The afternoon light in the Los Angeles event space felt soft and unhurried, as if the building itself understood that this was not going to be one of those thunderous Apple spectacles with confetti cannons and rock-star entrances. The new CEO, John Ternus, simply walked onto the low stage, said a quiet hello, and let a video do most of the talking. There it was, on the screen: a MacBook Pro with a touchscreen, the first in Apple’s history, presented not as a revolution but as a natural evolution. Then the real show began, not on stage, but in the corners of the room where music producers twisted knobs, filmmakers scrubbed through timelines, photographers swiped through high-resolution images, and fashion designers sketched directly on the display. The journalists and creators wandered freely, testing the laptop with their own hands, while Ternus hovered in the background like a host who trusted his guests to find the magic themselves. The biggest burst of applause, fittingly, came when he revealed that the Apple logo on the back of the laptop would glow again, a small nostalgic touch that felt almost like a wink. In an age when every headline is about artificial intelligence and cloud computing, Apple seemed to be saying: hardware still matters, still delights, still carries the brand’s soul. And the man delivering that message, at fifty-one, with twenty-five years inside the company, looked perfectly comfortable letting the product be the celebrity.
A few minutes after the presentation, I sat down with Ternus for the second time in two days. It was a familiar ritual for those who covered Apple in the Steve Jobs era—Jobs would grant a small audience after his keynotes, and you would leave with a sense that you had touched the mind behind the curtain. Ternus is not Jobs, and he knows it. He doesn’t have the theatrical gravity, the black turtleneck, the piercing gaze. He is softer, more affable, more like a brilliant engineer who accidentally found himself in the corner office. But after spending time with him, I began to understand what kind of leader he is. He is not trying to be Steve Jobs or even Tim Cook. He is trying to be John Ternus, and that may be exactly what Apple needs right now. I first met him in 2015 at Apple’s Input Design Lab in Cupertino, when he was vice president for Mac, iPad, Ecosystem, and Audio Engineering. Back then, I wrote about how he conducted a Javert-like investigation into a strange sound that a redesigned mouse made when sliding across a table. The fix required an almost obsessive attention to acoustic detail, the kind of perfectionism that defined Jobs and that Tim Cook had carefully sustained. Ternus was unknown to the public then, but in that lab, surrounded by prototypes and listening to the friction of plastic on wood, he embodied the quiet, relentless curiosity that Apple has always prized.
That early mouse mystery says a lot about Ternus and his relationship to Apple’s DNA. He came to the company right out of college, after spending four years at a virtual reality company, and he has never left. He overlapped with Jobs for a decade, though he says their interactions were rare, just “a handful of meetings.” Yet he describes himself as a student of Jobs’ teachings, absorbing the lessons indirectly, through the culture that Jobs built and through the leaders who carried it forward. “And then being able to work very closely with Tim, I’ve been very lucky,” he told me. That sense of luck, of gratitude, permeates his conversation. He doesn’t talk about his own vision in grand, sweeping terms. He talks about collaboration, about the people around him, about the systems that allow Apple to move as one. His colleagues describe him in almost reverent terms. Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing and a forty-year veteran, put it simply: “John innately has a great sense for great products, and that’s what Apple is. You can’t teach that.” That is the core of Ternus’s character. He is not a visionary who dreams up new categories from a mountaintop. He is a product guy who can feel when something is right, when a hinge clicks with the proper resistance, when an interface disappears into the task at hand. In a company with thousands of engineers and designers, that instinct is rare and perhaps unteachable.
His ascension to CEO invites inevitable comparisons to Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, another company lifer who took the top job after decades inside the organization. But the similarities end at the career path. Nadella was called upon to repair a broken culture, to heal the wounds of missed opportunities and internal rivalries. Apple, by contrast, has been on a multi-decade run of success, with products that define entire industries and a brand that inspires cult-like loyalty. Ternus is not a fixer; he is a steward. He is explicit that he will be an engine of continuity, and that word—continuity—is key to understanding why Tim Cook and Apple’s board chose him. They didn’t want a radical departure. They didn’t want a headline-grabbing personality who would remake the company in his own image. They wanted someone who would keep the machinery humming, who would protect the culture and perhaps refine it, who would not be seduced by the next shiny trend. In an era of AI hype and metaverse speculation, Ternus’s focus on hardware and on the physical objects that people hold and use every day feels almost old-fashioned. But that might be precisely the point. Apple’s greatest strength has always been the marriage of software and hardware, the seamless integration that turns a device into an extension of the self. Ternus understands that marriage better than most, because he has spent his whole career living inside it.
When I probed him on leadership and external influences, he seemed genuinely unconcerned with the usual CEO trappings. I asked which non-Apple CEOs he admired, and he paused, almost embarrassed. “I haven’t really thought about that,” he said. I asked if any business books had shaped his thinking. “Not really,” he admitted. “Of course I’ve read books, but there’s so much to be learned from the people I get to work with.” It is a striking answer, especially in an age of executive podcasts, leadership frameworks, and personal brands. Ternus seems almost allergic to the idea of packaging himself as a lesson for others. He would rather absorb knowledge from the colleagues around him, from the designers and engineers who have been solving problems for decades. Every time I tried to pin him down on the mark he wants to leave on Apple, he deflected and returned to collaboration. He spoke about the importance of cross-functional teams, of breaking down silos, of making sure that the Mac engineers talk to the iPhone engineers, that the services group understands the hardware constraints, that everyone shares a common language. If there is a vision in his leadership, it is not a destination but a method: to keep Apple a place where the best ideas can emerge from anywhere, where no one is too senior to learn from a junior designer, where the product is the only thing that matters.
Sitting with him, I found myself thinking about what makes a leader feel real. There is a performance to most CEO interviews, a careful choreography of confidence and humility. Ternus lacks that polish, and it is strangely refreshing. He seemed genuinely excited about the glowing Apple logo, not because it was a brilliant strategic move, but because it was a small joy he wanted to share. He spoke about the touchscreen MacBook Pro with a kind of reluctant wonder, as if he were still surprised that the technology had finally caught up with the idea. He did not preach about artificial intelligence or the future of computing; he let the demos do the talking, and then he stepped aside. Perhaps that is the boldest thing a leader can do in 2025: to resist the urge to be the story, to trust that the work itself will speak. Apple has always been a company of objects, of things you can hold and feel. In that sense, Ternus is the ultimate Apple insider. He is not a marketer or a financial engineer. He is a person who cares about how things work, how they feel, whether the mouse makes the right sound. That attention to the smallest detail is what allows Apple to keep creating products that seem effortless, and it is what will define his tenure. As the event wound down and the guests packed up their laptops and notes, I watched him talk to a young fashion designer, nodding as she showed him something on the screen. He was not performing. He was learning. And for a man who has been at Apple for twenty-five years, that may be the most human quality of all.
