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