John Ternus officially became chief executive of Apple on Tuesday, September 1, 2026, succeeding Tim Cook after a 15-year run of iterating Steve Jobs-era products that turned the company into one of the world’s most valuable businesses.
Ternus, previously senior vice president of hardware engineering, takes over a company with a market capitalization around $4.6 trillion. Apple shares, which closed Monday at $316.85, traded higher during Tuesday’s session, showing gains of roughly 2.5% (+$8.00, +2.52% as of 10:59:06 AM EDT) as investors digested the handoff and looked ahead to the fall product cycle.
The transition was announced in April and approved unanimously by the board. Cook becomes executive chairman and will remain involved, particularly on government relations and Apple’s ties with the United States and China. Ternus also joins the board.
Ternus, 51, joined Apple’s product design team in 2001 after studying mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and a brief stint designing virtual-reality hardware. He rose through hardware engineering, becoming a vice president in 2013 and SVP in 2021. He oversaw work on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods, and Vision Pro, and played a central role in Apple’s shift to its own silicon.
Cook praised him as having “the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honor.” Ternus has said he wants to restore some of the product “magic” associated with Steve Jobs while pushing Apple further into artificial intelligence.
Apple is expected to show its first foldable iPhone and other devices at its September event, along with updates to Siri and other AI features that have lagged rivals. Analysts say hardware innovation and a clearer AI strategy will define his early tenure.
Markets had months to price in the change. The stock has risen about 37% since Cook announced he’d step down and sits not far from its summer highs. Whether Tuesday’s bounce holds will depend less on the title change itself than on what Ternus delivers in the coming product cycle and in Apple’s long-awaited AI response.
MacDailyNews Take: Today is a very happy day for Apple, full of promise!
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Let’s hope Ternus can be at least half as good a CEO as Cook was.
Not possible when he was terrible. He didn’t do basic business 101 production supply diversification. He put all his production eggs into a hostile communist basket.
He also bloated up apples labor force with useless latte drinking do nothing employees that hurt the actual can-do engineers. 80% of Apple employees are latte drinking parasite cruft that need to be fired like Elon did with the useless twitter employees. Being a me-too over hiring copying retard google hiring of useless latte drinking do nothing’ers like this:
https://x.com/spiral_upwards/status/1610293013913260033?s=20
This stunted and retarded apples innovation. He’s a worse version of John skulley but jobs left him with a bigger cash cow to milk, the iPhone.
He’s a low level functionary that actually sucked at operations because of his failure to diversify production supply.
He could’ve bought Tesla for $40 billion, but instead wasted tens of billions trying to make his own car and failed miserably. He’s a disaster that was carried by the tsunami wave of the overwhelming success of Steve Jobs amazing iPhone that kept carrying his miserable failure along. Apple is a much worse, woke, diseased place than it ever has been. Still limping along on the back of Steve Jobs.
Good riddance to that piece of garbage. I spit at his parting and the damage he did to Apple.
Such a boneheaded take. Cook did an admirable job despite his faults. If Ternus’s tenure is a slam dunk it’ll be off of Cook’s layup. Apple’s leftist culture began under the hippie Jobs and metastasized in the prog/woke petri dish of the early 21st Century San Francisco Bay Area. One thing is for sure, Cook is nothing like Jobs personality-wise. Steve was a well-known a-hole who chronically parked in handicapped spots, sped and dehumanized and berated employees in vulgar terms, (not to mention denying his own daughter was his). Cook was a noble lord and a gentleman in comparison.
Youre take is ignorant of history, but i know that wont stop your arrogance, or how wrong you are. Hippie not equal to woke.
Jobs farts are more valuable than the entirety of cook’s life and your next 10 put together.
Cook lived off jobs’ iPhone. Go seethe more.
Let’s hope for much more than that.
Cook was a mediocrity at best. Virtually any competent CEO could ride Jobs’ innovations for fifteen years before their lack of vision bit them in the ass, as it did Cook.