John Ternus speaks during Apple's annual world wide developer conference (WWDC) in San Jose, Calif., in June, 2017.Stephen Lam/Reuters
In choosing a low-key, self-described product guy as its new chief executive, Apple Inc. AAPL-Q has done its best to avoid the trap that has recently caught other big companies – putting a finance guy who doesn’t know the business in the top job.
John Ternus is about as far from a money guy as you can get. He’s a hardware engineer who’s flown under the radar at Apple for 25 years. He prides himself on diving deep into solving technical problems in Apple’s trademark elegant way – the secret sauce in the company’s remarkable success.
Mr. Ternus’s greatest engineering hits include the iPhone, iPad and iMacs. Under outgoing CEO Tim Cook, he also worked on some of Apple’s signature products, including the Apple Watch, AirPods, Apple Vision Pro and the MacBook Neo.
Like his predecessor and Apple founder Steve Jobs, Mr. Ternus has a customer-first mindset and a deep devotion to developing products that delight users in every way.
Who is Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus?
The same can’t be said for companies such as Boeing Co. and the Walt Disney Co. They recently suffered under finance-trained leaders who knew very little about the products they were making and selling.
Boeing chose Dave Calhoun, an investment banker with only limited experience in the aircraft manufacturing sector, as its CEO in 2020. On his watch, Mr. Calhoun outsourced major components of the company’s aircraft manufacturing and assembly process as a way to cut costs.
As with many companies that outsource core processes too much, Boeing then had difficulty maintaining quality standards. Planes crashed. Parts fell off mid-flight. People died.
A series of regulatory and criminal investigations pointed to the weakness of outsourcing heavy manufacturing processes as the root cause of the problems. Mr. Calhoun left the company in 2024.
Disney CEO Bob Chapek, a finance guy, surrounded himself with similarly trained bean-counters. He then proceeded to eviscerate the creative heart and soul of the company – firing valued talent and cutting creative budgets.
Disney’s film, television and entertainment products suffered, and Mr. Chapek alienated loyal customers of the company’s theme parks by suggesting they were using the parks too much and limiting the enjoyment of those who paid full freight.
Mr. Chapek lasted only two years as CEO, but managed to crater Disney’s market value. He was eventually replaced by his mentor, former Disney CEO Bob Iger, who returned from his chairmanship to run the company.
In both cases, the boards bear much of the blame for promoting leaders who knew a lot about how to read a spreadsheet, but did not understand the value of their core businesses and were left in place too long.
Nothing kills innovation, creativity and a winning culture like a numbers-cruncher.
By contrast, Mr. Ternus is steeped in the Apple culture and its competitive differentiation in the marketplace. Like Mr. Jobs and Mr. Cook, he knows the unique recipe that made Apple the first US$1-trillion public company with a current market cap of roughly US$4-trillion.
With Ivy League credentials in mechanical engineering, he has the technical chops to be the smartest one at any tech table. But as promising as Mr. Ternus’s appointment may be, his success is far from guaranteed.
Up to this point, Apple’s remarkable run has been credited to the creation of beautiful products such as iPhones, AirPods and Mac laptops that have redefined what personal computing and mobile communications are all about. Mr. Ternus was a key player in their development.
Apple’s post-Cook future hinges on whether CEO John Ternus can ignite AI growth
Now the big challenge is artificial intelligence, and it’s a world where the product is quite different from those that buoyed Apple to tech dominance. In fact, Apple has been criticized widely for being slow to the AI rodeo.
Among the biggest knocks against the company is its failure to deliver on promises made two years ago to introduce new AI-based features into its products. A priority is to make its virtual assistant, Siri, more responsive and intuitive.
A major defection last year leaves Mr. Ternus with a big hole in his design bench. Jony Ive, the former Apple design guru responsible for the look and feel of signature products such as the iPhone, left the company to start his own AI product company called io Products. In 2025, IO was acquired by ChatGPT-maker OpenAI for US$6.5 billion.
Mr. Ternus’s background, experience and credentials suggest he is the right nerd for the top job. He knows the business inside and out.
But with that business changing so quickly – and so fundamentally – can he adapt and redefine Apple’s magic for an AI world?
Gus Carlson is a U.S.-based columnist for The Globe and Mail.