/architecture best suited to said AI...

fckgw3• 3 months ago

Few new products were launched, and those that were had mixed success.

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.

kube-system2• 3 months ago

The M series transition was perfectly executed, but that trajectory was set up before Jobs left when they went all-in on in-house semiconductor design.

oldnetguy4• 3 months ago

His legacy is he used Apple to help build China into a technological powerhouse at the expense of American workers.

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

ebbi5• 3 months ago

That's a pretty reductive take.

j16sdiz3• 3 months ago

Can you say the same for tesla or cisco?

drowntoge• 3 months ago

To me, Tim Cook has turned Apple into a company that is both “doing amazingly well” and “in urgent need of a radical change in direction” at the same time.

We’ll see how the new CEO sees it.

lunarboy2• 3 months ago

FaceID, AirPods, Apple Silicon, Vision Pro (though it was flop was a good try). Overall, I would actually place Tim above Steve in terms of business, although maybe not from a Human Computer Interaction design novelty perspective

shrubble• 3 months ago

What did they shut down? Aperture comes to mind, anything else?

jshier• 3 months ago

Many of their acquired pro tools, and pretty much all of their server hardware and software, though much of that started before Cook took over. Plus the Mac Pro missteps were on his watch, as well as the current cancellation. Apple seems more and more unwilling to invest in niche hardware like the Mac Pro, except where they see it pushing the platform forward, like the Vision Pro.

basisword7• 3 months ago

> Few new products were launched

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.

8avo• 3 months ago

Tim Cook is a businessman who made the company bigger than Jobs could.

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.

Tyrubias• 3 months ago

Tim Cook’s experience in logistics built Apple into the global hegemon it is today. I hope John Ternus’s experience with hardware can kick off a renaissance in both Apple hardware and software design. Mind you, Apple hardware is already amazing, but hopefully it can be even better with Ternus at the helm. Apple software is terrible, and hopefully Ternus can turn that around. I’m also hoping, without any evidence, that maybe a change in leadership will change how Apple participates in US politics.

EDIT: I also want to say I really appreciate Tim Cook’s emphasis on user privacy and I hope John Ternus can continue this trend.

Fr0styMatt883• 3 months ago

Curious as an outsider what you mean with US politics? Seems like Apple has a pretty strong stance when it comes to things like privacy that pushes back on some things (that could be smoke and mirrors though I guess).

valleyer2• 3 months ago

Start here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/07/tim-...

al_borland9• 3 months ago

Depending on who you talk to, this could go either way. Some people want big companies to champion their own political ideals on a larger stage and think Apple should do more. Others would say Apple should stay out of it, after things like their gift to Trump[0], for example.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-...

legitster• 3 months ago

The privacy is more of a market position thing than it is a political thing.

Apple has led the industry on hardware but is woefully behind on the software and services front. Focusing on device-level privacy controls turns what would be a gap into a moat, and it helps deprive Google and other services from monetizing their customer base.

Not to say that it's not something the company is passionate about - but it's also good for their business. Especially when you compare it to things like human rights, transparency, and security research where Apple could take a stronger stand but don't.

hedora8• 3 months ago

#appletoo

insane_dreamer2• 3 months ago

you mean offering gold bribes to the president along with $$$ to the prez inauguration to curry regulatory favor?

baal80spam2• 3 months ago

I can name some terrible software, but it wouldn't be Apple's.

ValentineC4• 3 months ago

macOS and iOS 26 are quite bad.

bigyabai8• 3 months ago

XCode, Apple Music, Siri, Apple Maps, The App Store, Finder, Safari, Spotlight, iCloud...

I'd need another hand to fully count all the Apple apps that have burned me in the past.

thereitgoes4563• 3 months ago

I admire how Tim Cook participates in US politics. He is doing the most while giving the least. I would do the same in his position, he is making the best of a difficult situation, and it is his duty to protect his company and employees.

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.

mcmcmc4• 3 months ago

Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump.

No effect on you, really. You aren’t affected by gas prices or tariffs? They are bowing down and participating in Trump’s patronage schemes. Every powerful person who does this is complicit with all the horrible things done by the Trump administration. They are endorsing Trump and his ilk with their behavior if not their words, which allows and encourages him to continue his fraud and abuse.

FireBeyond• 3 months ago

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).

He personally donated at least a million dollars to Trump's inauguration, plus whatever to the campaign.

bigyabai8• 3 months ago

He is doing the most while giving the least.
Contrast with every other tech executive

What contrast is there? Tech executives capitulated to Trump's demands, and Tim Cook did the exact same thing. The problem doesn't start and stop with the gold trophy, it encompasses things like European legislation, labor/union laws, and complex supply chains that Apple needs federal support to manage. There are convoluted motives here, and the bizzaro FIFA trophies are only the tip of the iceberg.

amalcon• 3 months ago

I'd be careful normalizing bribery. It's very micro-efficient, almost definitionally, but the macro effects of normalized bribery are well known and not good.

vel0city2• 3 months ago

Giving a golden statue of Trump has no effect on you and me, and a very large effect on Trump.

Bribery hurts everyone else following the law. It erodes public trust. All of us are definitely hurt by Trump's extreme and obvious levels of corruption.

hei-lima6• 3 months ago

Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's, IMO. But that doesn't mean it can't be better.

Congeec• 3 months ago

Best in terms of what? Quality Control? UI/UX?

lunarboy2• 3 months ago

oh the horror stories I've heard from friends at Apple. Don't think I've heard anyone who writes tests at Apple

toephu22• 3 months ago

Google is much better at software than Apple...most in the Valley would agree with this.

this_user• 3 months ago

Their legendary "goto fail" debacle as well as the ease with which ios has repeatedly been jailbroken would disagree. I think geohot once quipped: "My lawyer could write a better malloc."

apazzolini• 3 months ago

Apple's software is the best in the [category of shit software]

bayindirh• 3 months ago

Their software is better than most (if not all) of closed-source universe. That's true, but the problem is, they were better in the past.

I'm using both Linux and macOS close to 20 years (Linux is even more than 20, IIRC), and macOS (aka Mac OS) used to be snappier, more stable, more uniform and had incredibly low number of papercuts around the UI. Now it has some nasty thorns here and there, while Linux is improving steadily and not regressing much as macOS.

Apple needs to overhaul their software stack. They can use a lot of sanding and polishing to bring the shine back. They need another "Snow Leopard" release, as many people say.

On the other hand, even with all these bells and whistles, they can't even get close to the composability of Linux systems. Doing so will also damage their bottom line, so they won't, and that's OK.

whatsupdog3• 3 months ago

It's worst in case of freedom, which is the most important aspect for me. Every release they are slowly turning in the screws and make it harder and harder to install apps from developers who haven't jumped through all the hoops that Apple forces them to. I hope this change in leadership will change this strategy.

bryanlarsen4• 3 months ago

As a cross platform developer, MacOS is far buggier than Linux or Windows in my experience.

tyleregeto• 3 months ago

Opinions vary, but I've never found Apple software to be particularly good. Their hardware is almost always exceptional.

I'd go further and say I am constantly frustrated by how difficult their software can make basic tasks. I often find many of their UX patterns unintuitive, or even feel user hostile at times. Small example, I really want to view passwords as I type them in. I constantly miss type passwords on touch screens. User error maybe, but frustrating experience.

XCode is my least favourite IDE that I use regularily.

soperj• 3 months ago

Safari is a shinning example of how wrong this is. Sorry.

The fact that they tie the mobile version to the OS version is just ridiculous.

seanmcdirmid3• 3 months ago

Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's, IMO. But that doesn't mean it can't be better.

20+ years ago, software was so horrible that we were just tolerating it, and every new OS release was a big deal because there was hope things would get better! Today an OS release comes out and I have to be bothered by automatic "you must upgrade messages" to even care.

People forget how horrible it used to be, and if you still use windows, how much worse it could be when vs. Apple (and let's not get started on Linux).

Arainach• 3 months ago

What metrics or experiences lead you to that conclusion?

I've used basically all of the major operating systems for 30+ years and I cannot stand macOS. I use a Mac as one of my work devices, and off the top of my head:

* Basic things such as window management require third party tools to get things that are table stakes everywhere else. Even with third party tools doing anything with a "full screen" mode is not going to work the way you expect.

* You can't have separate scroll directions for your trackpad and your external mouse.

* External peripherals in general are a disaster. Every time I connect or disconnect from a docking station my windows are left in awkward positions sized larger than my screen and I need to drag them around

* macOS seems to store a different set of monitor orientations based on what USB port I connect my dock to - same dock, same monitors, 2 different layouts I had to configure independently. I don't even know how you could accomplish that if you wanted it - and absolutely no one wants that.

* Multiple monitors is constantly an afterthought, whether it's menus, the dock, layouts, what have you

* The Settings app is impossible to find anything in. You have to search, and that works OK sometimes, but the layout has no rhyme, reason, or comprehensible order

* Safari. Enough said.

I could keep going, but I absolutely do not associate Apple with quality software.

nixass4• 3 months ago

Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft

Apple's iOS is hot garbage. The macOS is not far behind on how horrible the UX is

mcmcmc4• 3 months ago

Have you tried Siri lately?

modeless3• 3 months ago

Android and Windows are better than iOS and macOS in many non-trivial ways. They have their own problems too, but as a user of all of them I don't prefer the Apple software. Apple's hardware, on the other hand, is clearly superior.

tehlike• 3 months ago

Apple could use a fresh approach to their software release cycles. I wish i could talk to someone at apple on this.

wewtyflakes• 3 months ago

I have not found this to be true for the software side of things.

- Apple Music's UI/UX is quite rough on MacOS.

- Trying to use my iPhone to type a long password on my Apple TV is hit-or-miss.

- For some reason trying to view a password using Keychain requires you to enter your credentials twice, every time, for as long as I can remember.

BugsJustFindMe• 3 months ago

Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's

But it's worst in the Apple software world compared to Apple's. In fairness, Microsoft has also been in steady tragic decline for a while. I don't know about Google.

selectnull• 3 months ago

Apple’s software is the best [...] compared to Google's or Microsoft's

Honestly, that's such a low bar to hit.

bigupthewhole• 3 months ago

Have you seen xcode? Have you seen Appstore connect in comparison to Google play console?

poolnoodle• 3 months ago

In my opinion Android (especially the Google Pixel flavour) is vastly more intuitive and logical than i(Pad)OS these days. I almost need to consult a manual to change my wallpaper on iOS. Anything to do with file management or notifications is also just plain bad on iOS. The keyboard is bad. Background downloads don't work reliably. If I want to transfer photos from a computer onto an iPhone I need special software and then cannot delete those pictures on the phone itself. I can choose between 3 multitasking paradigms on iPad – terrible!

gcau• 3 months ago

I find it hard to believe this comment isn't sarcastic. Apple's software, atleast in particular macos, is horrendous - to the point I ditched my m2 macbook for a thinkpad because of how bad it was. It's like a toy OS.

lateforwork6• 3 months ago

Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's

You are comparing against the wrong thing.

Compare it to NeXTSTEP from 35 years ago:

https://infinitemac.org/1989/NeXTStep%201.0

NeXTSTEP was both more usable and better looking.

mlinhares• 3 months ago

I haven't really had to work with microsoft software but apple's software quality is abysmal beyond the OS (and even the OS has places that are a joke, like the bluetooth stack).

I'd rather use nano than having to write code on xcode.

leptons2• 3 months ago

I'm not sure how you can think Finder is better than the alternatives. It's awful, and has always been awful, IMO.

root_axis• 3 months ago

Maybe 20 years ago, today it's no better than anything else - well designed in some aspects, total trash in others. The stewards of xcode, spotlight and siri (among many other stinkers) are disqualified from the category of "best"

pdpi3• 3 months ago

I still prefer macOS to desktop Linux or (yikes) Windows, but the margin has gotten smaller over the last several years. Unfortunately, that's less because Linux or Windows have gotten that much better, and more because macOS has stalled (and even gone backwards in some ways).

Keyframe• 3 months ago

What do you mean? Most if not all Apple's software is not even the best in their own category, let alone "in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's". If we look at only these three and leave other competitors, you want to tell us that Safari is better than Chrome (Edge is the same now), Pages is better than Docs and Word, Numbers is better than Sheets and Excel, Keynote is better than Slides (arguably) or PowerPoint, Mail is better than Gmail or Outlook, iCloud better than Google Drive or OneDrive (ok lol), Facetime better than Meet or Teams, Apple Maps better than Google Maps or Bing Maps, Siri better than Google Assistant or Copilot... ?

Outside the two.. Fina Cut better than Premiere Pro or Resolve or Avid, Logic Pro better than Pro Tools or Ableton or many others, Motion better than After Effects, Pixelmator better than anything from Adobe or Affinity..

Come on, my dude. Only thing I haven't mentioned is OS only because that's a religion and I don't fall into MacOS one.

Apple's hardware game is strong. Software isn't, never has been.

Nevermark5• 3 months ago

Apple’s software has a kind of reliable predictability that many appreciate.

But “best” is far too strong a word.

For starters, most if not all their software can be described as simpler also-rans.

And in line with that approach, for a company that innovates in hardware, it does not apply that effort to software.

With two exceptions in the last two decades. The iPhone and Apple Watch operating systems & interfaces were very creative efforts. Which genuinely matched the hardware innovation.

Vision’s OS, on the hand, basically iOS-ified hardware that deserved to be treated like the first device to be positioned above and beyond the Mac. The natural interface doesn’t fall below the Mac’s, like a touch screen does. It fat exceeds it, given a keyboard-trackpad.

Instead, software wise, we get another media and toy kiosk.

I am stunned that Tim Cook didn’t see the opportunity to leave his mark with a device that took the capability crown further than the Mac, instead of falling for the 3D as cute feature un-vision.

Pro hardware. Toy software.

He has been a great CEO. But if he let Steve and his own legacy down anywhere, that is where.

That, the predictable but mostly stalled vision of software apps. And all the odd software glitches on all their devices that seem to keep cropping up, that suggest poor underlying models to me.

Their underlying systems software are a high point. The hardware integration is stand out.

sam0x17• 3 months ago

It's really gone to shit in the last 2 years

locknitpicker• 3 months ago

Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's, IMO.

Apple does xcode, known for being perpetually broken and an ungodly mess of whatever design it had. Isn't it enough proof to completely reject your claim?

brikym• 3 months ago

Let's hope John takes his job Siriously

elicash3• 3 months ago

Apple software is terrible

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

walterbell4• 3 months ago

Did Vision Pro leadership subsequently take over Apple Intelligence?

hedora8• 3 months ago

Did they? Why don’t I see people using this product while driving, or even walking down the street?

nottorp7• 3 months ago

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

Good, can they move to fixing the base OS then?

nottorp7• 3 months ago

Apple software is terrible

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

appplication• 3 months ago

I wish I could get my Chrome memory footprint so low

firloop• 3 months ago

FTA:

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.

nxobject3• 3 months ago

The big bucks are for simultaneously groveling to Trump and China’s leaders. China usually makes or breaks the quarterly numbers after all.

pharos92• 3 months ago

Saying Apple Software is 'terrible' is a blatant hyperbole. Has it degraded meaningfully over the last decade in terms of stability? Yes. Has it's capability increased though? Yes. Has it become more secure by design? Yes. Is the UX better than anything else in market? By a country mile.

tensor3• 3 months ago

The UX used to be better by a country mile. The liquid glass update was a genuinely serious regression. Is Windows or Android now better? At least those operating systems don't have constant contrast issues and flickering. At this point they probably have more consistency.

MacOS reliability has slowly gotten worse and worse, but the UX drop with liquid glass was profound.

gabbagool• 3 months ago

I'm genuinely curious why you think Apple software is terrible?

CrimsonCape2• 3 months ago

When was the last time you used the clusterf* that is iTunes on windows?

Or more generically answer the question: how can I get an arbitrary audio file into my iTunes music? (hint: good luck)

Music 'synced' with iTunes but not appearing on my other devices? There must be some kind of arbitrary difference between 'synced with iTunes' and 'synced with iCloud'. I guarantee this is some kind of (barely) maintained legacy syncing to keep the iTunes workflow alive specifically so Apple can avoid giving users a modern 'import to my cloud library' feature.

apple4ever3• 3 months ago

Because there are so many bugs that it makes me wonder if Apple Execs ever use their own software.

For example, on MacOS, you can set an app to be on all spaces. But on reboot, despite that setting, it will stick to a single space, until you relaunch the app. It has been this way for 4-5 major OS versions.

There are PLENTY of examples just like that.

michael1999• 3 months ago

They re-write many apps every few years as part of their major design changes. These re-writes inevitably introduce lots of little bugs in uncommon workflows, and they often jettison whole features like AppleScript integration that cause real problems with users. They then spend a couple of years fixing the worst of these bugs, and things die down. Until the next UI-driven re-write.

jordand• 3 months ago

You've not read about or had the Calculator memory leaks on macOS Tahoe, have you?

Rebelgecko• 3 months ago

It's all been downhill since snow leopard IMO. Maybe I've just become cynical and jaded over the years, but I don't remember the last time I was excited for a new OS feature. Meanwhile the UX gets worse and worse with every new release. e.g. Tahoes janky corners, the dumbed down System Preferences app, random bugs that apple hasn't fixed for years, etc

xgkickt• 3 months ago

Their presumed lack of regression testing.

JeremyHerrman• 3 months ago

re: US Politics, I view Apple's gift of the gold & glass trophy to Trump more as a humiliation ritual Cook had to endure so that they can continue to uphold their principles, but with a less adversarial government.

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

tastyface5• 3 months ago

Disagree. Cook shows up to dinner parties with Trump all the time. I think he genuinely feels solidarity with the Epstein class.

arduanika3• 3 months ago

Tapping a hardware guy as CEO sends a good signal, at least to me, looking in from the outside. The company is leading from its strength, and getting back to its roots. I wonder how Woz feels today, seeing this.

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.

hedora8• 3 months ago

If they are going to tap a HW guy as CEO, the next big thing should be giving exec comp and positions to every member of the Asahi Linux team, and putting them in charge of SW at Apple.

fchicken11• 3 months ago

Chairman Cook was a hardware guy, and is why apple's hardware is excellent.

This just suggests him holding on to more influence. What apple needs, badly, is a software and tech guy (Cook is not a tech guy).

dlahoda13• 3 months ago

by apple software, you mean ios or macos?

nobodyandproud• 3 months ago

The user privacy can’t be overstressed. It and a sane release cycle are what keeps me on Apple.

nixass4• 3 months ago

it means nothing when the UX is hot garbage

riazrizvi3• 3 months ago

Cook was a steward of Apple as an offshored manufacturing behemoth. I'm looking forward to where this reset goes. Hopefully better and American made products.

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

levocardia• 3 months ago

So you're looking forward to a $2000 iPhone 18e?

nottorp7• 3 months ago

Hopefully better and American made products.

"Expensive for no good reason" products?

tty456• 3 months ago

I feel like Apple's biggest challenges these next 10 years will be logistics, being able to create or take advantage of additional redundancy in the supply chain for their major components.

Danox8• 3 months ago

With Ternus being the new CEO don’t be surprised if Apple takes a more active role in designing around the three Stooges of memory and bring it (the design and engineering) in house like the rest of the Apple Silicon chips.

alex1138• 3 months ago

I'll forever associate Tim Cook with Zuck

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

nozzlegear3• 3 months ago

You reminded me of Tim's "you should buy [your grandma] an iPhone" quip which was based (on good advice).

nodesocket2• 3 months ago

Apple software is terrible

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.

unsupp0rted2• 3 months ago

this spoiled cheese tastes terrible
when’s the last time you tried spoiled milk then?

syabro• 3 months ago

There are still levels below “terrible”

vovavili2• 3 months ago

Apple software is terrible

That's a wild claim.

Rover2222• 3 months ago

Have you used an iPhone recently?

sngz• 3 months ago

The software is what kept me away from iphones even though I hate android hardware

ebbi5• 3 months ago

maybe a change in leadership will change how Apple participates in US politics

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.

unsupp0rted2• 3 months ago

The less companies “participate in US politics”, the better for all involved

tokyobreakfast• 3 months ago

Apple hardware is already amazing

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.

hamdingers• 3 months ago

Home button issues were one of the most common hardware problems on iPhones <7. The haptic button evaporated an entire class of critical failures, hardly a blunder.

kulahan• 3 months ago

Don't forget that to shut down an iPhone, you need to remember the secret button combination. Of course holding the power button down doesn't shut it off. Why would it? That's just a standard held by EVERY OTHER ELECTRONIC DEVICE IN EXISTENCE.

Man, I love Apple, but their stupidity is beyond baffling sometimes. No Siri updates for 10 years, making the hardware harder to use, single-handed use is no longer as easy or comfortable, and they haven't done... anything(?) revolutionary in AGES. Their latest gaff was the Neo - a phone stretched out as much as possible to make a "laptop". They couldn't even bother to make the logo shiny on it, it was such a departure from true Apple style. Let's not forget the 92 lenses on the back of the phone that stick out a quarter inch, a screen that's nearly impossible to replace, and the hilariously pathetic "iphone repair kit" they lend you.

I have zero confidence in this guy. Nothing he had oversight over has gone well, as far as I'm concerned.

whatever1• 3 months ago

The shareholders expect more profits. So no, the only way is ads and fees on the best sellers.

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.

jtbayly• 3 months ago

Pennies? Their devices have famously high margins.

aibrahem• 3 months ago

For all the faults of these companies, their founders and CEOs, I genuinely believe the world would have been a bit of a sadder place without companies like Apple and Google. That’s not something I can say about most companies (Microsoft), and honestly, there are companies I think the world would be better off without entirely (Oracle).

ergocoder• 3 months ago

a renaissance

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

stetrain4• 3 months ago

My guess is that Cook will continue to handle some of the hairier political situations, letting Ternus focus on Apple itself.

dev1ycan• 3 months ago

Apple under Tim Cook stopped innovating, entirely. If Steve was stil alive he'd still be competing we'd probably have Safari on Windows to this day... and cheaper computers (like the NEO but with upgradeable RAM)

wtallis3• 3 months ago

If Steve was stil alive he'd still be competing we'd probably have Safari on Windows to this day... and cheaper computers (like the NEO but with upgradeable RAM)

The MacBook Pro started using non-removable batteries in 2009. Also: https://www.folklore.org/Diagnostic_Port.html

I don't think your fantasy that Steve would have staunchly defended upgradable RAM in the past decade has much grounding in reality. It seems entirely likely that he would have supported the switch to LPDDR to enable better battery life, higher performance and thinner form factors at the cost of sacrificing that upgradability.

Rapzid3• 3 months ago

If he were going to do that he'd already have been doing it just like Tim locking down logistics long before he became CEO.

Don't count on it.

TimTheTinker• 3 months ago

I too deeply appreciate the commitment to user privacy they've demonstrated. Their head of user privacy is a man of integrity and commitment.

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.

pretzel5297• 3 months ago

I also want to say I really appreciate Tim Cook’s emphasis on user privacy and I hope John Ternus can continue this trend.

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...

raincole2• 3 months ago

Wow, the worst example of violation of privacy is...(wait for it) local push notification storage being plaintext. We already bought it, no need to sell more Apple product to us!

fchicken11• 3 months ago

I mean...

Really what apple is doing is putting a spin on their core business model of selling users the technology rather than renting it to them by subsidizing its development through spying.

It's not so much that privacy is apple's goal, but rather privacy is inherent to apple's business model (unlike google, which has always been spyware).

DeathArrow5• 3 months ago

Mind you, Apple hardware is already amazing, but hopefully it can be even better with Ternus at the helm. Apple software is terrible, and hopefully Ternus can turn that around.

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

ulfw• 3 months ago

Apple's hardware (at least when it comes to their best selling products) is behind the times though. Relatively old and small camera sensors, no new battery tech and falling behind manufacturers using silicon-carbon (most evident on the mediocre iPhone Air battery runtime), no design innovation, no alternative form factors etc

insane_dreamer2• 3 months ago

Siri was pretty bad, though it's noticeably better recently.

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.

ece• 3 months ago

The problem with Apple software is they stop competition where it makes them money through lock-in. Apple ARM CPUs are great, but the GPUs do leave things to be desired, and they stop competition there too on their platforms.

potatoproduct• 3 months ago

Apple doesn't care about privacy, its a convenient USP.

Tepix• 3 months ago

They have behaved in a consistent matter to emphasize user privacy.

What makes you say they don‘t care?

lachlanj• 3 months ago

Don’t expect anything to change re politics. The CEO has to look out for the interest of the company.

tchalla• 3 months ago

Under Cook’s leadership Apple has grown from a market capitalization of approximately $350 billion to $4 trillion, representing a more than 1,000% increase, and yearly revenue has nearly quadrupled, from $108 billion in fiscal year 2011 to more than $416 billion in fiscal year 2025.

Quite successful.

thimabi2• 3 months ago

I also liked the part about growing the company while reducing its carbon footprint by more than 60%.

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

benoau2• 3 months ago

It's probably an even bigger reduction considering their growth.

But it's still a net deficit of nearly 15 million tons of emissions of which practically none are offset.

https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Pr...

pzo3• 3 months ago

This is what’s all bad with us stocks and completely disconnected with market value: Revenue jumped 4x but market capitalization got inflated to 12x.

pama• 3 months ago

The price over earnings (arguably an imperfect, but better way to compare stock prices against each other than using pure revenue) for Apple has been fluctuating within about a factor of 2 for the last 20 years. Since before the iPhone, people were nervous about the possibility of sustained growth of profits of the company, and the P/E was similar to today. Once Apple started making a lot more money under Tim Cook, the price was at a relative discount becauee 10 years ago people were certain (but wrong) that this run would end soon and badly. The long term stability under Cook was truly impressive. Lets see what the markets think abiut the leadership change tomorrow, but probably this is not an immediate event.

rootusrootus2• 3 months ago

Investors are forward-looking, though, so it just means that they think the future looks brighter than the immediate past.

The real disconnect IMO is TSLA.

cesarvarela• 3 months ago

Some of that is debasement, but some of that is that there is no other brand like Apple.

Would you not own stock of the most valuable brand in human history?

boppo12• 3 months ago

Yep. QE was a monumental mistake that killed economic mobility. Asset owners vs wage earners.

pembrook2• 3 months ago

True, but also Apple is in a far more dominant position today.

Alongside Nvidia they essentially monopolize TSMCs entire latest generation chip supply.

That’s a moat in hardware that is going to get even stronger over time. Given this hardware moat they can dip their toes gently into the B2B market they’ve never really cared about and pick up another few hundred billion in high margin revenue over the next 10 years no problem.

I’ve always found it weird that Apple’s entire org runs on Mac but no other Fortune 500 company on earth does. Seems like an opportunity to nibble away at Microsoft.

throwaway274482• 3 months ago

Do you think market cap should be proportional to revenue?

csomar• 3 months ago

Market cap should theoretically be determined by profit, interest rates minus liabilities (see legacy auto makers). Though it's future looking, so it might be higher or lower than a simple analyst estimation. Of course, this discount meme stocks (like TSLA) which are valued by the insanity of the crowd.

IncreasePosts• 3 months ago

For the same period:

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

elicash3• 3 months ago

Was meta a public company back then? Amazon, I think, was quite small, too.

postalcoder• 3 months ago

This is a specious comparison at best. Apple is, at heart, a hardware company. They have different growth profiles. A consumer hardware company getting that sort of growth is mind boggling.

pornel• 3 months ago

He destroyed my trust in Apple in ways that can't be put in numbers.

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.

didip• 3 months ago

wow… I didn’t expect this. My guess would have been after the current administration.

Why so soon?

PlunderBunny• 3 months ago

Yeah, I thought Cook would stay on until the end of the Trump-admin in order to keep ‘swallowing the dead rats’ so that the next CEO would have a clean plate.

rhubarbtree6• 3 months ago

Midterms Nov, so it’s all about to be over - either trump heads towards impeachment, America doubles down on its descent, or democracy ends. Either way, not point hanging around after that. If he’s impeached there’s a fresh start. If he does well, then this regime isn’t going anywhere for the long term. If the elections aren’t free then better get used to it.

So nothing further to wait for,

ykl• 3 months ago

I'm really hopeful about John Ternus stepping into the CEO role. Pretty much everything he's done leading Apple's hardware engineering has been an enormous unqualified success, and for a company like Apple, having hardware lead the company seems like the right step.

gopheryourshelf• 3 months ago

Apple's headquarters The Ring made under Tim Cook represents what Apple today is . Kissing the Ring of Trump

al_borland9• 3 months ago

I’m curious Ternus’ views on services and the heavy hand Cook has had with them. I’d like to see Apple chill out a bit. Have them, but stop pestering users with in-OS ads and notifications to sign up. It’s been very off putting and cheapens the platform.

lotsofpulp3• 3 months ago

I hope they sell a higher priced monthly Apple One bundle which allows people to pay extra to not see ads in Apple Maps. Can even make it multiple tiers for no ads in Apple TV and Apple Maps, or maybe privacy plus tiers so they can earn more money by not selling search history.

al_borland9• 3 months ago

Add Apple News to the list. Paying for Apple News and still getting paywalled by various sources was insane. I don’t know who approved that, but it turned me off the whole service.

Apple Maps really needs to up their POI game. They have some native data, but I’m still regularly seeing images from 3rd party sites and get prompted to download the app. I understood it in year 1, but we’re 13 years in now. This is the primary reason I keep Google Maps around.

BitwiseFool2• 3 months ago

Personally, I hope the lack of advertisements in Apple Maps comes bundled with the fact that I purchased an iPhone. A lack of ads is a selling point.

TheDong• 3 months ago

They should charge for it.

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.

nerdsniper3• 3 months ago

They'd have to have an iron will to not do what every other leading platform has done, which is to:

- Gradually "make the line go up" by ramping up ad volume until the product is terrible (thereby ruining Apple's reputation among the 50-90% of users who aren't paying the ad-free prices).

- Periodically nerfing the premium ad-free tiers and putting ads into tiers that were previously ad-free.

- Purposefully making the lower tiers worse and worse in order to squeeze out marginal increases in conversion rates to the premium tiers.

al_borland9• 3 months ago

There is no way they’re making that much per phone on adding ads.

YouTube’s who platform is built to show ads and run by an ad company. They are likely going to be much more profitable than a few ads in the App Store and Maps, and I’ve read Premium users are more profitable than ad-supported users. They are charging $160/year after a recent price increase. The fee you’re suggesting would be over 14 years worth of payments.

Amazon lets users remove ads on Kindle for a 1 time fee of $20, and people keep Kindles a long time.

The goodwill alone would be worth more than $20, considering iPhones already have margin (unlike most Amazon hardware).

Apple has been using security as the tent pole feature to try and differentiate themselves from everyone else. One of the reasons all the other platforms feel insecure is that ads imply data collection. If they really want to “think different” they need to stop following the crowd and operate a system that doesn’t create the compromised incentives that ads tend to come with.

thimabi2• 3 months ago

I don’t closely follow the news about Apple and now I’m wondering why they decided to go forward with this change at this moment.

As the world undergoes increasing supply chain issues, wouldn’t it be in Apple’s best interest to keep Tim Cook as CEO for a while? Or is he the one who’s looking to transition to a less demanding position?

Gagarin1917• 3 months ago

Tim must have wanted to enjoy 4/20 without worrying about company drug testing.

arduanika3• 3 months ago

He already had the trail of his retirement mapped out, and picked the perfect moment to blaze it.

LarsDu88• 3 months ago

Probably didn't want to sit through any more executive kowtow meetings with the Orange Man

wombatpm• 3 months ago

I think supply chain optimization is untenable in a chaotic global trade environment. You don’t need to be an expert to buy from more suppliers and lay in a supply of stock. JIT falls apart when tariffs go from 20% to 120% to 15% based on whims and court cases.

ghaff2• 3 months ago

Cook is also 65 and doubtless has more money than god. He's been a great success and it's not unreasonable to think he may have wanted to start riding into the sunset. Apple's wishes are irrelevant at some level.

doctoboggan• 3 months ago

I know the rumors were swirling for the past few months, but just 4 more months of Cook seems like pretty short notice, no?

basisword7• 3 months ago

Given how quickly Cook had to step in for jobs, first in the interim role, four months seems like plenty of time (particularly given he's still executive chairman).

owenwil• 3 months ago

4 months in his _current_ role, but he’s not going anywhere—he’s remaining on as Chairman, which is still very much involved day-to-day.

toephu22• 3 months ago

Not really. Anyone and everyone is replaceable. Even Steve Jobs.

jjk166• 3 months ago

In 2021 the average time from announcement to new CEO for S&P 500 companies was 3.5 months, so this seems reasonably normal.

[0] https://www.spencerstuart.com/research-and-insight/2021-ceo-...

grusgrus• 3 months ago

Consider that is mostly public headway. Behind the scenes the handover, mentorship, alignment I am sure was already happening for a while. E.g. you probably don't want the incoming CEO to have to immediately clean house or people might end up doubting their decisions, getting anxious or similar. The previous CEO can start retiring, moving people around to clear out possibly problematic leaders, break up internal "gangs" and ways of work - people will be more willing to accept their decision as they've been at the head for a while and have the trust. The new CEO comes in, group dynamics and rules are still fresh and building up between everyone, they don't have a black mark for firing anyone - to me it just feels like it would be a healthier and more mature transition.

To support this I was thinking about (and obviously Googling these names because I definitely don't know them by heart, only that they recently left) the change of CFO Luca Maestri to Kevan Parekh, John Giannandrea being removed, Alan Dye leaving and being replaced with Steve Lemay.

So I take those 4 months more as like an FYI to the public than anything else. Though I am definitely not someone that knows corporate politics all that well (or at all), just mostly thinking out loud in response to your comment.

porcoda• 3 months ago

Yup. The rumor mill was talking about a CEO change for a while, and around the time you saw the rumors building you saw the departures you mentioned. Ternus was being mentioned as the likely successor at least back to November last year. So internally the shifts have already been happening for some time, only observable on the outside via the high profile departures.

alanwreath2• 3 months ago

It’s not novel to critique or idolize anyone, especially given the roll undergoing the changing of the guard. It’s not like hundreds of managers are changing.

They are all still there.

But here’s to hoping that change comes. Apple is already a rich company. But isn’t that boring?

al_borland9• 3 months ago

Many companies have quite a shakeup in management around big changes like this, though I’m not sure how Apple operates internally. Maybe they are an exception to the rule?

andsoitis• 3 months ago

Apple is already a rich company. But isn’t that boring

“Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art” — Andy Warhol

auggierose• 3 months ago

You can argue that Warhol never made anything that qualifies as art.

valine• 3 months ago

Apple silicon has been an unmitigated success so it makes sense they’d go with Ternus. On a related note Apple needs to add Ternus to their spell check dictionary

doctorpangloss• 3 months ago

they made a bet on EUV on better commercial terms than samsung and intel could do for themselves. another point of view is that TSMC's cost structure, of having highly educated, overworked, and wildly underpaid Taiwanese employees, is the real unmitigated success.

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 :)

boarsofcanada2• 3 months ago

Apple Silicon wasn’t under his purview, that would be Johny Srouji.

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.

caycep4• 3 months ago

He also got promoted

anonym00se12• 3 months ago

Ternus had essentially nothing to do with Apple silicon. That's all Srouji and his team.

sva_• 3 months ago

I believe his name is Tim Apple

apgwoz• 3 months ago

And his successor John Turnip.

iamakrt• 3 months ago

Maybe MAC mini M5

kmeisthax• 3 months ago

My personal hope for John Ternus is that he relaxes some of Apple's anti-competitive bullshit to the point where the company is willing to make iPads actually useful for anything other than 2D drawing apps. As someone who has been daily-driving an M1 iPad Pro for five years, the iPad is the most glaring hole in Apple's lineup in terms of usefulness.

Yes, I get that the iPad is supposed to be a "casual computing device" or whatever. Yes, I know Apple has delivered significant improvements to iPadOS's capabilities in those five years. But using it still feels like wearing a straitjacket a lot of the time.

jbverschoor• 3 months ago

I'd love the m5 ipad pro (with some more RAM please), and just use macos on it

I have almost no use for the keyboard that's attached to my macbook. I use an external one. On the plane it's in the way. The only use for the keyboard is when taking it with me somewhere which is not my regular spot. And even then a portable bottomcase (keyboard+touchpad) would be great.. Basically an iPad

walterbell4• 3 months ago

Now that the Microsoft exclusive has ended for Qualcomm (ex-Apple) laptops, upcoming Arm laptops from Dell/HP/Lenovo should be well supported by Google's unified ChromeOS+Android desktop, which includes a full Debian Linux pKVM VM with vGPU accelerated graphics. Plus the Nvidia-Mediatek Arm gaming laptops.

These new devices will combine Arm performance-per-watt, thousands of Linux OSS packages, ChromeOS desktop SaaS and Google Play Store touch-optimized local apps. Apple could compete by enabling MacOS and/or Linux VMs on iPad Pro, without forcing Pro users to jump through JIT-enabling hoops for iSH or UTM.

MacOS already runs on iPhone SoC in Macbook Neo.

danielrhodes• 3 months ago

I think Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon. If you think about the last 15 years, Apple has really become the biggest possible version of itself without losing its values.

Tech in general has changed quite a bit though. I don't know how Steve Jobs would have reacted to AI, and I don't know where tech itself would be if Jobs were still around. But I do think the next evolution is due and yet to be seen. It's not clear that Tim Cook would be the one to effectively see that through. And so I think his timing is impeccable and probably aligned with what is best for Apple. I have a lot of respect here: time has shown that a lot of leaders don't let go until its too late.

thenanyu• 3 months ago

Siri was under jobs. He saw AI before everyone else

ubercore• 3 months ago

I know it is actually AI, but calling Siri AI vs the current state of the art is... generous.

ivanjermakov• 3 months ago

AI talks started before Jobs was born...

throwawaymobule• 3 months ago

Siri was already an iphone/android app before Apple bought it, to be fair.

eloisant2• 3 months ago

The problem with the word "AI" is that it's a broad term with fuzzy borders depending on who you ask.

But no matter what definition you take Siri was not the first AI. It's a classical cases of Apple fans thinking Apple invented everything because they saw it first in an Apple product...

If you think about AI in broad terms, it goes back to the 1970's where any skill computers gained originally thought as only human was called AI. Like playing chess.

If you think about the recent use of AI = LLM chatbots/gen AI, Siri wasn't an LLM.

drob5187• 3 months ago

Cook did a great job. I was hesitant when Steve Jobs died and Cook took over. Jobs was so visionary and it wasn’t clear that a finance guy would be a good fit. He clearly learned what he needed to and he trusted those people around him in the organization who also had vision to do what they do best. So, kudos to Cook. He proved my fears unwarranted.

jayd16• 3 months ago

Honestly, I think Jobs would hate the fuzzy, unpolished results that AI gives you.

simplyluke2• 3 months ago

I'd also add that from the perspective of an employee in the industry, Tim Cook has had a remarkably steady hand throughout multiple business cycles in the industry that have made Apple a much better place to work than many of the other very large tech companies: no massive over-hiring after covid, no massive layoffs to correct for that, average tenure at the company BLOWS other companies out of the water, a reputation for a strong engineering culture

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.

ebbi5• 3 months ago

Agree. With the cash balance that Apple has, CEO's usually get tempted to make moves that let them flex, but he was very disciplined in that sense.

lurk2• 3 months ago

a reputation for a strong engineering culture

We’re talking about the company that shipped the storage bug?

spacedcowboy• 3 months ago

yep, I worked there for 20+ years, only retired due to health. I was about middle of the park in my group’s tenure there…

lukeify• 3 months ago

Steve Jobs existed in an era where he could show us new technology when new technology brought a sense of joy and amazement; whereas due to a multitude of factors, new technology no longer causes such emotions for a substantial portion of people.

wvbdmp• 3 months ago

Eh, it still could if anyone would make it a priority. I’m not a Jobs or Apple fanboy by any stretch, but I think this is selling him short.

makeitdouble3• 3 months ago

To a point I think the blame lies on the tech companies not doing their jobs. The iPad could have been that kind of joy and amazement machine for many, except it never was allowed to entrench on the mac or the iPhone.

The Steamdeck was a breath of fresh air, the whole Steam frames and cube could have been a big deal.

jbmchuck• 3 months ago

Agreed - once the ad-based profit model took off that no longer became possible.

mancerayder• 3 months ago

There's nothing like that reveal of the first MacBook Air, where he whips it out of a manilla envelope. I loved that first one at the time. Maybe less so on my lap when it turned into a stovetop - but it was innovative and cool and exciting, and the stuff now is not.

raincole2• 3 months ago

The main factor is that the same people are 15 years older now. You can ask people who are 50+ now whether they felt "a sense of joy and amazement" when iPhone was introduced.

Mistletoe• 3 months ago

Which is the chicken and which is the egg here though? Maybe new technology that moves people isn’t coming because Tim Cook was the ceo.

noahlt• 3 months ago

Hacker News? More like MBA news.

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.

mrits• 3 months ago

Profit maximizing often involves selling much cheaper and lower quality versions of your products. Often times this involves even getting other companies to mass produce it under your name. The cheapest Mac is arguably their best product.

Besides some changes to macOS and removing the ability to upgrade I've been pretty happy with Apple.

dvt• 3 months ago

I think Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon.

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).

atonse• 3 months ago

Except we can’t discount the fact that Jobs chose Cook as his successor. So there’s something Jobs clearly saw there, past being “diametrically opposed” to Jobs’ product obsession. Maybe Jobs felt there were enough product people.

SkyPuncher• 3 months ago

I find this critique extremely odd. Sure, Apple isn't perfect, but literally every thing they do is top tier in the category they enter.

I started writing out a list of Apple's products and it was simply [x device] in [y category] is either the best or consistently rated in the top of that category.

VirusNewbie• 3 months ago

Airpods? They make more than most SaaS decacorns. How can you not credit that as a massive success that came out of nowhere?

thenakulchawla2• 3 months ago

In Steve Jobs biography, I read that he was obsessed with the factory they built to mass produce devices. I think he was in some way also obsessed with logistics of how things were made, and Tim Cook came in and not only helped Apple but also helped transform the global supply chain.

I also think most products apple makes are in the top tier of their respective category, if not the best.

tguedes• 3 months ago

I despise the Cook hate from some Apple fans. No he’s not the visionary that Jobs was. But I think he was the best person to scale Apple up to what it is today while still keeping the soul of the company alive.

jwr2• 3 months ago

without losing its values

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.

sneak3• 3 months ago

Apple has really become the biggest possible version of itself without losing its values.

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.

Aachen6• 3 months ago

Apple has really become the biggest possible version of itself without losing its values.

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

rdbl273• 3 months ago

Cook has done more or less the opposite of what Jobs did.

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

walthamstow4• 3 months ago

I don't own one, but the Apple Watch did very much change the category, defined it even. Vision Pro was a innovative bet, maybe not a great one. Apple Silicon completely changed the game.

racl101• 3 months ago

Reminds me of the Godfather and how they called Tom Hagen not a "wartime consigliere". This was at a time when conflicts were starting up again and Vito had just been gunned down. Tim is Tom. Steve was Vito.

When Steve Jobs came back in 1997 Apple was against the ropes and they needed some radical change lest they sink.

But after they stabilized around 2010s then they didn't need radical shakeups but to maintain the good thing they got going. Tim was the man for that. And he did it well.

And yes I get that in this case one is a consigliere and one is the Don but there's similarity here.

bdelmas• 3 months ago

Tim Cook took Steve Job's vision and really took it to the moon.

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".

arendtio• 3 months ago

I am not a big Apple fan, but when I see what they did with the M-series MacBooks, it feels like they are from the future. And not just a year ahead or so, but more like a decade.

This is something Tim and John both deserve credit for.

ahmedfromtunis• 3 months ago

When Cook took over, people expected him to fail.

I don't think even Steve Jobs would've been able to imagine that Apple can get this big.

elzbardico2• 3 months ago

To be honest, a lot of industry analysts were skeptical of Jobs' second coming. And when he did a deal with Microsoft, most of them thought they were right in their initial pessimism.

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

Aachen6• 3 months ago

Pundits... or might it just be that people can't predict markets and behavior without large error margins and compounding effects that magnify these errors further over time?

rhubarbtree6• 3 months ago

Guilty. I predicted they would decline, due to a lack of new products. I guess I was right in a sense, but I didn’t see the potential of optimising what was already there.

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

tmp10423288442• 3 months ago

@dang can we fix this to mention John Ternus becoming CEO

w10-1• 3 months ago

His letter (at the top of Apple's web site) is moving:

https://www.apple.com/community-letter-from-tim/

I understand Tim is a logistics genius and Ternus is a hardware genius, and that we all want better software and policy from Apple, but I'm glad that there seems to be good people at the head of one of the biggest and most consequential companies, and further that they seem to care about being good people.

As far as I can see, that's the only way to have a prayer of scaling without too much damage, which is the key issue humanity faces today.

voncheese2• 3 months ago

Thank you for sharing the link, it's a good read.

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.

mghackerlady• 3 months ago

I really wish they did more for free software. I know they contribute heavily to LLVM and are still the main stewards of webkit, but they've very much ignored darwin as a free software operating system, to the point it feels like they only keep it free out of legal obligation

liuliu5• 3 months ago

I honestly don't know. tim@apple.com is unavailable for quite some time now (since I tried a few years ago), while lisasu@amd.com still works around that time frame.

ladberg• 3 months ago

It's always been tcook@ - and it will get looked at by someone at least

djyde4• 3 months ago

I'm really curious how he manages to read through so many emails every day.

archon810• 3 months ago

https://www.apple.com/community-letter-from-tim/

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

anonym00se12• 3 months ago

Ternus is not a hardware genius. He's a hardware engineer that rose through the ranks at Apple because, from what I've heard from Apple hardware engineers, Dan Riccio liked him "like a son."

nerdsniper3• 3 months ago

I understand Tim is a logistics genius and Ternus is a hardware genius, and that we all want better software and policy from Apple

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.

npunt8• 3 months ago

This is a really good take. This is absolutely not software's stable era, we're in for a rough next decade as AI upends every well-established software practice and the very paradigms we've relied on for so long of apps, OS, and ecosystem. This is an era we have to get through and it's going to be messy as hell.

Leadership needs to make sure everything else in the business is in order so that they can contain and shape the direction of the white-hot plasma of AI and its implications. A software leader would be too hands-on in this process and get nerd sniped. Sometimes you need some distance.

ugh123• 3 months ago

but I'm glad that there seems to be good people at the head

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

herodoturtle• 3 months ago

His letter (at the top of Apple's web site) is moving

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

spacechild1• 3 months ago

and further that they seem to care about being good people.

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.

kobalsky• 3 months ago

Tim is a logistics genius

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.

MPSimmons• 3 months ago

So, John Apple?

alanwreath2• 3 months ago

Johnny Apple Seed references incoming…

icyfox• 3 months ago

So much of what Apple has lost over the last 10 years is a lower bar for what counts as good enough.

You see this most obviously in software and marketing - the kinds of decisions where only a few people sign off at the end, and where "good enough" is whatever those few people decide it is. You see it less in hardware and procurement where there's a powerful review cycle and scrutiny at every level of the stack. Work there is more immediately measurable: benchmarks for performance, dollars for cost.

The "vibe" of software, or of a PDF [^1], is much harder to catch that way. There's no benchmark that flags it and most conventional executives aren't drilling down in that level of detail to see it either.

You want distributed decision-making, of course. But that only works well if it's distributed to people who've cultivated their own taste and who will make good calls under pressure. I'm not sure how much of that gets fixed by leadership change at the top. Taste isn't really something a CEO can decree into a 60,000 person org. But I've only heard good things about Ternus, so I'm optimistic. Fingers crossed for a bright new chapter.

[^1]: https://www.apple.com/promo/pdf/US_FY26_Earth_Day_Promo_Tand...

SirMaster2• 3 months ago

Why is the photo so blurry?

Austin_Conlon2• 3 months ago

Maybe it was edited by Apple Intelligence.

SirMaster2• 3 months ago

Oh wow, it's much clearer now. Guess it was a mistake lol.

Austin_Conlon2• 3 months ago

Wonder to what extent Craig Federighi was considered and what the decision-making factors were there.

mabedan3• 3 months ago

He could have not wanted the job to begin with. CEO is no joke, and for him would mean to say goodbye to software forever.

troupo• 3 months ago

I wish he would say good bye to software forever. Apple software is getting worse by the minute it seems.

mrbnprck• 3 months ago

Age, possibly. Ternus has 6 more years until retirement than Federighi.

lateforwork6• 3 months ago

To what extent do you think Apple software has done well under Craig's leadership?

pier25• 3 months ago

John Ternus really did turn the Mac around. The last 5 or so years of the Intel era were a disaster. Hopefully he will be able to turn things around with software too.

voncheese2• 3 months ago

Yeah and with long development, lead and change horizons that come with hardware, that's a super hard thing to do.

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

mpweiher2• 3 months ago

One of the reasons software is harder is that people think it's easier.

michelb2• 3 months ago

Maybe, but I think we have to wait for Craig Federighi to leave first.

cubefox3• 3 months ago

The NYT was right: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/technology/apple-ceo-tim-...

aurareturn2• 3 months ago

Plenty of people speculated that Ternus was the successor for a long time.

aanet3• 3 months ago

Whoa, didn't expect the announcement to come so soon. Of course, the sound bytes were everywhere, but even then, this was a surprise announcement.

So, the Tim Cook era lasted 15 years (2011 - 2026). He's 65yo, and he could have easily hung in there for a few more years. But I believe he's leaving at the peak -- both Apple's and his own -- and this might be the best time to leave, rather than being forced out (as many too-long-in-the-tooth CEOs have been) when the company inevitably grows slower, or has a crisis.

Ternus is 50-51 yo, roughly the age when Cook himself took over Apple. There the similarities disappear. Ternus is a HW guy through-and-through. I hope he has solid SW and Design team with him. He's gonna need it, given all the big/small design snafus in the recent past. [Not including Mac Neo in there, which looks stellar by any means]

Wishing him luck; he's gonna need it. (and me too, my $$$ are invested in AAPL, and I ain't selling anytime soon, so well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

caycep4• 3 months ago

Granted, 65 is probably a milestone for anyone. I think BMW has a hard stop for its execs at that age

aanet3• 3 months ago

Agreed... EU (and most countries, afaik) have age limits for CEOs, which I do support.

Though US famously does not, which is a curse in itself, IMHO.

Though tbh, it's worth wondering if Berkshire Hathaway without the Sage is still the same...

xyst2• 3 months ago

At least John has an engineering background, been with company for couple decades and not some private equity/hedge fund/wannabe Steve Jobs visionary douchebag.

Personally, I have lost all interest in Apple and been slowly switching off their hw/sw/saas for some time.

gigatexal• 3 months ago

Yeah glad to see a hardware person take the helm and not a bean counter. The hardware is masterful now. Let’s keep it that way. Wonder if he kills the Vision Pro.

quaddoggy• 3 months ago

Surprised that someone from Gen X is getting the opportunity to lead a company of this caliber. We've spent most of our adult lives getting smothered by Boomers and Millennials.

Thanks for making all that money, Tim. Now please retire. Please.

esafak2• 3 months ago

Google is gen x.

silisili• 3 months ago

And Microsoft. And Netflix. And Uber.

I'm perplexed by the assertion, unless it was some joke that went over my head.

dekhn• 3 months ago

Prediction: Sundar will step aside and Demis will replace him.

(actually I doubt this- Demis does not want to run a big company whose main business is Ads)

cubefox3• 3 months ago

The problem is that neither Sundar nor Demis are remotely as focused and competitive as Sam and Dario.

lateforwork6• 3 months ago

Tim Cook stepped down when he hit 65. Sundar has 12 years to go to hit that milestone.

threepts• 3 months ago

demis has always publicly stated he does not care about the business aspect as much as the scientific endeavor.

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

pupppet2• 3 months ago

Anyone know why?

Tim gifted Donald a trophy 8 months ago doing his legacy no favors. You wouldn't do this if you knew you were on your way out. Makes me wonder if something happened between August 2025 and now.

pertymcpert3• 3 months ago

You give a trinket to a near dictator in order to not have your company, which you're responsible for, dragged over the coals and attacked by a psychopathic goverment. In the grand scheme of things this was a completely genius play and did no harm to anyone.

tjmc• 3 months ago

That's a reasonable take - Apple had a gun to their head regarding tarriffs and exposure to China, but I'd still love to know how Steve would have played the same hand.

tonyedgecombe3• 3 months ago

Or something is about to happen.

cooper_ganglia2• 3 months ago

Committing $100M to U.S. manufacturing is pretty good for one's legacy, I'd say.

alsetmusic6• 3 months ago

For Apple nerds that pay close attention to company, this is no surprise. Third-party dev Marco Arment wrote a blog post speaking to Ternus earlier this month[0].

Marco has enough standing within our world that it's actually a clever idea to appeal to Ternus on these terms. He'll probably be aware that it was written and the appeal is somewhat generic in its call to reverse course on some Cook-era policies.

We're all very hopeful but there's not enough information available on the outside to predict with any certainty how he'll lead.

0. https://marco.org/2026/04/01/letter-to-john-ternus

4gotunameagain• 3 months ago

Why would anyone pay close attention to a company ?

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

echoangle• 3 months ago

Because you’re a shareholder.

Or because you’re interested in the products and the „company community“ is fun and you like talking about it.

alsetmusic6• 3 months ago

I dunno. Cause I spend a lot of money on their products and a lot of my time using their software. The announcements they make affect the way I use computers.

Does anyone here pay close attention to updates in the Linux kernel or is that pretty stupid too? (To be fair, you didn't call me stupid, but it's sorta there.)

What's Framework doing? I'm pretty jazzed about their laptops even though I don't buy them.

What about game companies that get bought by Microsoft and now people worry that the franchise they love might get killed?

I'm a nerd and I care a lot about a thing. I don't feel bad about that.

throw0101d3• 3 months ago

Why would anyone pay close attention to a company ?

Why would anyone pay close attention to a sports team? A musician? A writer?

But if you read Arment's post:

As you grow into the leader that we know you can be, I urge you, on behalf of everyone who loves computers as much as we do, to protect and cultivate this spirit of Apple’s founders as the company’s top priority:
*We love computers. We don’t hide that — we celebrate it!
*We use computers to enhance our minds, lives, and abilities — not to be controlled, restricted, tricked, placated, angered, or surveilled.
*Our computers work for us, with the utmost respect for our time, attention, money, data, and privacy.
*We are customers and owners — not resources to be harvested, annoyed, or badgered into ever more services and upsells.
Apple leads the industry in these values, but leading doesn’t always mean excelling. Remaining true to these values requires constant diligence, honest evaluation, introspection, and the audacity and courage to effect change.

* https://marco.org/2026/04/01/letter-to-john-ternus

Perhaps if more companies had values besides "shareholder value"[1] the world would be a better place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

elxr3• 3 months ago

When your livelihood indirectly depends on their whims (aka the app store rules) or the possibility some new feature or product they announce directly affects the way you build your software, either positively or negatively, why not pay close attention?

hbn2• 3 months ago

I'm curious how you ended up creating an account on Hacker News if you don't see why people would be interested in major news regarding the biggest computer maker on the planet.

stasomatic4• 3 months ago

Marco should concentrate on fixing the UX abomination that Overcast has become instead of writing breathy sophomoric letters. At this point, I’ll vibe code my own podcast player.

yokoprime• 3 months ago

If you want to burn tokens making a bespoke podcast player its probably a good learning exercise. I like Overcast, it would be great if i could see the latest episodes on the front page when opening the app, otherwise its fine.

alsetmusic6• 3 months ago

I mean, whatever your opinion of his redesign of the app (I know a lot of people were pretty unhappy), he is a host on a podcast that has had Phil Schiller (former head of marketing who was on stage with Jobs for many years) as a guest while he was still an Apple exec. He's a known entity to them.

Further, one of the other hosts is John Siracusa, the guy who wrote in-depth 18 page reviews of MacOS X releases for ArsTechnica for many years. He got a shoutout from Apple's head of software, Craig Federighi, when I attended a live interview in 2019 during the week of their World Wide Developer's Conference (hosted by John Gruber of Daring Fireball). Siracusa must have been in the first few rows because Federighi said something like, "Oh, there's Siracusa." You could label that "fan service" because everyone in that theater knows who he's talking about and it's a form of acknowledging the crowd as a community.

So, all of this is to say that Marco is one of the small number of outsiders who could write such a letter on their blog and have upper ranks of Apple hear about it and maybe, maybe not, be curious enough to see what was said. I can't do that. I don't know if you can. But Marco can. I'm glad he took a shot. Whether it means anything, we'll never know.

And yes, the release of his redesign was premature, but I'm ok with the app as my daily podcast driver right now.

alsetmusic6• 3 months ago

I think it's interesting that the handoff will be complete on Sept 1. That would mean Ternus will helm his first iPhone launch that month. Auspicious timing. Curious the math they calculated when landing on this date. Certainly tees him up for an early win if the products are well-received.

Whatarethese• 3 months ago

Apples first foldable phone. It will be a huge success.

Geee• 3 months ago

My guess is that they'll release something impressive in September, and they want to give Ternus an early win as you said. Maybe a new completely product or Vision Air.

prawn• 3 months ago

iPhone Ultra.

mpweiher2• 3 months ago

Another iPhone mini...

qubob• 3 months ago

Tim's departure announcement is timed between product announcements. Although, not a surprise to anyone

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.

LoganDark• 3 months ago

One more thing: See ya suckers! I'm outta here.

neuralkoi• 3 months ago

I hope they will turn Siri around with these changes.

RyanZhuuuu• 3 months ago

can't believe craige is not the ceo

djyde4• 3 months ago

I always thought Craig would become CEO.

boarsofcanada2• 3 months ago

If you compare the trajectories, I think it’s safe to say software has been a dumpster fire under Craig compared to what’s been accomplished on the hardware side. The fact that Craig has been the face of WWDC for many years made many people see him as the face of the company but it’s been clear they have been elevating Ternus’s visibility in product announcements for a few years now.

RaoulP• 3 months ago

For a long time I was hoping it would be Jeff Williams. For the brief moments these heads at Apple get the spotlight, I always felt he gave off a sense of humanity and sincerity.

apple4ever3• 3 months ago

I appreciate what Cook did for the hardware, but he really failed on the software side. Too many little and annoying bugs. I look forward to Ternus improving that side while maintaining the same hardware quality.

mabedan3• 3 months ago

If Johny Ive stayed, he could have become CEO... Now he has to design Ferrari dashboards and AI Pins

geodel2• 3 months ago

"Designing AI Pin has been the greatest privilege of my life. I'd rank it higher than anything I did before"

Petersipoi• 3 months ago

You buy that? If he really did say that, it's just a mixture of cope and a passive aggressive attempt at a jab.

denkmoon3• 3 months ago

What an absolute tragedy that would be for the world

nottorp7• 3 months ago

he could have become CEO

Oh that would have been a treat. He would have made Apple hardware so unusable for real work that I'd have switched back to beige boxes running Linux.

I'm sure he dreams about keyboards that are harder to type on and even more sensitive to dust than the emoji keyboards of yore.

tsunamifury• 3 months ago

"What a mediocre designer, I hear all he's ever one is a phone and some music player"

This entire thread is evidence of why hackernews crowd fails to make anything successful anymore, product or otherwise

Kuyawa• 3 months ago

Mister Ternus, please create an Apple TV.

It will redefine the way we watch TV and that's exactly your job, to make something truly unique. And I'll tell you the secret sauce, the remote. I know you'll come up with something totally different, a marvel of engineering that will drop jaws around the world. Different aluminum colors and extra flat? Check. But that's not what this new generation needs. They want to watch tiktok and instagram in their TV and nobody right now offers an out-of-this-world experience. Social media consumption on a big screen. Excel at that and you will sell millions at whatever price you set.

My credit card is ready...

mandeepj• 3 months ago

Some people might say Tim is leaving but he got himself promoted, just like Bezos. So, being an “Executive” chairman he’s going to be actively involved and be responsible, but not on daily basis and deep into each of verticals.

Also, going over his past statements as recent as during this year, it seems like he didn’t want to leave his CEO position, so he got forced out?

snowwrestler• 3 months ago

Also, going over his past statements as recent as during this year, it seems like he didn’t want to leave his CEO position, so he got forced out?

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.

instagraham• 3 months ago

I get that this year's iPhone will be marketed as the first under Ternus's overall leadership, but truthfully, we can expect next year's to have more of his mark, since I imagine most of the details for the iPhone 18 have long been done, dusted and set into motion.

cooper_ganglia2• 3 months ago

John Ternus is the perfect choice. I expected Craig, and that would've been great, but Ternus is going to really be something special in that role!

lateforwork6• 3 months ago

Why would Craig have been great? macOS usability and quality has suffered greatly under Craig.

bilsbie2• 3 months ago

Do.you.think.he’ll.fix.the.usability.issues?

yalogin• 3 months ago

Wonder how much of this decision has to do with the current climate and not wanting to deal with the current head. I was quite disappointed to see cook towing the line and bending the knee, let’s see what Ternus will do

vicchenai• 3 months ago

15 years of supply chain excellence and the software running on that hardware quietly got worse every cycle. the m1 transition was so clean it made everyone else look like they were guessing. ternus thinks in tolerances and thermal envelopes - giving the keys to someone who's already pulled off the hardest platform migration in apple's recent history seems right.

caycep4• 3 months ago

To make the M1 transition so clean took a lot of software excellence...one can argue Apple's compiler / virtualization / software languages team is the best in the industry (grumbling from Swift UI developers aside...)

cyberpunk• 3 months ago

They’ve done a few impressive things also, remember that time they converted the root filesystem on every ios device on the fly with a point release? Kudos to whoever clicked that particular button I’d have bricked it personally ;)

p1necone2• 3 months ago

The m1 transition was clean, and the hardware is amazing, don't get me wrong (I just bought a neo and I'm very happy with it). But the transition did look even more amazing than it should have because of just how dogshit Intel macs had gotten, especially around thermal throttling. Apple could have built much nicer systems on Intel already had they just made them slightly thicker and used sensible heatsink and fan designs for the hardware they were putting in them.

(We're seeing echoes of that again now where you can get 20-30% performance bumps in Neos and Airs just by sticking a thermal pad on the CPU - Apple is still allergic to cooling, they've just built amazingly efficient hardware that sidesteps the problem)

bilsbie2• 3 months ago

Will this change their AI strategy (or lack of)

geodel2• 3 months ago

Like blowing hundred billion dollars for undifferentiated technology?

qsz13• 3 months ago

I just hope they can bring back the live events for the product releases.

segmondy• 3 months ago

Tim saw the ram shortage and said, "WTF am I suppose to do with this? I'm out of here!" Better leave a hero ...

nixpulvis• 3 months ago

Apple is good at hardware, they need help with software. I hope putting a hardware guy in charge can still improve this situation.

carefree-bob5• 3 months ago

Well, if I was Apple, I would not put one of their software guys into the position since the software leadership team has been ineffective. So either hire externally (crapshoot) or promote internally. It makes sense. Hopefully the hardware guys will knock some sense into the software leadership and impose accountability in that arena.

zoogeny2• 3 months ago

I've been critical of Cook at times because I feel his vision was a business vision more than the kind of futurism I felt from Jobs. Cook was the ultimate bean counter, hyper-optimizing Apple from a financial and operational perspective. I felt like he took less risks and was mostly squeezing every single advantage that Apple had to its limit.

But I cannot argue with the results the man achieved. Especially the transition to A-series and then M-series chips has been an incredible success. Perhaps the biggest flop was the Apple Vision Pro, but it is hard to really call him out on that since it wasn't that Apple lost a battle, it was that the product category just hasn't caught on (yet). Siri is another place where Apple has lagged but they could very easily catch up with the massive interest in local AI on the mac minis.

I think it will be difficult to look back on his legacy without giving him a large share of credit for Apple's continued success.

bell-cot• 3 months ago

Bold futurism can work very well when you're the (relative) scrappy underdog. So long as you're too smart or lucky to make any huge mistakes.

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

cg805• 3 months ago

Strategic competence and playing to your strengths is ok to me. Avoiding lots of bad decisions can sometimes be just as good as making some really good decisions.

jillesvangurp2• 3 months ago

The Vision Pro's failings are IMHO not software or hardware related but a poorly executed platform strategy for content. Apple's reflex to build walled gardens has crippled the effort. And it's not the first time. Their Apple TV strategy was held back for years as well. Great hardware. Very cheap. You can plug it into any TV. It's not a bad game console even. But it lacked games. And streaming TV channels. And for a long time also streaming content. Apple fixed that eventually but Apple TV remains a distant competitor to more main stream platforms such as Netflix, which works on just about anything. Just like Youtube, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO, Disney, and all the rest. Apple TV at this point is an also ran that apparently is barely profitable. A few nice TV series but very much a niche player. The Apple TV hardware is more or less irrelevant at this point. And despite the name, Apple never made a TV or much of a dent into conquering the living room.

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.

nxobject3• 3 months ago

Re: Apple TV (the studios and the content)... it is a bit of mystery: it's very worthy and good - arguably one of Tim Cook's finest achievements - but not a runaway success in a very competitive post-TV market. Steve Jobs shepherded Pixar into the world, and I'm sure he'd consider Apple TV (again the content arm) a comparable achievement.

Steve Jobs called the original Apple TV a "hobby", and, similarly for now there isn't any pressure for it to massively grow.

puelocesar2• 3 months ago

It’s not the “walled garden” that’s preventing Valve to write Proton for Mac, it’s the lack of Vulcan support. Apple pushed to its own Metal framework when they deprecated OpenGl, which is probably great for performance, but outright denying support for Vulkan was a killer blow for games.

Rapzid3• 3 months ago

If Macs were "great" for gaming people would be buying them for gaming.

zoogeny2• 3 months ago

There is some good analysis here, but your argument about the Vision Pro being a content failure doesn't hit for me. It isn't just Apple that has failed in this space, we have Meta, Valve, HTC and a few others who have all had pretty lack-luster results. VR as a product category just doesn't seem to have caught on.

boppo12• 3 months ago

massive interest in local AI

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

rhubarbtree6• 3 months ago

Moving to Apple Silicon perfectly suited Tim Cook’s skill set and is a great foundation for the company’s future. He played to his strengths in a way that genuinely brought huge benefits to the consumer.

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.

stasomatic4• 3 months ago

“Good morning. We have moved to Taiwan.”

I like Tim, but I don’t think the Tim we see is the real Tim. He must be an absolute elite sniper ninja cyborg internally, which is also cool.

perfmode• 3 months ago

Nothing but respect for Tim Cook. I feel fortunate that a company as principled as Apple on privacy and human values holds a dominant position in computing and makes quality products. I once encountered him dining alone in Palo Alto, years ago. He struck me as a humble man, someone who happens to be gifted and has put that gift to good use. A beacon of light from Alabama. I’m grateful for his efforts, and hopeful that Ternus can carry the Apple legacy forward as the baton passes to the next generation.

dzonga• 3 months ago

Tim Cook will be one of the legendary CEOs in history.

he knows when to be conservative - and knows when to push hard.

qualities very few CEOs have shown to have in practice.

all his contemporary competitors have ridden on certain waves e.g A.I to increase company valuation - while he did sorely on just pure operations not hype.

bitbeq• 3 months ago

Tim has done an amazing job in the post-Jobs era with his logistics. Brought Apple from $350B to $4T. This move makes perfect sense as Apple needs to start their next chapter with how rapid the world is changing at the moment. I do hope Apple's values don't change going into this new era.

Rapzid3• 3 months ago

All FAANG except Netflix are trillion to multi-trillion companies now. And Microsoft too.

Tim is fine, but there are clearly other, more powerful forces at play than "Tim Apple amaze".

mvkel3• 3 months ago

Cook is known to be monk-like, so the relative quiet of this announcement is no surprise. Hopefully Ternus takes some risks and revisits some things from scratch (the OS layer)[0] rather than continuing down the path of more service add-ons that Cook seemed to be excitedly geared up for. Personally, it's worth noting that Ternus did -not- directly oversee the Vision Pro, which is encouraging.

[0] As Steve Jobs said in 2005: "OS X is the most advanced operating system on the planet and it has set Apple up for the next 20 years."

How incredibly prophetic that 21 years later, MacOS is suddenly showing its age.

dlahoda13• 3 months ago

linux and windows are older.

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

mvkel3• 3 months ago

Right. We're not still running Windows Vista, or RedHat. Time for a rethink.

torben-friis2• 3 months ago

Cook is known to be monk-like

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

BitwiseFool2• 3 months ago

"I've got no idea what he's like as a person"

Case in point? From what I've read he's reserved, keeps a very low profile, and is dedicated to his work. We know next to nothing about his personal life.

perardi• 3 months ago

I don’t know if I would go so far as to say “monk-like”. He’s a college football die-hard. But he is a very chill dude.

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.

JetSpiegel3• 3 months ago

no overt politics

Excuse me? Giving a literal gold trophy to the God-Emperor Trump is not politics?

nodesocket2• 3 months ago

I wish Apple would lean into gaming and create a competitive GPU system. Does not have to compete with a 5090, but 5070 level and game developers will come and port games. Huge untapped market. I still have to run a dedicated gaming PC just to play games (especially Flight Simulator).

sultanofsaltin• 3 months ago

Pretty simple hot take:

This period in Apple’s history will be the cold ice bath post Jobs.

There may be serious fanboy energy to this but Apple has so much dry powder going for it still, and to put that in the hands of someone who actually builds, along with what looks to be a strong rumor mill year with VR stuff and the foldable to create a big tailwind… it seems like a pretty intentional move.

Also if they dropped one more subscription on us before expanding categories they might’ve caused an avalanche in lack of confidence.

Cook did an excellent job of raking in cash for bet the company size bets that he wouldn’t be guaranteed to see through. The dude is clearly a salt of the earth, values guy, should enjoy a proper retirement era.

pzo3• 3 months ago

I hope Ternus can turn this ship. Apple wasted the last 5 years without any significant innovation/revolution or even without significant evolution. No groundbreaking change from iphone 12 pro in current iphone 17 pro.

Before we had many groundbreaking features that redefined how you use smarphone:

- gps

- flashlight (yes everybody with flashlight in the pocket!)

- front selfie camera + video calls

- compass + accelerometer + gyroscope

- good wide and ultrawide (video) camera

- nfc + apple pay

- fingerprint / faceid

- esim

- magsafe

Now you can have iphone 12 pro and don't miss much from iphone 17 pro.

ebbi5• 3 months ago

Every time I see this argument, it comes across as lazy. iPhone (and smartphones in general) are a mature product, so of course it'll be iterative. But you can't compare the camera from the first few iPhones to the latest ones. I certainly didn't expect, when the first iPhone launched, that the camera on an iPhone would replace my dedicated camera for 90% of my use cases.

celsoazevedo4• 3 months ago

You make a good point, but at the same time, things are a bit stale if you look outside the Apple and Samsung bubbles.

For example, a Vivo X300 Ultra or Xiaomi 17 Ultra. Much better cameras, larger batteries, 90-100W charging, etc.

lateforwork6• 3 months ago

iPhone (and smartphones in general) are a mature product, so of course it'll be iterative.

That's the kind of thing people say when they are out of ideas. The reality is that the mobile phone market was already a mature market, with Nokia as the leader, even before the iPhone was released. Then Steve Jobs showed the world how to innovate.

chatmasta• 3 months ago

What about Apple Silicon?

adastra22• 3 months ago

Believe it or not, more than five years ago.

Krastan• 3 months ago

Its been more than 5 years since the M1 came out in Nov 2020

pzo3• 3 months ago

yes they innovated with apple sillicon but I would say it only shines in macOS environment. On iOS / iPadOS it's completely untapped - like having ferrari with only gravel roads around.

ValentineC4• 3 months ago

I hope Ternus can turn this ship. Apple wasted the last 5 years without any significant innovation/revolution or even without significant evolution. No groundbreaking change from iphone 12 pro in current iphone 17 pro.

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.

n8cpdx• 3 months ago

I think the satellite connectivity is a pretty big deal and iPhone led with that. Also camera control literally changed how I use the phone.

Aachen6• 3 months ago

For anyone else wondering what this means:

lets you quickly open your iPhone camera and access common camera settings *points at button* (https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-the-camera-contro...)

The way you phrased it about changing how you use a phone, I was expecting you control a lot of the phone via the camera somehow (gestures?) and don't need to bother with the pesky touchscreen. But okay no it's just the camera button that has been on cameras and other phones since time immemorial

1970-01-012• 3 months ago

Don't forget about the Apple Car. 100% of that failed, and Tim spent a decade on it. Quite a bit of attention on here, but it seems we've quickly forgotten all about it since it was never seen.

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

carefree-bob5• 3 months ago

I forgot all about the Apple car when assessing Tim's legacy, too.

I guess if you are gonna fail, fail so deeply that it doesn't affect your legacy :P

kelseydh• 3 months ago

Really sucks we never got to see any of the prototypes or designs they built for it.

spacebanana72• 3 months ago

Apple was wise to get out of the EV business. It's very expensive in terms of factories, regulation etc and not very profitable. They had no first mover advantage, government backing or legacy advantage.

What's the best case scenario? Make few billion a year fuzzed with long term warranty liabilities? That might sound nice, but for apple their companion products like AirPods or the Apple Watch easily clear much better profit. Putting their corporate effort into another companion product is more economically sensible and far less risky.

cheschire• 3 months ago

The Vision Pro was a big bet that failed. But they tried.

j16sdiz3• 3 months ago

The satellite message thing?

gehsty2• 3 months ago

My washing machine still only washes clothes!

comrade1234• 3 months ago

Is this a reward for a job well-done? Because apple hardware for the last 5-years has been amazing. The software though has sucked - will it be more years of amazing hardware and shit software? In other words focusing on developers, especially of llm software? I'm fine with that. Maybe we'll get rack-mountable apple ai servers (joking - apple servers were great and lasted a decade+ but went nowhere)

Yeah, what's going on? I'm confused by this choice - I would have expected a marketer. Maybe they really are doubling down on hardware for the ai age?

xeonmc• 3 months ago

    I would have expected a marketer.

Or as some may call it, a Shiller

dlahoda13• 3 months ago

they replacing person doing horizontal scalability with vertical.

do they predict problems of some sort - like lost of ability to small down transistors for a while or supply chain disruption(increased prices of components sourcing)?

pacifi30• 3 months ago

Thank you Tim Cook, as I am writing this on an iPhone.

Is this a golden opportunity to take on the software side of Apple, native apps like photos and messages, notes app? So much good data we give to Apple apps sit their idling, there is a play here to turn them into an independent playable artifacts and shared digital human network company. My friend emma has her snack Game on! I would like to get a snack list derived from her snack data. Yes, texting works but there is no programmatic way of accessing each other’s data. I believe this data needs be freed from Apple.

Apple’s privacy approach is stellar, that quest though is a prison where our data goes and does a slow death.

tastyface5• 3 months ago

Good riddance to an effective CEO whose entire legacy will be tarnished by a giant, gold-plated asterisk.

nelox• 3 months ago

China is effectively run by engineers, so that is a good hedge for Apple.

butterlesstoast• 3 months ago

Anyone else notice the header text gets cut off on mobile? On an iPhone 17 no less...

torben-friis2• 3 months ago

Can't reproduce on an OPPO, funnily enough.

ozmaverick72• 3 months ago

Can not believe no one has asked the obvious question - is his nickname Tina ?

t1234s• 3 months ago

They need to move all of the iOS boatware apps bundled with macOS to the app store so people can choose to uninstall then reinstall them later.

CarbonCycles• 3 months ago

I commend Apple for hiring someone internally...someone who climbed up the ranks and understands the DNA of the company.

Also think it's cool that John Ternus has only a bachelor's degree with a very down to earth presence. I completely dig his LI page being really bare bones.

I suspect Apple is about to experience another Renaissance era...

lateforwork6• 3 months ago

Plus his degree is in mechanical engineering. I wonder how he climbed up the ranks of hardware engineering with a degree in mechanical engineering. Quite amazing.

guzfip• 3 months ago

I wonder how he climbed up the ranks of hardware engineering with a degree in mechanical engineering. Quite amazing.

Given the level of mathematics I’ve seen involved in hardware, I’d assume the average mech eng. has a better chance than the average software eng.

Aachen6• 3 months ago

only a bachelor's degree

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

jodrellblank2• 3 months ago

I assume they mean "good that Apple's new CEO doesn't have an MBA".

elxr3• 3 months ago

In the context of a tech CEO, any degree past a bachelor's has very, very little relevance in the real world.

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

nntwozz• 3 months ago

Cook will handle the politics and optics, he will remain like a king representing Apple without any true power.

Ternus will be the soldier in the trenches.

I feel excitement for the future of Apple.

adrianwaj• 3 months ago

Any chance of a future where hardware can be customized at the design stage, like 3D printing but taken to an even higher level, even for 1-off builds? So prompt-driven manufacturing? For example, a watch with a USB-C port?

One day that watch could be your only PC. And then some type of eyeglass for a screen. Can also do "terrain overlays" Terminator style. I suppose battery power is the bottleneck so maybe long-distance wireless power delivery is the key (as what Tesla originally created.) So no battery at all.

6thbit• 3 months ago

So John gets to announce the Fold comes september

hamasho• 3 months ago

It's exciting to see that the new CEO of Apple is a hardware guy.

I was just thinking about what had been avoiding enshittification, and Apple's hardware was the only thing I came up. All other stuff, all products from Google, MS, Facebook, Twitter, and even Nvidia though the performance was improved has gone downhill. It's not only tech companies, but fast food, car manufacturers, real estate, and many others, if it wasn't shit from the start like consulting, healthcare, and marketing.

They have flaws, like not allowing users to repair the hardware, but well, at least it's consistent.

I really hope Apple (hardware at least) will remain free from enshittification.

tamimio• 3 months ago

I have to admit, regardless of whatever opinions you may have on Apple, Tim is/was probably the best bug tech CEO in the sea of evil ones out there, or evil and grifters, he remained focused on what’s the best might be for the users and also the company.

greatgib• 3 months ago

Sad to see Tim Cook leaving as I was enjoying this downtrend of Apple products that is driving users to more open (and better) solutions like Linux PCs. I cross fingers for John Ternus to still be greedy and not being too competent.

richardatlarge2• 3 months ago

Like Sam Altman, Tim Cook makes me think that what we fear in AI is already here. These two guys are corporate robots that act only in the service of the bottom line.

nxobject3• 3 months ago

In retrospect, it seems Apple telegraphed Ternus well in advance - the NYT had an article well in January that clearly wasn't a source of friction with Apple Marketing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/technology/apple-ceo-tim-...

djyde4• 3 months ago

While I don't agree with many things Cook has done during his tenure, like the Touch Bar and removing the SD card slot from MacBooks, I have to admit the man knows how to make money.

bschwindHN3• 3 months ago

I don't like that Tim Cook added the touch bar and removed the SD card slot, but you have to give him credit for also removing the touch bar and adding the SD card slot ;)

1123581321• 3 months ago

Hah, had a funny moment along these lines. SD vs MicroSD came up as a topic. I glanced down at my M3 MBP and said, “looks like MacBook Pros use the regular SD slot.” The guy solemnly informed me that actually, Apple had removed the SD card slot from my laptop. His face turned red when I turned it to show him.

montgomery_r• 3 months ago

There’s a lot of commentary to the effect that the Mac hardware is good, but the software is somehow terrible. Speaking as someone who first used a Mac Plus, graduated to an SE/30, and is now on a Mac mini m4 pro… I can remember when Macintosh was widely held to be an acronym for Most Applications Crash, If Not, The Operating System Hangs. The software has always been terrible, until you try the other guys’ stuff. The hardware has often been good, and is in a purple period right now. Enjoy it while it lasts! (It won’t).

t0lo• 3 months ago

RIP Tim, the best derivative by the book uninspired machine to ever do it.

laughing_mann• 3 months ago

Please, do not make the products any thicker!

bofia• 3 months ago

This would not be on The Successor

ChrisMarshallNY2• 3 months ago

Sounds like a good choice. Glad to have an engineer in charge. Tim Cook is no spring chicken. I do hope Ternus maintains the focus on privacy.

That focus on privacy pisses off a lot of devs (Yours Truly, included), but I sincerely believe in it. I write apps that Serve a demographic that values privacy.

ourmandave• 3 months ago

What if, right after Tim is gone, all the leaks of iPhone designs and colors stopped?

I'm just askin' questions.

sMarsIntruder• 3 months ago

What are you suggesting?

shmerl• 3 months ago

Will it change Apple's extreme bend into lock-in for the better?

jsemrau• 3 months ago

He is proof that LinkedIn doesn't matter.

celeryd• 3 months ago

Apple is currently lightyears ahead in privacy compared to any other major consumer tech company, is this going to still be the case with Mr. Ternus at the helm? That's not a question meant to be answered right away, but my current mindset evaluating the change in leadership as a consumer.

EDIT: Also, can Apple take over the data center already? I am sick of HP and Dell.

ninjahawk1• 3 months ago

Big shoes to fill. Steve Jobs vouched for Tim Cook to be CEO…then Tim has been the CEO to see Apple become a global billion dollar company. This new CEO has been at apple for like 25 years (I think) so I’m sure he’ll do fine.

tiffanyh• 3 months ago

I do think Ternus being at Apple for 25-years (2001) is getting lost in the story.

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.

Fanofilm• 3 months ago

Apple needed a "AI CEO". Hopefully John Ternus is Apple's "AI CEO". That is the win-vs-lose.

Apple included.

mizzao• 3 months ago

Apple accidentally has a giant moat in having the only hardware that can run AI models locally on consumer products, plus not having thrown a huge pile of money into the tar pit of model training, which is ultimately becoming a race to the bottom with identical products, perfect competition, and razor thin (currently negative) margins.

They're gonna be fine in the AI age just like Costco was able to be a honey badger about e-commerce.

jonahs197• 3 months ago

RIP apple

vincnetas• 3 months ago

when job of ceo is to make sure that policies around the globe don't interfere with business: "Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world."

lasky• 3 months ago

Big day!

Least understood yet most influential company in the history, present and future of the venture capital backed tech world.

simonw• 3 months ago

I appreciated John Gruber's piece on this: https://daringfireball.net/2026/04/another_day_has_come

isodev• 3 months ago

Oh finally! Ternus is at least fun to look at during keynotes so we have that to look forward to.

pcblues2• 3 months ago

Good luck to him. If he was behind the Neo, then he deserves the post. That's the perfect new product in the mac world.

bg24• 3 months ago

It is a net positive to have a technologist and hardware leader at the helm. In this era, Apple can hire the right people to build software faster. but they need a strong hardware leader at the helm to differentiate themselves. In local AI, they have a unique opportunity, but limited window of time.

arjunthazhath• 3 months ago

Tim did cook well!!

michelb2• 3 months ago

Earlier than I expected. Seeing that Johny Srouji got promoted as well, this reshuffle might have been a way to make sure he stays for a few more years as well?

nurettin• 3 months ago

Arthur Levinson, who has been Apple’s non-executive chairman for the past 15 years, will become its lead independent director on September 1, 2026.

What are these titles? Why? Who does what? It feels like a linkedin tea party.

lastdong2• 3 months ago

I have used Macs since the Classic era. My best Mac was a PowerBook G4 that could run Windows on a VM faster than most Windows machines at the time. My first MacBook was brilliant, but I have noticed a decline since then. My 6-year-old MacBook Pro really struggles nowadays, whereas I remember a time when people proudly said their 10-year-old Macs were still snappy even during rosetta. Currently, Linux is the preferred choice for work. Windows 11 Enterprise is not bad when stripped of all social, news, and 360 ads overhead, but Microsoft is really trying hard to mess it up there too.

Edit: 6 years old, not 4, and also Intel Macbook, so due an upgrade for sure

argsnd2• 3 months ago

Your M2 MacBook Pro really struggles? That is genuinely crazy, given that I use one as a daily driver and it feels just as fast as the day I bought it.

I think the Apple Silicon transition has increased Mac longevity far beyond the Intel or PowerPC eras, and I am quite baffled you think otherwise.

lastdong2• 3 months ago

You’re right, it’s 6 year old, so a dinosaur by technology standards! I see your point.

KaiMagnus• 3 months ago

I’m gonna keep my expectations in check, but this would be a good opportunity to get back to live presentations. I just watched a 1997 Macworld recording and the audience has really been something that I missed since COVID.

https://youtu.be/IOs6hnTI4lw?is=2ZpwOgsBxfMkkloh

hbn2• 3 months ago

I miss the live presentations too, there's no tension or humanity watching a polished prerecorded video compared to someone having to demo live. It would also discourage them from pulling another Apple Intelligence fiasco and announcing a bunch of features they don't have developed yet. Though I'm sure they're more wary of that than anyone for the time being.

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.

heisenbit• 3 months ago

He is 50 and been in Apple almost all his working life. Is that not a mono-culture risk for a CEO?

dhruv3006• 3 months ago

Apple software about to get better and better :)

keepamovin9• 3 months ago

This is one of the more broadly normal HN-reaction threads to large public news event I've seen in a while. A lot of love for Apple, respect for the decision, and respectfully stated nuance. Surprising and good.

I still haven't scroll down to the bottom, I don't want to spoil my impression. But it's great to see a positive reaction. Good way to mark the moment. Tim has been CEO for 15 years roughly, since Steve's passing. This guy seems much younger than Tim was when he ascended. I hope he really takes it to the next level.

Got a feeling that Apple has some Amazing new hardware category-making products coming out of the 'skunkworks' over the next 3 years.

mentalgear2• 3 months ago

Hopefully the Neo is the beginning of Apple making useful and affordable products for all users, instead of walling their garden to squeeze out every last penny via Cook's 'premium'-upwards-screwdriver tactics ... the history of market-dynamics suggests otherwise, but let's hope and wait there's a mindset change as well.

dash22• 3 months ago

I think it might be the opposite. You make cheap products for everybody because you are going to make money off subscriptions. Personally, I think it's a reasonable strategy, but it might mean they lose their focus on high-end craftsmanship.

linhns2• 3 months ago

Neo is a good product, but they're making their better products (Macs) more out of reach for a whole class of customers.

netdevphoenix• 3 months ago

making useful and affordable products for all users,

Affordable, ethical. You can only choose one.

keepamovin9• 3 months ago

Honestly i think it will bifurcate. More Neo more high end

user_78322• 3 months ago

I don't intend to be a contrairian purely to be one, but Apple is the same company that (to paraphrase) wanted to "see Saurik cry".

This being hackernews, I hope to be excused for siding with a white hat code-hacker over a trillion dollar corporate.

(And that's not getting into all the other morally questionable stuff they've done.)

Ygg23• 3 months ago

How dare you insult the forty gazillion company! Stand back ma'am I'll protect you from this handsome hacker ruffian!

Jokes aside, I have started to see Microslop as the lesser of two evils (two evils being MSFT and AAPL, Google being its own parallel universe abomination). Their commitment to backward compatibility really paved the way to cheap PCs for the masses. That said, every day Macroslop is working diligently to prove me wrong.

throawayonthe• 3 months ago

trying to find the context, saurik seemsto be Jay Freeman[0], known for Cydia[1]; i'm guessing apple was 'unhappy' about his work around software for jailbroken iphones, but nothing immediately popped up, what did they do?

oh i guess it's from a court hearing[2] when his company was suing apple over app store monopoly ("... they are talking about an iOS update that, quote, broke Cydia Impactor. Where they said, it feels too good to destroy someone's spirit. We did something else today that will kill him again with a little smiley emoticon.")

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Freeman [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cydia

[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/18730843/75/saurikit-ll...

sneak3• 3 months ago

Forget about saurik; they wanted to countermand their own customers using his code to do things on their own phones they bought from Apple.

The contempt for their customers is palpable these days.

eats_indigo• 3 months ago

I think they're the exact same age at time of appointment?

az226• 3 months ago

But Tim Apple had gray hair

DarkNova62• 3 months ago

This is one of the more broadly normal HN-reaction threads to large public news event I've seen in a while. A lot of love for Apple, respect for the decision, and respectfully stated nuance. Surprising and good.

In other words, nothing insightful or worth talking about. I don't want to read news for feelgood vibes.

cimi_• 3 months ago

This is relevant information for this forum, for good or bad Apple has a lot of impact.

I find your reaction strange, do you read news to be angry and/or afraid? :)

planb• 3 months ago

But there is interesting information in lots of the comments. Like the quote from Ternus about Apple Maps in one of the comments. This gives relevant insight of how he thinks and how he might handle problems when he takes over.

pembrook2• 3 months ago

I don't want to read news for feelgood vibes.

Yes, as algorithmic engagement has proven, most people want to read the news to get angry about stuff.

But I don't like hanging around that. I'd rather talk about tech news with nerds (old HN) and not just talk about coastal filter-bubble US politics with big tech worker bees (new HN).

US politics has definitely captured the crowd here lately. Half of the comment threads somehow devolve from discussions of Javascript frameworks into hysterical left-populist struggle sessions over the perceived political injustice of the day.

Maybe some feel good vibes and some apolitical news for the day aren't a bad thing.

keepamovin9• 3 months ago

What are you like as a person? This isn’t just news - it’s conversation

tcfhgj4• 3 months ago

A lot of love for a company which doesn't even let you chose the apps you want to use.

hk__22• 3 months ago

This is not a bad thing.

zapzupnz2• 3 months ago

A wonderfully out-of-date sentiment.

keepamovin9• 3 months ago

Unless you choose your hardware first…

DeathArrow5• 3 months ago

A lot of love for Apple

That makes me wonder why people love Apple but hate all other big companies.

AussieWog932• 3 months ago

There are plenty of other big companies that people love too. Off the top of my head: Nintendo, AMD, Disney.

In the case of all of them, they may make some questionably ethical business decisions but at the same time do genuinely care about the craft they're in, pushing boundaries and making quality products.

dspillett• 3 months ago

To a large extent: the product, the gloss, the luxury-item impression. People generally aren't looking beyond that deeper into the company behind.

You can see a similar thing in the 3D printing world with Bambu Lab - people love the product (my A1 has been excellent value, very reliable, and I despite preferring my fancy more expensive toy for most tasks I would still recommend it to those starting out without specific needs that such a design can't provide), and any concern about the company behind it (slowly closing off the ecosystem, initially trying to make out that their obviously-inspired-by-the-fullspectrum-scorca-fork colour mixing option was their own original stroke of genius) doesn't matter to them.

With both Bambu and Apple part of why they get this attention is the end-to-end polish that people feel in the product experience (to be fair is a valid reason to choose those products) and a certain amount of luck in them bringing their show to market at the right time, where other companies are seen as producing more interchangeable commodity items. Without that distinction giving people a higher view of the product range, the other companies struggle to get away from the fact that we don't naturally, for good reason, trust nor love commercial entities.

The other thing working in favour of some companies is momentum: some were worthy of some adoration for higher quality products and/or greater customer care than the competition, but are no longer and it takes a while for everyone to realise how much things have changed. Disney is definitely a company that I would add to this pile, and there are others.

Another big company that seems to get a lot more adoration than any of their competition is Nintendo, though I'm not in the gaming market any more so I don't know how much of that they still earn and how much of it is just that at least they aren't Sony or Microsoft!

msh• 3 months ago

For a long time apple did a lot better for both "hackers" and normal customers compared to the other big operating system company.

They also made a good unix based OS that was easy to purchase on decent hardware (esp laptops).

briandear• 3 months ago

Have you used Oracle, Salesforce, Windows? That’s why.

card_zero5• 3 months ago

There's a BBC article on this, with a quote:

With a new boss, Apple may be showing its strategic interest in deeper integration of AI into its hardware, said Hubbard. "The very strengths that made Apple dominant - their discipline, polish, and control - could become constraints if the next era rewards openness and faster iteration," he said.

The opposite of the basic human interface quality and consistency improvements that several commenters here hope for.

(Admittedly "Hubbard" here is just the first pundit they could grab, an Assistant Professor of Management and Organization, so this isn't the best informed prognostication.)

keepamovin9• 3 months ago

I honestly think they are just transitioning to a new format for user interfaces. What I mean is I think there’s some hardware coming that is going to make all of the previous user interface is redundant in someway at least in Apple’s thesis and so there’s less focus on making those traditional screens great because we’re gonna have new surfaces.

layer8• 3 months ago

This guy seems much younger than Tim was when he ascended.

Ternus just looks a bit younger. He’ll be 51, and half a year older than Cook was when he became CEO in 2011.

calgoo• 3 months ago

All the C-suits in Apple that normally does the presentations look completely LA style artificial. Nothing looks human about them, they always give off the same feel of un-personal, robotic, snake oil sales people; not someone that you actually would like to lead a company, as in someone who actually understands what it means to be human.

keepamovin9• 3 months ago

I suppose saying he looks better at that age would be inappropriate? Haha

garganzol• 3 months ago

Your statement implies that positivity equals to normality. This is the same kind of statement that would imply that negativity or evil is normal.

All those statements are psychological manipulation. Being too positive or too negative makes people blind and mendable by silently suppressing their will to be themselves.

keepamovin9• 3 months ago

I think you can do better

tonyl• 3 months ago

Love for hackernews community

throwaway2037• 3 months ago

    > This guy seems much younger than Tim was when he ascended.

I just checked. Tim Cook is 65 now, which makes him about 50 when he became CEO. John Ternus is 50 now.

MetaWhirledPeas• 3 months ago

I'd say a bigger difference is that Jobs casts a much larger shadow than Cook. Maybe Ternus will find it easier to move the company forward.

FpUser• 3 months ago

To me Apple is the company that had started the war against personal computing.

TwoNineFive• 3 months ago

That's some really gross toxic-positivity begging.

keepamovin9• 3 months ago

You can do better

tcp_handshaker2• 3 months ago

This reads like a good example of how prestige brands flatten people critical faculties. :-)

"A lot of love for Apple" is not evidence of wisdom or merit. It is evidence that Apple has been extraordinarily successful at converting ordinary consumer electronics into a moral aesthetic identity for its customers... Once that happens, public praise stops being about products and starts being about selfregard.

That is why Apple gets discussed in a register normally reserved for institutions that have actually earned public affection. In reality, it is a company that charges luxury prices for tightly controlled products, then persuades customers that the control is sophistication and the markup is virtue. :-)

This is mostly a case study in prestige bias. People are not just evaluating a company but protecting a status hierarchy in which buying Apple signifies discernment.

And the something amazing must be in the skunkworks line is the usual theology that means when the present is overpriced iteration, redemption is always scheduled for a few years from now.

keepamovin9• 3 months ago

You can do better than that

didibus5• 3 months ago

I'm not sure why so many people seem to think Apple software is terrible, I recon it's quite good personally, what's the issue with it?

rhubarbtree6• 3 months ago

It has become very buggy in recent years. Lots of glitches. And the liquid glass fiasco didn’t help.

Historically there were so few bugs in Apple’s software that to encounter even one was a jarring experience. Now they’ve reverted to the mean, and it’s just as buggy as Windows or Android. So if you’re comparing with them, no big deal. But compared to Apple standards we’ve fallen a long way.

didibus5• 3 months ago

I see, as someone who recently came to Apple (about 2 years ago), from Windows and Android, Apple software seems pretty good, like above those.

mrb• 3 months ago

Example of bugs, posted last month on HN: https://www.bugsappleloves.com/

Aachen6• 3 months ago

Do you have any specific questions? The request for "what's wrong with Apple software" is about the size of a Wikipedia page to answer and what people are saying in the comments seems quite clear to me. Since you're referring to comments, but none in particular, I'm not sure what parts you want an elaboration on. It might also help to just ask in a thread that has information you find unclear

shaky-carrousel• 3 months ago

I'm looking forward for all the Temu jokes we're going to see.

vaughan• 3 months ago

For me this is the perfect timing. Just this week I was fed up with my iPhone (and most of the Apple ecosystem) and bought a Google Pixel 10 Pro.

retinaros• 3 months ago

Say what you want of Tim and he might not be directly responsible for it but the M1 chip is the greatest achievement of apple since the iphone

npunt8• 3 months ago

Tim Cook really set John Ternus up to succeed as incoming CEO. Apple has a huge constituency that needs to be reassured about this change: customers, fans/developers, wall street, and global political leaders. These are HUGE stakes and John needs early wins with each to be seen as a legitimate successor. Check out what wins he has coming in the next year-ish:

1. Hardware: OLED touchscreen Macs, foldable iPhone (2026) & 20th anniversary iPhone (2027). The message here is about flexing his strength in hardware.

2. Software: Snow leopard-like iOS27/macOS27 fixing a lot of Liquid Glass' rough edges. The message here is he's returning Apple to form with quality software.

3. Ecosystem: Gemini-powered Siri. The message here is he's getting Apple finally on track to meet the promise of AI.

4. Political context: A clean slate. The message here is placating the president (or anyone) is in the past.

The timing is interesting because Apple needed Ternus announced before WWDC27 in June, because that's when Gemini-Siri and Snow Leopard-OS strategy are both being unveiled. But they needed to delay it as long as they could so that Tim Cook could soak up as much Trump-chaos as was necessary. Now that polls and vibes show Trump losing support across the board, politically it's the safest it's ever been to announce this change, and still enough time before WWDC to suggest that what's being announced are his initiatives.

nixass4• 3 months ago

It's funny how yesterday's John's wiki article didn't even know his exact age/DOB. Now it's corrected :)

tgrover• 3 months ago

That's a surprising and amazing decision. Putting a key element of the hardware side of the business at the head of it might lead to a some amazing hardware upgrades and innovations! All for it

registeredcorn• 3 months ago

It would certainly be neat to hear if Apple can find the guts to do something interesting with new leadership at the wheel. As is, it feels like the entire company has just been a bizarre, indifferent stasis for near two decades.

avadodin• 3 months ago

John Apple, gotcha

MrBuddyCasino• 3 months ago

"(Apple’s Board of Directors): Looks like Tim couldn’t Cook. But maybe John can Ternus around."

https://x.com/tomieinlove/status/2046337143703007672

not_that_d• 3 months ago

Asking as a non American. Why would this matter to me? Why should I care about this?

gordonhart• 3 months ago

Apple has an enormous global footprint. Their devices are made in China, India, and Vietnam, and source parts from basically everywhere. More than half of Apple's revenue comes from outside the US and there are 1.5 billion iPhones in use across the world (somewhat larger than the population of the US).

Se_ba• 3 months ago

So now in charge will be John Apple, got it.

woodydesign• 3 months ago

Very happy about this news. I think he might could bring apple back to a innovation culture company again. Seems well balanced Jobs + Cook. Looking forward next 18 month of Apple. I already setup recurring investment for Apple in 2 months ago, finger cross

giancarlostoro3• 3 months ago

I have been wanting this for Apple for a while. They are very “boring” when it comes to risk and pushing forward the way Steve Jobs did. I really think they have a lot of potential they are missing out on.

I still hope they eventually sell server blades for macOS.

ghaff2• 3 months ago

Xserve was their big explicit enterprise push. Blades as a whole ended up as something of a niche. Hyperconverged is probably where we've ended up from there for the most part but it's not a big slice of the market.

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.

elxr3• 3 months ago

They are very “boring” when it comes to risk

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.

redbell• 3 months ago

The other day, I was watching a video by fpt.(@FrontPageTech) entitled Tim Cook is Leaving Apple from Mar 12, and honestly, seeing this news today, I had to go back and rewatch it again and it strikes hard on me, especially at the linked time (https://youtu.be/8xo4uG7YpJI?si=eHP5yyEOFGn85ajv&t=278). At 6:46, Jon Prosser said: John Ternus is the next CEO of Apple.

You may also be interested in this video where Jon Rettinger predicted that John Ternus will be the next Apple CEO. Goodbye Tim! A new era for Apple (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbqLWZtdQTc)

stetrain4• 3 months ago

This has been reported by Mark Gurman at Bloomberg since 2024. Those other outlets are likely directly or indirectly referencing this reporting.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-08/apple-s-n...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-10-05/who-wi...

sshrajesh• 3 months ago

Apple stock grew 2322.5% during Tim Cook's tenure from 08/24/2011 to 04/20/2026. CAGR approximately 24.29% per annum. Pretty incredible.

bofadeez2• 3 months ago

Pretty easy when you just buy back your own stock with all your profit like Warren Buffet told you to. Incredible.

u_fucking_dork• 3 months ago

It’s that easy folks. Just buy back your own stock and you print money and success. That’s all it takes.

kyrra• 3 months ago

To steal from Twitter:

"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 )

gehsty2• 3 months ago

How many companies on that list make money by manufacturing a physical product and selling it to customers? How many other consumer goods companies 11x their market cap? How many other consumer goods companies have revenues remotely approaching Apple?

The business you mention are pure service / zero marginal cost businesses, and in that time internet usage has expanded both in reach and depth (it is being used for more things in more places), so their opportunity for profits has grown. Apple turns aluminium and silica into a laptop. They didn't even miss a beat during COVID.

Yay for Tim Cook for scaling this to the absolute behemoth of supply chain and manufacturing that modern Apple is.

Closi• 3 months ago

You are cherry picking here - Why not include Intel, Samsung, Sony, HP or Dell etc on your list? Why include Facebook but not Twitter?

We are talking about the third largest company in the world by market cap - growing an additional 3X isn't particularly feasible (that would have made them twice the size of the next largest company).

Particularly with the hardware category it's easier to drop the ball and fumble rather than stay on top - just see Nokia or Rim.

renticulous2• 3 months ago

All the printed money got accumulated to the MAGIC 7. The rest of the Fortune 500 are flat.

smath• 3 months ago

I for one am happy to see an engineer at the helm.

nafistiham• 3 months ago

Putting the hardware head at the times of AI. Great decision.

mastermage• 3 months ago

Finally John Apple

yogigan• 3 months ago

If the CEO comes from hardware, it suggests Apple still believes its long-term moat is integrated hardware + silicon + software, not just services.

theow654• 3 months ago

I guess he was let go because Teump hates gays

antirez• 3 months ago

It is very hard to evaluate Apple as a single entity. Certain branches of the company did great in the latest 10 years: the chips division being the most obvious one but in general hardware did well. Software received a lot less love, and in general deteriorated, but the really terrible performance was the products division. Then there is the horror story of Apple software stores and services.

zarzavat2• 3 months ago

Apple is held to a different standard. Tahoe is bad because it's ugly and has inconsistent corner radii. Meanwhile Windows has multiple critical issues e.g. Windows update induced instability.

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.

delfugal• 3 months ago

Can't believe they didn't rehire Gil Amelio.

phendrenad2• 3 months ago

Wonder if Trump will call him John Apple.

alpha_trion• 3 months ago

This will be the first time Apple has had an engineer as CEO. I'm excited to see what this brings.

maplethorpe• 3 months ago

Could this be Apple's chance to finally stop dragging its feet and integrate AI deeply into its OS?

upupupandaway• 3 months ago

Why is this necessarily a good thing?

akashwadhwani35• 3 months ago

Is it only me or we want an iPhone mini back?

pmdr• 3 months ago

Bring back the keynotes. I want to hear people cheering and booing again.

Danox8• 3 months ago

I don’t use either Apple Maps or Google maps in a car on the move at all. I just listen to music or podcast.

I don’t need the distraction.

ivaivanova• 3 months ago

The end of an era! I think Ternus will bring a long-awaited fresh perspective.

John Ternus to become Apple CEO

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