Incoming Apple CEO John Ternus is bringing back a trusted lieutenant from his time running hardware engineering to join his new management team.
Ternus has hired Laura Legros, who served as a vice president of hardware engineering until retiring in 2022, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Legros will report to Ternus when he takes the CEO role on Sept. 1st, Bloomberg News’ Mark Gurman reports citing people who asked not to be identified because the personnel change hasn’t been announced.
The move shows that Ternus is starting to put his stamp on the company’s leadership ranks. It also marks a rare case of an Apple executive returning to the company after retirement. In her new role, Legros will act as a vice president working cross-functionally with different parts of the company.
According to Gurman, during her career at Apple, Legros helped manage product delivery, development schedules and coordination across engineering teams to ensure they remained aligned. Before retiring, she was one of Ternus’ most trusted deputies. In 2018, she appeared during an Apple product launch event to introduce a new version of the MacBook Air. Two years later, she unveiled the current iPad Air design.
Over the past several months, Ternus has been shadowing Cook and helping lead executive meetings. The incoming CEO has already met with leaders across the company and participated in roadmap reviews for a number of divisions for the coming year. Ternus has also been spending considerable time with Apple’s industrial design group.
Ternus will have a slew of executive changes to oversee in the coming years as multiple members of Apple’s leadership team approach retirement age. This includes the likes of App Store boss Phil Schiller and Luca Maestri, who oversees real estate and information systems. Kate Adams, who transitioned to overseeing government affairs after serving as general counsel, plans to retire at the end of this year.Ternus, currently Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, is set to succeed Tim Cook as CEO on September 1st. Cook will become executive chairman of the board.
MacDailyNews Take: Under Tim Cook, Apple systematically strayed from Steve Jobs’ core vision. Product Design, the very soul of the company Jobs rebuilt, was demoted, sidelined, and subordinated to operations, supply-chain efficiency, and services revenue. The result? Fifteen long years of polished but profoundly boring iteration: thinner bezels, faster chips, incremental camera bumps, and endless “Pro” variants that rarely moved the industry forward the way the original iPhone, iPad, or even the aluminum unibody MacBooks once did.
Jobs put Design at the absolute top of the food chain. Jony Ive’s group wasn’t a service department; it was the engine. Cook flipped the hierarchy. Hardware engineering, operations, and finance called the shots (poorly; witness Luca Maestri famously rejecting calls to invest in AI early on which is why he’s now sidelined). Design became reactive instead of directive. The Vision Pro launched as an impressive, but overpriced, underbaked curiosity. After billions spent, the Apple Car evaporated. True category-defining leaps simply did not happen.
Now comes John Ternus, a product person, a hardware guy who has spent his career shipping actual devices rather than optimizing margins. Early signals are encouraging: bringing trusted hardware lieutenants back into the fold and already embedding himself with the industrial design group. That is exactly the right instinct.
If Ternus moves quickly to restore Design to its rightful place at the apex of Apple’s decision-making, the company might finally escape the long, comfortable, lucrative mediocrity of the Cook era. Apple doesn’t need another fifteen years of safer, prettier, or just different iterations. It needs the return of products that make people stop, stare, and rethink what a computer in their pocket, on their wrist, or on their face can be.
The hardware engineer is about to become CEO. The question is whether he has the will — and the authority (with Cook looming as Executive Chairman) — to put Design back on top where Jobs left it. The next few years will tell us if Apple can innovate again… or if the iteration treadmill simply continues under a new CEO.
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.
