Tim Cook Made Apple Rich. I'm Hoping John Ternus Makes It Interesting Again.

Apple announced on April 20, 2026 that Tim Cook is stepping down as CEO. He's moving into an Executive Chairman role. John Ternus — Apple's long-time hardware engineering lead, the guy who's been running the iPhone, iPad, and Mac programs — takes the top job.

I want to say up front: I'm not here to dunk on Tim Cook. The man made Apple the most profitable company in history. Over his 15-year run as CEO, he turned a hardware business into a services empire. The App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Pay, AppleCare — the whole subscription stack grew from a rounding error into roughly a quarter of all Apple revenue, growing faster than the rest of the business. That's not nothing. That's generational wealth for shareholders, employees, and anyone who owned the stock.

But let's also be honest. It has been a long time since Apple made me want something new.

The hardware has been boring

When's the last time you saw a new iPhone and thought, oh, damn, I have to have that? For me it was the iPhone X, and that was nearly a decade ago.

Since then it's been slightly better cameras, slightly bigger displays, slightly thinner bezels. The iPads got M-chips, which is great if you're a pro user, but the iPad experience as a whole hasn't really changed in years. The Apple Watch has been refining the same form factor for a decade. The Vision Pro was the one big hardware swing of the Cook era, and it landed with a thud — incredible engineering, no software story, and a price tag that made most people try it at an Apple Store and walk out.

Meanwhile the M-series Macs have been legitimately good. I'll give Cook that. The transition from Intel to Apple Silicon was clean, fast, and the laptops that came out of it are the best Macs ever shipped. But even that was a hardware story the engineering teams had been planning for years. It's the exception, not the rule.

The rule is: Apple under Cook got very good at making money off what it already had. It didn't get good at making new things.

Services was the strategy. And it worked.

I don't begrudge Cook the services pivot. It was the right business move. Hardware revenue is lumpy and tied to release cycles. Services revenue is recurring, high-margin, and predictable. Every Wall Street analyst on Earth will tell you Cook-era Apple made the right call.

But there's a cost to that strategy that doesn't show up on a balance sheet. If you're running a services business, your hardware becomes a distribution channel for the services. The phone doesn't need to wow anyone, it just needs to sell enough units to keep the subscription funnel full. That's exactly what the last decade of iPhones has felt like to me — incremental distribution-channel upgrades, not product-category inventions.

What Ternus actually does

John Ternus has been Apple's Senior VP of Hardware Engineering since 2021, and he's been inside the hardware org for over two decades. He oversaw the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and AirPods programs. When Apple brings a new iPad or MacBook to an event, Ternus is the one on stage showing it off.

The reporting coming out of Bloomberg, AP, and CBC in the past few days all describes him the same way: low-profile, deeply technical, hardware-obsessed. He's not a marketer, not a services guy, not a finance guy. He's an engineering guy who spent his entire career shipping physical products.

That's exactly the kind of CEO I want running Apple right now. Not because services were bad, but because the pendulum needs to swing back. A hardware company led by a finance-brained operator for 15 years is now going to be led by the guy who actually runs the hardware org. That's a real signal.

What I'm hoping for

I don't need Apple to invent a new category every year. But I'd like at least one product in the next three years that makes me actually care again. Maybe it's a real next-gen iPhone form factor. Maybe it's a home robot. Maybe it's a Vision Pro done right, at a price that isn't insane. Maybe it's something none of us has thought of — which is kind of the whole point.

Ternus takes over at a tricky moment. The AI era is eating every big tech company's lunch, and Apple is visibly behind. Apple Intelligence launched late and underwhelming, Siri is still a joke, and Apple doesn't have a story on agentic computing while Anthropic and OpenAI are shipping monthly. That's the challenge.

But here's the thing. Apple has always been best when it ships integrated, opinionated hardware that makes software feel inevitable. If there's anyone who can figure out what AI-era Apple hardware looks like, it's probably a hardware engineer who's been inside the company for 25 years and now has the keys.

I'm ready to be excited about an Apple keynote again. Over to you, John.