{"id":667972,"date":"2026-09-02T02:43:30","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T02:43:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/667972\/"},"modified":"2026-09-02T02:43:30","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T02:43:30","slug":"john-ternus-takes-over-as-apple-enters-era-of-ai-foldable-phones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/667972\/","title":{"rendered":"John Ternus takes over as Apple enters era of AI, foldable phones"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a> John Ternus (left), takes over as Apple chief executive, with Tim Cook (right) becoming executive chairman (VALERIE MACON) <\/p>\n

John Ternus took over as Apple’s chief executive on Tuesday, inheriting a company that towers over the smartphone market but trails its rivals in artificial intelligence. <\/p>\n

One of his biggest challenges will be balancing the company’s dependence on China while parrying acute political pressure from the White House. <\/p>\n

The handover ends Tim Cook’s 15-year run, replacing the operations specialist who built Apple’s supply chain with the engineer who built its hardware. <\/p>\n

Ternus, 51, joined Apple’s design team in 2001 and worked his way up to senior vice president of hardware engineering, reporting to Cook. <\/p>\n

He leads the engineering teams behind Apple’s entire product lineup, including the iPhones that generate most of the company’s revenue. <\/p>\n

He gets barely a week to settle in, with Apple holding its annual iPhone event on September 9, where it is expected to unveil its first foldable handset. <\/p>\n

“Tim Cook left the house in phenomenal order,” said Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at investment firm Yorkville Ives & Co. <\/p>\n

“But now it’s about Ternus defining the AI chapter.” <\/p>\n

Ives expects the new chief executive to lean into what he knows.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

“There’s no reason to fix what’s already working,” he said, predicting Ternus will concentrate on hardware innovation while leaving Cook’s supply chain intact. <\/p>\n

Some analysts had argued software chief Craig Federighi was the more logical pick for a company scrambling to catch up on AI.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Creative Strategies, said that misreads how consumers actually adopt technology. <\/p>\n

“Consumers are still buying hardware first, and it’s going to be like that for a long time,” she said. “You’re not going to discover the value of AI if you’re not interested in the hardware.” <\/p>\n

Cook echoed that sentiment in a final memo to employees on Monday.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

“Few people understand what it takes to build products that change the world the way John does,” Cook wrote. <\/p>\n

Ternus earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and worked as an engineer at Virtual Research Systems before joining Apple. <\/p>\n

Inside the company he is credited with driving a push to make products more durable, reliable and resilient, and with design work that cut their carbon footprint. <\/p>\n

The harder question is what kind of leader he becomes. <\/p>\n

“Even people that know him now don’t know him as a CEO,” Milanesi said. <\/p>\n

“You might know him as the head of engineering, but once you’re CEO, things change. Your responsibility is bigger, your power is bigger. You’re dancing a different kind of dance.” <\/p>\n

Ternus’ base salary will be $3 million — the same amount Cook received when he was CEO — but stock options could increase total compensation to $58 million in his first year, according to a securities filing on Tuesday. <\/p>\n

Cook’s salary will decrease to $2 million, while his total compensation over the next year could be worth $47 million, according to the filing. Cook’s total compensation for 2025 exceeded $74 million. <\/p>\n

– ‘Learn on the job’ – <\/p>\n

Nowhere is that gap wider than in the geopolitical role Cook excelled at, courting both Beijing and Donald Trump’s White House to protect a supply chain that runs largely through China. <\/p>\n

Apple’s manufacturing operation is among the most complex in corporate history, a web of hundreds of suppliers and assembly lines that Cook painstakingly built over decades. <\/p>\n

Cook in recent years began shifting some of the work elsewhere — iPhone assembly to India, other production to Vietnam — but the diversification has been gradual, with China, one of Apple’s biggest consumer markets, still anchoring the system. <\/p>\n

Complicating matters, Trump has repeatedly demanded Apple build iPhones on American soil, threatening tariffs on those made overseas. <\/p>\n

Cook avoided the heaviest blows of Trump’s trade war by cultivating the president directly, making US investment commitments and political donations — all while also keeping Beijing onside. <\/p>\n

The tricky political terrain will be new for Ternus. <\/p>\n

“He knows Apple Park like the back of his pocket in terms of hardware,” Ives said of Ternus. “But on the global stage — that’s probably one of the biggest areas where he’s going to have to learn on the job.” <\/p>\n

Cook is not going far. He becomes executive chairman of Apple’s board, with a mandate the company has said includes engaging policymakers around the world. <\/p>\n

“That was really clever,” said Milanesi, arguing the arrangement frees Ternus from a role Cook has handled alone for years. <\/p>\n

The September 9 iPhone event will be the first public measure of the handover. <\/p>\n

A foldable iPhone would be the most significant redesign in years, and Ternus will be its face — eight days into the job. <\/p>\n

“This is a moment that they created for him,” Milanesi said. <\/p>\n

arp-smb\/pnb <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"John Ternus (left), takes over as Apple chief executive, with Tim Cook (right) becoming executive chairman (VALERIE MACON)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":667973,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[261],"tags":[291,311,289,290,44317,18,19,17,6964,109408,282041,82,257204,310],"class_list":["post-667972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-apple","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-cook","tag-eire","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-john","tag-john-ternus","tag-milanesi","tag-technology","tag-ternus","tag-tim-cook"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117199149733882060","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=667972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667972\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/667973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=667972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=667972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=667972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}