Tim Cook ended his 15-year run as Apple's chief executive on Monday (Aug 31). John Ternus, the senior vice president of hardware engineering, takes over on Tuesday (Sept 1), days ahead of a Sept 9 event where the company is expected to introduce the next iPhone 18 generation, according to g1, the news portal of Brazil's Globo group. The succession was announced on July 27, as dated by UOL. Cook remains at the company as chairman of the board.
The goodbye came in a letter to employees, obtained by Bloomberg according to g1 and also published by the site 9to5Mac, per Forbes Argentina. "Today is my last day as CEO of Apple. I always knew this moment would come, and yet it is hard to believe it has", Cook wrote, adding that he leaves the job "completely at peace" and recalling the goal, associated with Steve Jobs, of leaving "a mark on the universe". On X, he summed it up: "My title changes tomorrow, but the love I have for the Apple community never will."
"I'm not leaving Apple. But I am stepping away from a role I have deeply loved. I could not be more excited about John's leadership."
Cook took over in August 2011, succeeding Steve Jobs, who died that October at 56. He joined Apple in 1998 after 12 years at IBM and a stint at Compaq, and became chief operating officer in 2005. Under his tenure, annual revenue grew from US$108 billion in fiscal 2011 to more than US$416 billion in 2025, and market value jumped from about US$350 billion to roughly US$4 trillion, figures cited by g1. UOL notes the company crossed US$1 trillion in 2018 and briefly hit US$4 trillion this year, the first listed company to reach that level; TecMundo says the brand reached US$5 trillion for the first time.
"Jobs was a genius of innovation, while Cook was a genius of execution", Francisco Jeronimo, vice president at research firm IDC, told UOL. The execution lived in the supply chain: Cook coordinated partners across Asia for a company that sells 250 million iPhones a year, by the analyst's count. He is also credited with the turn to recurring-revenue services such as Apple Music and Apple TV+, and with new product categories, the Apple Watch and the AirPods. Missteps include the HomePod and the Vision Pro, both weak sellers, according to UOL, and a lag in artificial intelligence that now passes to his successor.
Who is John Ternus
Ternus has been at Apple since 2001, when he joined the product design team after a stint at Virtual Research Systems. Trained in mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, he led hardware work on the Mac, iPhone and iPad lines and joined the executive team as senior vice president in 2021, according to g1. TecMundo describes him as discreet and credits him as a central figure in the switch from Intel processors to Apple's own Apple Silicon chips. Announcing the successor, Cook said Ternus "has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator and the heart to lead with integrity and honor".
The ledger Ternus inherits
The calendar is tight: on Sept 9, Ternus fronts the event that, per rumors cited by UOL and TecMundo, should unveil a foldable iPhone, possibly named iPhone Ultra. Artificial intelligence is next on the list; the new Siri only materialized through a partnership with Google, according to TecMundo. On hardware, the memory-chip crisis threatens to raise prices and squeeze supply, and production, once concentrated in China, has partly shifted to India, now a key base for supplying the US market, UOL reports, which also notes regulatory pressure from the European Union and Brazil for looser App Store rules. "Apple no longer has the same bargaining power it used to have, and Ternus will have to navigate this phase while securing enough supply for its products, keeping them affordable and, at the same time, protecting margins", Tarun Pathak of Counterpoint Research told UOL. For suppliers and assemblers, the order of the day is holding down costs just as memory gets expensive; for consumers, the risk is paying more for the next devices. The first reading comes at the launch event of the new administration itself.