When Tim Cook leaves Apple, the key question is who will manage the company’s daily operations? In a crisis, new COO Sabih Khan and retail head Deirdre O’Brien are well-equipped to step in. However, for a formal CEO succession, hardware engineering chief John Ternus is the top candidate, according to Bloomberg News’ Mark Gurman.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
There are a few reasons this makes sense. For one, Apple has limited options within its executive management team. Ternus is 50 years old — the same age Cook was when he took the role — giving him the potential to be CEO for a decade or more if things go well. The same can’t realistically be said for most of the other top executives who might be under consideration.
Second, Apple probably needs more of a technologist than a sales or operations person. Though Apple has grown tremendously under Cook in both product breadth and revenue — and the iPhone 17 is clearly resonating with customers — the company has struggled to break into major new technology categories.
Apple has had great success designing its own chips, but the company has stumbled in areas such as mixed reality, generative AI, the smart home and autonomous vehicles. That could lead the board to conclude that a product engineering leader like Ternus is the answer, despite him not being known internally as someone who pursues big bets.
Third, Ternus stands out. He’s charismatic and well-regarded by Apple loyalists and trusted by Cook, who has granted Ternus more responsibilities. The executive has emerged as a key decision-maker on product road maps, features and strategies, extending his influence beyond the traditional scope of a hardware engineering chief.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote in July:
For its NeXT CEO, Apple needs relative YOUTH, not another 50- or 60-something calcified company lifer who was part of the so-called team that blindly missed the GenAI paradigm shift.
Steve Jobs was 42 years old when he returned to Apple as interim CEO in September 1997. pic.twitter.com/Bk0kdul7QF
— MacDailyNews (@MacDailyNews) July 10, 2025
Apple’s next CEO doesn’t need to be Steve Jobs, but does need to be much better than Tim Cook.
What should happen at Apple:
- Tim Cook retires (yesterday, preferably)
- Cook does not get Chairman of the Board position
- Apple hires a charismatic, visionary CEO in the mold of Jobs
- Company returns to path of inventive innovation
What likely will happen at Apple:
- Tim Cook hangs on for years
- When he finally retires as CEO, he becomes Chairman
- Apple hires another bland, myopic CEO in the mold of Cook
- Company continues on path of iterative stagnation
Please help support MacDailyNews — and enjoy subscriber-only articles, comments, chat, and more — by subscribing to our Substack: macdailynews.substack.com. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
Identifying the 42 year old visionary is the hard part. For a behemoth that relies on the stock value you’re almost certain to get a caretaker. If you want anything else pray for the intercession of Saint Jobs to make the unlikely come to be. I give it an 18% chance of happening, but as another Saint once Saint, “So you’re saying there’s a chance.”
Geez, MDM. “Calcified” at 50? How about “50 is the new 40?” Honestly, shareholders will never let someone take over a soon-to-be FOUR-TRILLION-dollar company who hasn’t had over 2 decades of experience. Or do we want another ZuckerBoy leading Apple?
Jobs was a freakin’ unicorn, but I agree we need someone with vision, personality, mostly apolitical, with excellent interpersonal and public communication skills.
Run a few names up the poll?
As a shareholder, I support bringing back Scott Forstall.
I 100% support this. He’s the only logical choice if you want someone who takes big risks, and was brought up under Steve. He was “ousted” for something so stupid (not signing a letter). Tim saw him as a threat (someone who rocked the boat too much), and took the opportunity to throw him out. And he has the stage polish of Steve (just go watch how he introduced Siri).
Elon Musk. I would love to see throngs buying iPhones only to scratch casing and break screen to spite their face in protest at Apple’s new CEO, because we all know, deep down, who the intellectual inferiors are.
While I like your “Apple hires a charismatic, visionary CEO in the mold of Jobs” WHO IS THAT PERSON!!??
Same, same. MDM should kick out a name or 3 if they can.
Their criticisms are documentable, but I’ve said as much in the past here: Who is that person?
For every single young charismatic, visionary CEO they could hire to energize new product development while managing the legacy businesses, there are 10,000 young charismatic, visionary CEOs who would tank the entire business within 3 years.
The REAL, underlying problem is this statement:
“When Tim Cook leaves Apple, the key question is who will manage the company’s daily operations?”
CEOs are not, I repeat, NOT supposed to run the daily operations of a company. Period. A CEO’s job is to run the company from long term perspectives as in, “How best do we make the company better in the next six months or one year or five years.” CEOs must not get bogged down in day-to-day operations unless there is a major emergency.
Day-to-day operations are the purview of the COO. Maybe that is the problem with Cook. He was great at operations. Maybe Cook can’t let go of operations and cannot focus on the horizon and how to get there!
Jobs’ greatest talent by far was his ability to see the horizon and see how to get there. Jobs never really invented anything, but when shown something he could tell better than almost anyone in recent history whether that item was the future or not. (Yes, there were missteps like the hockey puck mouse and the toaster Mac.) Sometimes like the original NeXT box, he saw too far into the future with NeXt failing then virtually the entire industry adopted those technologies in 10 years or so, but he saw the future.
Apple needs a leader. Apple does not need a caretaker. Apple does not need an efficiency expert. Put those people in charge of day-to-day operations. Apple needs to get a leader with vision.
Jobs was half on the horizon and half in the details.
He attended Apple’s weekly half-day marketing meeting. He visited the design department every day. He famously chose the specific location of screws on at least one model of MacBook.
Apple needs to be like Alphabet. With Many CEOs and one Group CEO (Tim Cook till Trump is there.) There is no Giannandria replacement as it is two positions role rather than one. Under Group CEO Cook, there will be a CEO AI Engineering and an SVP AI Engineering. Currently All SVPs were/are so busy that they lost the site of impending Tsunami of AI. With this change Apple can lure both old and new AI Engineers and middle managers.
If Apple wants to take one message from this comment, then that would be to be like Alphabet. Apple is too crowded at the top, make some room there.