The 5 Things Every Apple Fan Hopes John Ternus Will Fix As CEO

This expert opinion by Jason Aten, a tech columnist, was originally published on Inc.com.

Last week, when Apple announced that Tim Cook would step down as CEO in September and turn over the role to John Ternus, it was huge news, even if no one was really all that surprised. There have been rumors for more than a year that Ternus, who currently serves as SVP of hardware engineering, would be Cook’s successor. Still, when a $4 trillion company says it’s getting a new CEO, it’s a big deal.

Cook, by almost every way you can measure a CEO, did everything right. He took a $350 billion company and built it into one worth $4 trillion. He will go down as one of the most operationally successful technology executives in history, and that is not a small thing.

But Apple fans have a different way of measuring the company’s success. Sure, the Cook era produced cool new hardware, like the Apple Watch, AirPods, and Apple Silicon. But it also gave its fans a growing list of frustrations that compounded quietly over 15 years. Siri hasn’t been great. Software shipped with bugs that would have been unthinkable in an earlier era. Services grew so central to Apple’s strategy that the company started to feel less like one that builds remarkable things and more like a platform that monetizes them.

And, so, the moment Apple announced that Cook was stepping down and that John Ternus would take over in a few months, the internet did what it always does: started compiling all the things it’s been wanting to say for years.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Transitions are legitimately the best moment for change inside a large organization. The incoming leader gets a brief window of permission to break things, shift direction, and communicate a vision for what they see coming next. It’s the one time you can say “we’re doing this differently now” and have it land.

Of course, John Ternus has worked at Apple for 25 years. Whatever a “Ternus era” looks like, it’s going to have a lot of Cook in it, and a lot of Steve Jobs before that. He didn’t get this job by planning to tear anything down. There are, however, a few things Apple’s most loyal fans are hoping he does differently:

1. Fix Siri (And Apple Intelligence)

Siri is, at this point, mostly a punchline. That’s only become more true as other voice assistants get better. It also didn’t help that Apple made a bunch of promises about an Apple Intelligence-powered version of Siri, very few of which it has been able to deliver on two years later.

For now, Apple is leaning heavily on partners—including ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini—because its own foundational model work hasn’t gotten it far. It all gives the impression that Apple is far behind, and at risk of missing out on the next era of technology. Fixing this isn’t optional for Ternus. In many ways, what Ternus does with AI will be his first defining test of how he thinks beyond hardware and how Apple thinks about its future.

2. Be More Decisive About Products

Cook’s approach to leading Apple was deliberate and more likely to ask questions than give answers. That worked well for running the most complex supply chain in the history of consumer technology. It was also probably the right choice if the thing you’re trying to do is optimize for the most successful consumer device in history—the iPhone.

It’s less ideal for deciding whether new products or ideas are actually good. Bloomberg’s reporting on Ternus describes someone who is “willing to make clear calls.” That’s a specific contrast, and it isn’t accidental. The hope is that a CEO with deep product instincts will simply decide things faster, and that decisions made faster will be better than decisions made by committee. Apple has produced some products in recent years that feel like they lost an argument somewhere. A more decisive boss might fix that.

3. Make Apple A Hardware Company Again

Relatedly, a lot of people are hoping that Ternus’s most decisive decision is that he refocuses Apple on its greatest strength—its products. As CEO, Cook turned services into Apple’s most reliable growth engine, and he deserves enormous credit for it. But somewhere in that transition, the balance shifted. Apple’s hardware instincts are good—thanks largely to Ternus’s influence over the past few years. But it was services that increasingly drove the headline strategy.

Now that the hardware guy is in charge of the whole company, there’s definitely a hope that will change. Specifically, it’s a hope that Apple will feel less like the company that tries to upsell you on a dozen services when you set up your new iPhone for the first time, and more like a company trying to figure out the very best version of the products you hold in your hand.

4. Take Bigger Swings

The vision that Steve Jobs created and Cook profitably executed was: Apple builds the things people didn’t know they needed, and then those things become essential. That formula requires genuine risk. It requires being willing to look a little crazy until you don’t.

There’s a sentiment that Apple needs to restart its innovation engine. The company’s fans still look to Apple for exciting, useful, disruptive devices. The phrase “one more thing” lives on as shorthand for a kind of ambition that has felt increasingly absent. The Vision Pro was a swing, but an expensive, unfinished one. Smart glasses, robotics, AI wearables—these are all reportedly on the roadmap. The question is whether Ternus pushes them through with urgency or lets them emerge cautiously when they’re ready. Let’s hope it’s the former.

5. Fix The Software

This is the irony baked into the whole Ternus era. His strongest credential is the thing Apple is currently doing best: hardware. Of course, that’s probably why he’s about to become CEO—the area he was responsible for is the company’s biggest strength.

On the other hand, Ternus’s biggest gap is the thing Apple is currently doing worst: software. I’m not sure anyone would argue that software quality isn’t the company’s biggest challenge. The past few years have seen a steady decline in overall fit and finish of Apple’s first-party software—especially macOS.

MacOS Tahoe is fine, but there are plenty of devoted Apple users who refuse to update to Tahoe because they feel like the overall Liquid Glass interface is such a regression that they want nothing to do with it. Ternus understands how a screw should feel. He now also has to care about whether a toggle works or a UI layout makes sense.

To be clear, all of these are legitimate concerns wrapped in hopes for the future, but there’s a real risk that all of those hopes become misplaced expectations. Ternus isn’t going to Apple’s campus on September 1 and blow things up. He’s going to do what he’s always done — focus on craft, move deliberately, care about quality in a way that shows up over time.

That’s worth something. It just might not be the radical changes Apple’s biggest fans are hoping for.