The incoming CEO said he was ‘lucky to have worked under Steve Jobs’ and to have had Tim Cook as a mentor.

Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple’s CEO after 15 years in the role. The company has announced John Ternus, senior vice president of hardware engineering, as his successor. Company shares went up marginally following the announcement.

Starting 1 September, Cook will assume the role of chairperson of Apple’s board. Ternus will be joining the board.

The new CEO’s position will be taken over by Johny Srouji, whose current role as the senior vice president of hardware technologies will expand to absorb the Ternus’s responsibilities.

“Cook’s legacy will be defined by steady [and] disciplined operational stewardship … [yet] he has not overseen a step-change innovation that would reset Apple’s competitive position for the next two decades,” commented Forrester VP principal analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee.

“That’s where John Ternus comes in. Ternus is a hardware engineer, which signals that Apple will seek differentiation in its physical products even as it looks to reframe the device as a substrate for intelligent experiences.”

Chatterjee added: “But he must resist the temptation of incrementalism that has plagued Apple of late and escape the iPhone’s gravitational pull in his quest for the next disruptive form factor.”

The company is still reliant on the iPhone as it seeks its next growth engine.

Cook joined Apple in 1998 and became CEO in 2011. Under his leadership, Apple grew from a market value of around $350bn to more than $4trn. His tenure as CEO saw the introduction of the Apple Watch, AirPods, iCloud, Apple Pay and more.

Ternus, who joined Apple’s product design team in 2001, became vice president of hardware engineering in 2013. He joined the executive team in 2021, and had been widely viewed as next in line to succeed Cook.

The outgoing CEO is stepping down at a time when Apple, and many alike, face increasing supply chain issues, memory crunch, geopolitical tensions, AI adoption woes and regulatory pressure. But despite these factors, the company posted “record” earnings in the quarter past.

“John Ternus has the mind of an engineer [and] the soul of an innovator”, said Cook. “He is a visionary whose contributions to Apple over 25 years are already too numerous to count and he is without question the right person to lead Apple into the future.”

Ternus added: “Having spent almost my entire career at Apple, I have been lucky to have worked under Steve Jobs and to have had Tim Cook as my mentor.

“It has been a privilege to help shape the products and experiences that have changed so much of how we interact with the world and with one another.”

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