John Ternus takes over as Apple’s chief executive on Tuesday, inheriting a company that towers over the smartphone market but trails its rivals in artificial intelligence. One of his biggest challenges will be balancing the company’s dependence on China while parrying acute political pressure from the White House. The handover ends Tim Cook’s 15-year run, replacing the operations specialist who built Apple’s supply chain with the engineer who built its hardware.
Ternus, 51, joined Apple’s design team in 2001 and worked his way up to senior vice president of hardware engineering, reporting to Cook. He leads the engineering teams behind Apple’s entire product lineup, including the iPhones that generate most of the company’s revenue. He gets barely a week to settle in, with Apple holding its annual iPhone event on September 9, where it is expected to unveil its first foldable handset.
Some analysts had argued software chief Craig Federighi was the more logical pick for a company scrambling to catch up on AI. Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Creative Strategies, said that this misreads how consumers actually adopt technology. Ternus earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and worked as an engineer at Virtual Research Systems before joining Apple.
Inside the company, he is credited with driving a push to make products more durable, reliable and resilient, and with design work that cut their carbon footprint. The harder question is what kind of leader he becomes. Your responsibility is bigger, your power is bigger.
You’re dancing a different kind of dance.” Nowhere is that gap wider than in the geopolitical role Cook excelled at, courting both Beijing and Donald Trump’s White House to protect a supply chain that runs largely through China. Apple’s manufacturing operation is among the most complex in corporate history, a web of hundreds of suppliers and assembly lines that Cook painstakingly built over decades. Cook, in recent years, began shifting some of the work elsewhere – iPhone assembly to India, other production to Vietnam – but the diversification has been gradual, with China, one of Apple’s biggest consumer markets, still anchoring the system.
Complicating matters, Trump has repeatedly demanded Apple build iPhones on US soil, threatening tariffs on those made overseas. Cook avoided the heaviest blows of Trump’s trade war by cultivating the president directly, making US investment commitments and political donations – all while also keeping Beijing onside. The tricky political terrain will be new for Ternus.
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