I Spent 30 Minutes With Apple’s CEO. Now I Know Why John Ternus Got the Job

LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyThe brief ceremony introducing the new Macbook Pro this week was as low-key as the presenter, Apple’s new CEO John Ternus. He stepped onto the low stage at a Los Angeles event space with zero fanfare, said hi, and queued up a video showing the first touchscreen Mac. Then he released the modest crowd of journalists and creators to get hands-on with the new laptop and roam between eye-popping demos of music producers, filmmakers, photographers, and fashion designers using the laptop. Ternus, who at 51 is on the younger side of Apple’s top management, has been CEO for less than two months. But this launch and a series of other recent announcements have made one thing clear. With this new guy—if a 25-year Apple veteran could be considered new—it’s all about the products. Perhaps fittingly, the biggest noise of the presentation came when Ternus revealed that the new device restores the illumination to the Apple logo. Maybe that’s a symbol that in the age of AI, Apple is beaming out the message that hardware still rules.

A few minutes after the presentation, I sat down with Ternus, for the second time in two days. Steve Jobs used to grant me an audience after his famous keynotes, too. Ternus isn’t Jobs, of course, nor is he supposed to be. But who is he?

I first met Ternus in 2015, when I spent a day with him at Apple’s Input Design Lab, a testing facility in Cupertino. He’d risen to VP for Mac, iPad, Ecosystem, and Audio Engineering, and he struck me as affable and knowledgeable. (He spent four years right out of college at a virtual reality company, but he’s been at Apple ever since.) The peg to my story at the time was how this unknown manager conducted a Javert-like investigation to fix the weird sound a redesigned mouse made when sliding on a table.

That attention to detail was a legacy of Jobs’ perfectionism, which Tim Cook sustained as the next CEO. In the decade when Ternus overlapped with Jobs, he says he had only “a handful of interactions” with the founder. “But I've always felt like sort of a student of Steve's teachings,” Ternus said. “And then being able to work very closely with Tim, I’ve been very lucky.”

Ternus has so far been defined by his product prowess. “John innately has a great sense for great products, and that’s what Apple is,” says Greg Joswiak, Apple’s SVP of worldwide marketing and a 40-year company veteran. “You can’t teach that.” In one sense Ternus’ ascension is similar to that of Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, another lifer promoted to the top post. But Nadella was called upon to fix a broken organization, while Apple has been on a multi-decade run. Ternus is explicit that he will be an engine of continuity. That word is key to his selection, and above all explains why Tim Cook and the rest of Apple’s board was so comfortable with the choice.

The extent to which Ternus is a deep Apple insider became clear when I probed him on his views on being a corporate leader. I asked him which non-Apple CEOs he admires, and he was stumped. “I haven't really thought about that,” he said. I asked whether any business books had an impact on him. “Not really,” he said. “Of course I’ve read books, but there's so much to be learned from the people I get to work with.” Indeed, every time I tried to pin down Ternus on what mark he wants to make at Apple, he deflected the question and told me how he will continue Apple’s commitment to internal collaboration.

Ternus’ key collaborator is probably Johny Srouji, the architect of the company’s custom silicon, an initiative that’s driven many of the company’s innovations in the past decade. Srouri says that their relationship will be even closer, as Apple has merged its hardware engineering and technology organizations with Srouji at the top, reporting to Ternus. “John is going to be a great CEO,” he said. “He's a product guy at heart, but Apple's secret weapon is the DNA, the culture, which is not going to change. Remember, John has been here for 25 years. It’s not like he's going to come and everything's going to be different.”

Being Apple’s CEO encompasses much more than products—there’s a $100 billion business in services, a huge infrastructure, and the general mishegoss of running a giant corporation. I asked Ternus what it’s like to take on a massively expanded portfolio. “One of the amazing privileges of this job is getting to learn so many new things,” he said. “I have been and will continue to learn and go deeper into different areas. But, you know, I do love product. I'm super passionate about it.”

Like it or not, the CEO of a $4 trillion company has to be involved in policy and politics. It has been widely reported that as executive chair, Cook will still conduct some of Apple’s high-level policy duties, including the equivalent of stuffing gold-plated binkies in the presidential mouth. Ternus implies that the reality is more nuanced. “Tim is available to help wherever I ask him, and it's great to have him in that role,” he said. “He obviously has a ton of relationships he's developed over the years, and of course, I'm building new relationships in this role as well.” One relationship he has yet to build: the president. Ternus has yet to meet Donald Trump.

Then there’s the one thing that could possibly disrupt the way Apple has run its business for the past 50 years. Ternus is taking over the company during what may be the biggest technological shift ever. I suggested to Ternus that history may judge him on how he handles AI. I spelled out for him a couple of narratives people spin about Apple. One is that Apple has been hobbled by a failure to develop its AI product Siri, and even after an update it’s still in catch-up mode. The other is that Apple is smart to avoid the high cost of developing a frontier model and that the strategy of organically putting AI into its products, with a focus on privacy, will pay off in the long run.

“Everyone has an opinion—I really like where we’re at,” he said. “I would hope people recognize that the work we do is building incredible products that make their lives better. We’re absolutely going to leverage AI to do that. We don't want to ship AI for AI's sake. When we're doing it right, people won’t have to think about whether it was AI that made this happen or more traditional software. What matters is, did we build something that they really love?”

That assumes that AI, as powerful as it is, will wind up as a “normal” technology, organically integrated into our current gadget-sphere. Another school of thought is that AI is an apocalyptic disruptor that will shred the current ecosystem. In that vision, all those cool apps Apple supports will be subsumed by AI-concocted agents generated from prompts, or even autonomously. Ternus doesn’t buy that scenario. “That could make life really easy, I suppose, but the creation of products is a deeply human and personal thing, something that we love to do,” he said.

When I asked whether he’s in favor of AI regulation, he replied, “We all read the stories and think about it from a cybersecurity standpoint—clearly these models are very capable of doing things. Our focus is on making sure that our products are secure and safe, and protecting the users' information.”

His non-answer shows that he might well be on the way to mastering political communication. But policy will never be the focus of John Ternus. He is, and probably always will be, the product-guy CEO. Before we ended our conversation, Ternus had one question for me: “What did you think of the logo?”

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