Just weeks into the job, Apple’s new chief executive is already trying to shake the company out of its long-running rhythm. John Ternus, the longtime hardware engineering chief who succeeded Tim Cook on September 1st, is pushing Apple to move faster, launch more often, strip out layers of management, and put engineers closer to the top of the organization.
That account comes from Bloomberg News’ Mark Gurman, who reports that Ternus, a product person, has begun discussing an overhaul internally: accelerate product development, broaden the device lineup, and build a leaner company with a sharper engineering focus after operations manager Cook’s 15-year iterative slog.
The first visible change is the calendar. Apple has long clustered its biggest announcements around spring and fall. Ternus has told colleagues the company needs to introduce products more quickly and become more experimental if it is going to stay competitive. The idea is not an instant rewrite of how Apple designs hardware — those cycles are deeply established — but a shift toward more frequent releases throughout the year rather than two big seasonal waves.
The product pipeline already points that way. After the recent foldable iPhone Duo launch, work is underway on additional hardware next year, including camera-equipped AirPods, smart glasses, and a redesigned iPhone tied to the device’s 20th anniversary, along with refreshes such as a new HomePod mini, iPad mini, and Apple TV.
The organizational piece is more immediate. Ternus wants fewer middle-management layers between working engineers and senior executives. Over the past two weeks, Apple’s hardware engineering group has dismissed a number of engineering program managers — the people who for decades have managed timelines and coordinated work across teams. The cuts reached several program managers and about half a dozen directors, one of Apple’s most senior employee ranks. Those affected were given a short window to find other jobs inside the company; anyone who does not will be laid off later this year.
Smaller cuts have already hit other groups, and some early-stage projects judged less essential have been scaled back or canceled, including work in Siri, Vision Pro, and AI-related software engineering. Internally, the mood is described as more hands-on and hectic, with product managers being pressed to deliver more devices, more often, on shorter timelines.
None of this is a sudden conversion. At 51, Ternus has argued for a leaner Apple for years. While running hardware engineering, he told employees at an all-hands meeting that the company should hire fewer people, demand more from the engineers it already has, and cut organizational bloat. He once showed a slide of annual headcount growth and said Apple should be accomplishing more with fewer employees.
Cost-cutting is part of the same brief. Apple considered laying off about 5,000 AppleCare customer-service workers over the summer on the theory that AI agents could take over phone and web support; those plans were put on hold. Even so, employees in several divisions expect more reductions later this year or early next, even as some 2027 planning still assumes higher budgets and headcount. A smaller cultural signal: some teams were told they could not bring plus-ones to upcoming holiday parties for the first time in years.
Ternus is not only looking at expenses. With services chief Eddy Cue and CFO Kevan Parekh, he has discussed new services and ways to pull more revenue from products and offerings Apple already sells. More frequent hardware launches, the thinking goes, would also widen the base of customers who then buy subscriptions and other services.
The contrast with the Cook years is intentional. Cook built an operational giant and, via financial engineering(massive buybacks) a roughly $5 trillion company. Ternus, a 25-year Apple veteran who oversaw hardware across iPhone, Mac, Watch, iPad, and AirPods and helped drive Apple silicon, is betting that an engineering-first, less layered company can ship more ambitious products without waiting for the next September event. Cook remains executive chairman and a government-relations presence; how far the two men stay aligned on strategy will be one of the tests of the foreseeable future.
For now, the message from the new CEO is blunt: fewer layers, more products, tighter teams, and less patience for the old cadence. Apple is being told to get back to work.
MacDailyNews Take: Better late than never!
You know, some people get upset when we point out that Tim Cook is a boring, reactive caretaker who’s not really the best person to be running Apple today or for at least the past several years.
Operations manager Cook should have been a 3-5 year stopgap after Steve Jobs’ untimely passing, running the iteration playbook, providing continuity for the company while it found a real CEO. Instead, he hung on — and keeps hanging on — well past his sell-by date.
Sigh.
You can be upset with us for having the temerity to call it like we see it, but the fact remains that Apple would be doing significantly better today with a visionary who’d have seen AI on the horizon, who’d have recognized the intrinsic importance of Siri and therefore invested in it instead of criminally neglecting it, and who wouldn’t have squandered the company’s gigantic leads in things like personal assistants and podcasting. – MacDailyNews, August 22, 2024
Apple needed new blood years ago, but the old blood simply won’t let go. – MacDailyNews, January 22, 2025
See also: Steve Jobs never meant for Tim Cook to still be Apple’s CEO in 2025 – MacDailyNews, July 9, 2025
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His words are hard NOT to like. He’s talking more like the owner of a start-up, vs a lumbering aircraft carrier trying to make a turn. Rigor.
Yes, the Rigor Mortis of the past where Siri 1.0 was the walking dead is finally over!
Cook was, in retrospect, a Temu Ternus.
He did a brilliant job, but he was no engineer. I wonder how much Cook truly uses his Vision Pro, today.
He hung on too long. Thank Ternus for turning up and being a solid choice, it could be never have been Federighi.
Time for Ternus to take his turn at the turntables and turn things around for ever more massive growth than under Cook!
If Ternus is serious, he should lead by example. His next move should be that he is returning Apple to live Events, not staged, canned, boring corporate commercials, but LIVE events like Steve Jobs used to host. That is Job 1. Second, he should resume the in person Apple Shareholder meetings. It has been an extremely cowardly move to use the COVID nightmare to end real shareholder communications and participation in the company annual meeting. Totally unacceptable. Ternus could get lots of good will and generate stock enthusiasm by simply doing the right thing and restoring these meetings.
agreed!
Totally agree, I really enjoyed the shareholder meetings at Apple Park in 2019/2020. I got to ask a question at one of them and snapped a photo with Tim Cook at another. Going on 7 years without another in-person meeting is abhorrent.
I am very glad to see Cook gone. This guy sounds like a good choice. He’s saying many of the right things. However what’s missing is a focus on UI/UX. People used to salivate over new OS releases and line up around the blocks for Apple products. I haven’t seen any of that excitement for a while because Apple stopped being “insanely great”.
Part of the problem (you’re correct but omitted this genuine “insanely great” surprise killer) is that the supply chain now is so large it’s nearly impossible to create something no one knows about ahead of time.
Today’s supply chain leaks would have let us know everything about the iPod before the different versions were introduced live. SJ would be fuming today with the inability to surprise anymore.
Only if manufacturing all or most in the USA would there be a possibility of designing something truly new, surprising and delighting when announced and demoed live. Even then there is such a draw to spread the info of what’s coming, that might work once or twice, then the contacts in the supply chain in the USA would leak info too.
I do miss being awed by, an internet browser, a cellphone, and a iPod that did have some leaks just before being announced.