Ternus becomes Apple's CEO today as Cook's 15-year run ends
Fifteen years, one $4.5 trillion company, and a handover that lands in the middle of Apple's messiest stretch in a decade. Also: the AI labs quietly turned Apple's own desktop hardware into training substrate.
Tim Cook worked his last day as Apple's CEO on Monday, and John Ternus — the hardware chief behind the M-series transition and the thin iPhone line — takes the job on September 1. Cook isn't going anywhere: he becomes executive chairman, and he has told Ternus he'll keep managing Apple's relationships with the Trump administration and the Chinese government, the two files that defined his tenure. First announced in April, the handover closes a run that carried Apple's market cap from roughly $350 billion in 2011 to more than $4.5 trillion. Cook marked the moment on X with a note to "the Apple community," and Apple held a farewell dinner at Apple Park last week with tributes from Ternus, Laurene Powell Jobs and longtime executive Eddy Cue.
The timing is what turns this into a hard job rather than a victory lap. Ternus inherits a Siri rebuild that slipped for years before reaching users this summer, an AI organisation that has watched senior researchers walk to OpenAI and Anthropic, and a memory-chip crunch that has pushed prices on some products up by as much as $500. Apple called the shortage an "unprecedented challenge," and it is hitting the same quarter a new CEO is trying to establish himself.
Cook's April endorsement was unambiguous — "without question the right person to lead Apple into the future" — but Cook was also the company's best politician, the one who kept Washington and Beijing from becoming existential problems. That portfolio now sits with a chairman rather than the CEO, which leaves Ternus to prove that the product instincts that earned him the promotion scale to a company whose next decade is mostly software. The strain in Apple's AI effort is already visible — Apple confirms Qwen for China AI, pulls manual in a day — and licensing another company's model to ship features it couldn't build on its own schedule is a tell. Ternus's first public test arrives September 9, when he, not Cook, fronts the "Surprise and shine" event expected to unveil the foldable iPhone Ultra and the iPhone 18 Pro.
OpenAI has bought tens of thousands of Mac mini and Mac Studio machines while Anthropic rents Mac minis through AWS, both to train the computer-use agents that navigate real software interfaces. The logic is unglamorous and sound: reinforcement learning for GUI agents needs thousands of parallel copies of macOS running at once, and Apple's desktops are the cheapest way to buy that at scale. It's an odd compliment to Apple's silicon from the companies eating its talent, and it lands as Mac revenue jumps nearly 29 percent year over year to $10.3 billion — Apple's fastest-growing hardware line. The rush reportedly caught the company flat, with no dedicated business engineering team and no enterprise AI strategy, and it pulled the M6 Mac mini and new Mac Studio chips into a late-August launch ahead of the usual autumn slot. High-end configurations have been backordered for months as a global memory shortage collides with demand Apple never planned for.
What to watch: whether Apple starts selling to the labs on purpose instead of by accident.
Is a hardware chief the right person to fix Apple's AI problem, or does Ternus need a software co-pilot? Tell us in the comments.
