The technology world’s most anticipated leadership transition is now official.
Apple announced that Tim Cook will step down as Chief Executive Officer a role he has held since 2011, when he succeeded the late Steve Jobs. Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering John Ternus will assume the top executive position on September 1 of this year. Cook will remain at the company as Executive Chairman, while Ternus will join Apple’s board of directors.
The CEO change at the $4 trillion company was approved unanimously by Apple’s board after a long-term succession planning process. Johny Srouji, SVP of Hardware Technologies, will step into Ternus’s current role overseeing hardware as the new Chief Hardware Officer. Ternus, who at 51 is nearly the same age Cook was when he became CEO, has spent almost his entire career at Apple. He studied mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and joined Apple’s product design team in 2001. By 2021, he was promoted to Senior Vice President, making him the youngest member of Apple’s executive team at the time. Ternus takes the CEO role amid growing questions about the next generation of Apple hardware devices particularly with the iPhone now nearly two decades old. He is widely expected to lead the debut of the first-ever foldable iPhone, making the most consequential hardware moment in years the first major product launch of a hardware engineer’s tenure. Apple’s announcement is part of a sweeping wave of CEO transitions in 2026. Greg Abel replaced Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, Josh D’Amaro replaced Bob Iger at Disney, and John Furner replaced Doug McMillon at Walmart with the urgency of AI transformation cited as a common catalyst behind several of these exits.
