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John Ternus officially became Apple's chief executive on Tuesday, taking charge of a company that dominates the smartphone market but lags rivals in artificial intelligence, all while facing mounting political pressure from the White House over its reliance on China.
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.
Ternus, 51, joined Apple's design team in 2001 and worked his way up to senior vice president of hardware engineering, reporting to Cook.
He leads the engineering teams behind Apple's entire product lineup, including the iPhone, which generates most of the company's revenue.
He gets barely a week to settle in, with Apple holding its annual iPhone event on Sept. 9, where it is expected to unveil its first foldable handset.
"Tim Cook left the house in phenomenal order," said Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at investment firm Yorkville Ives & Co. "But now it's about Ternus defining the AI chapter."
Ives expects the new chief executive to lean into what he knows, predicting Ternus will concentrate on hardware innovation while leaving Cook's supply chain intact. "There's no reason to fix what's already working," he said.
Some analysts had argued that software chief Craig Federighi was the more logical pick for a company scrambling to catch up on AI. Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Creative Strategies, said that misreads how consumers actually adopt technology.
"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."
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. 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.
The harder question is what kind of leader he becomes. "Even people that know him now don't know him as a CEO," Milanesi said. "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."
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.
Apple's manufacturing operation is among the most complex in corporate history, a web of hundreds of suppliers and assembly lines that Cook built over decades.
Cook in recent years began shifting some of the work elsewhere, including iPhone assembly to India and other production to Vietnam, though the diversification has been gradual, with China still anchoring the system.
Complicating matters, Trump has repeatedly demanded that Apple build iPhones on American soil, threatening tariffs on those made overseas. Cook avoided the heaviest blows of Trump's trade war by cultivating the president directly, making U.S. investment commitments and political donations while also keeping Beijing onside.
The tricky political terrain will be new for Ternus. "He knows Apple Park like the back of his pocket in terms of hardware," Ives said. "But on the global stage, that's probably one of the biggest areas where he's going to have to learn on the job."
Cook is not going far. He becomes executive chairman of Apple's board on the same day, with a mandate that includes engaging policymakers around the world. "That was really clever," Milanesi said, arguing the arrangement frees Ternus from a role Cook has handled alone for years.
The Sept. 9 iPhone event will be the first public measure of the handover. A foldable iPhone would be the most significant redesign in years, and Ternus will be its face, eight days into the job. "This is a moment that they created for him," Milanesi said.
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