Apple has named John Ternus as its next chief executive officer, making him only the fourth person to hold the title in the company’s nearly five-decade history. The transition, announced on April 20, 2026, takes effect September 1, with outgoing CEO Tim Cook moving into the role of executive chairman.
Ternus, 51, has spent a quarter century at Apple. He joined in 2001, the same year the original iPod launched, and worked his way up through the hardware engineering ranks to oversee the development of essentially every physical product Apple sells: iPhone, Mac, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods.
A succession plan years in the making
Cook’s 15-year run transformed Apple from a $350 billion company into the most valuable publicly traded entity on the planet. At the time of the announcement, Apple’s market capitalization sat at approximately $4.6 trillion. To put that in perspective, that’s larger than the GDP of every country on Earth except the US and China.
Under Cook, Apple became a services juggernaut, launched the Apple Watch as a new product category, and navigated pandemic-era supply chain chaos that would have buckled lesser operations. He also steered the company through its transition from Intel chips to Apple’s own silicon, a move that reshaped the competitive dynamics of the entire PC industry.
