Well it’s official, Tim Apple Cook is stepping down as Apple CEO
After an incredinbe 15 year run where he turned a $350 billion company into one briefly worth $4 trillion.
He quietly built a services business generating over $100 billion a year… and oversaw the Apple Silicon transition that made every rival's laptop look like a space heater by comparison.
(And fully converted me into a diehard Apple user)
The new CEO is John Ternus.
He's been at Apple for 25 years... and you've almost certainly never heard of him.
Check out his banger of a LinkedIn profile as proof
But in my mind, this is the most interesting thing to happen at Apple in years.
You see, Ternus is the man behind the last decade of Apple's hardware.
He was the driving force behind the M1 chip — Apple’s biggest innovation of the last decade.
He also killed the butterfly keyboard and brought ports back to the MacBook (so he’s already a hero in my books)
So he built the thing and now he runs the thing.
The contrast with Cook is stark.
Cook was an operations genius… a supply chain wizard who came from Compaq and IBM before Jobs recruited him in 1998.
His skill was scale… efficiency… and margin.
Apple under Cook became less a product company and more a financial engine with great hardware attached.
Growth was driven by services revenue and share buybacks rather than blockbuster products launches.
While John Ternus is, by all accounts, a hardware purist.
Someone who apparently loses sleep over whether a product's internals justify its price tag.
That's a different set of instincts at the top, and it tends to produce different decisions.
Whether that matters to you as an investor depends on what you think Apple's next decade looks like.
The services flywheel Cook built isn't going anywhere because just it's too darn profitable and too embedded in people's lives.
But the question hanging over Apple for the last few years has been… what's next?
The Vision Pro was a commercial misfire.
Apple Intelligence (Apple's AI suite) has been underwhelming so far.
And while the hardware moat is real… it’s not growing as fast as it once was.
Ternus comes from the camp that believes the answer is tighter integration between chip design and device design.
I’m talking on-device AI that runs locally rather than in the cloud… with better silicon and fewer compromises.
The M-series chips were built on exactly that philosophy.
Now I’ve never owned Apple stock directly (although I’ve owned BRKB for a long time now so I’ve got a position by proxy)
But I find the leadership change fascinating… because the person who was probably most responsible for Apple's best hardware over the last decade just became the person setting the strategy.
September 1 is when Ternus officially takes over… so watch this space.
Oliver
P.S.