Both Tim Cook & John Ternus are the right guys in the right place, at the right time

For one more day, Tim Cook is still the CEO of Apple. Despite foibles, he was the right man in the right place to make Apple the financial and cultural juggernaut it is today. John Ternus is too.

Since my first Apple II in 1979, there have been many Apple CEOs, many philosophies behind Apple. Jobs’ was apparent in the 80s, and then again in his iCEO/CEO days.

And then he got sick. He made his last, best decision for Apple before he did.

He made Tim Cook the CEO of Apple.

Cook’s era begins in 2011

Cook’s first keynote was rough. It would take him about two years to get as smooth at presentation as Jobs was.

I think intentionally, he never tried a Jobsian reality distortion field approach.

When Cook took those keys, the iPhone wasn’t as big as it would be just a few years later when the iPhone 6 shipped. That blew the doors off the place.

He also had the early iPad to deal with and advance. And then, the first project without any real involvement from Steve Jobs, the Apple Watch, shipped.

He’s been hailed and pilloried over the years for the same reason, he wasn’t Steve Jobs. Apple didn’t need another Steve Jobs after Apple wasn’t first to a MP3 player or to a smartphone.

They needed a Tim Cook, after Apple wasn’t the voice of the revolution anymore. They needed a guy to drive Apple’s logistics and culture into the stratosphere, where it is today.

For everybody who thinks that Steve Jobs was right about everything, as a reminder, he named Cook to be CEO. And it worked out pretty well.

Not parasocial, not social

I’ve had close encounters with Apple’s two great CEOs. The first was with Steve Jobs, when I was hired for a games evangelism role inside Apple in 2001. The offer was tended, I was packing up my family to move, and in about a 40-word conversation, he handed me off to his assistant to tell me that the role was gone.

I wasn’t public-facing with Apple writing when Steve Jobs died. I did a lot of discussions and briefings in DC with mostly military folks about what it might mean, so I was still very immersed and had a lot to do that day and week afterwards.

The second Apple CEO close encounter was with Cook. This was in very late 2011, almost 10 years to the day after the Jobs call, very soon after he took over. I don’t remember the day, but it was after Thanksgiving and before the feds shut down for Christmas.

The iPad was relatively fresh, and the Department of Defense was considering them for use. Having been a submariner and a consultant, I was invited to a big meeting one Thursday night in DC.

As it turns out, the Department of Defense, specifically the Department of the Navy, didn’t like the Wi-Fi on it. There were concerns that it might be an issue with RF emissions control, and therefore impactibg detectability on underway ships and submarines.

Tim was in town for some lobbying effort or other, I forget which. I still wasn’t doing this job facing the internet yet, that would take another six months.

He and I very briefly exchanged pleasantries in a meeting room. A panel discussion about the iPad Wi-Fi “issue” in was about to start, but he was ushered out by his assistants before the discussions started. This left us with folks from the Reston, VA government support office and a few engineers from Cupertino.

And that was it. One of Tim’s many assistants reached out after my daughter died and I wrote about how my Apple Watch helped get a heart condition diagnosed. That was more a sympathy call than anything else.

John Ternus is his own man, influenced by Cook’s shadow

I’ve been asked a few times about what I expect from John Ternus as Apple CEO. I’ve mostly said “expect a very Cook-ian company for at least four years.”

It’s too early to tell what John is going to be like in a year or two. All that’s certain is that he’s got big shoes to fill.

He’s not an operations guy, he’s an engineer, mostly. He’s had his hands in all of Apple’s hardware for at least a decade, which is a good foundation.

He’s got a $4 trillion dollar company, who righted the wrongs of late-Intel hardware for most users mostly under Ternus’ hardware direction. He’s being handed an absolutely commanding mobile ecosystem, that he had less to do with, but not nothing.

The folding iPhone is about to ship albeit about 10 years after the first folding smartphone shipped. And Apple’s main money-maker for the rest of the year, the iPhone 18 Pro, is in days too.

This is not a Disneyesque CEO turnover. I still think that Bob Iger handed off to Bob Chapek, seeing the COVID storm on the horizon and other cultural and structural issues in that massive company.

After all, COVID had been brewing inside Apple’s and Disney’s supply chain in September of 2019, before it hit the US. Iger knew it was coming and was going to be a problem.

And on COVID, I think Cook stared that down better than Jobs would have. I suspect the latter would enforce his own timetables, global pandemic be damned, to the detriment of the company.

The RAM and SSD commodity pricing as of August 2026 that facing the new CEO are COVID-esque from a pricing and value destruction perspective, and will be for years, but not insurmountable. It just needs a whole lot of spending money, patience, and time.

I suspect Tim will be working that as a geopolitical problem as Apple Executive Chairman tomorrow, and going forward.

Jobs was Jobs. Cook mostly got allowed to be Cook by Apple fans, but he was true to himself, bedamned the complaints that he wasn’t Jobs.

Let Ternus be Ternus. Don’t decry that he isn’t Jobs or Cook, he’s not really listening anyway.

No matter what happens, it’s going to be interesting.

Apple was doomed in the ’90s when bean-counters ran the company. Things were bad, and the Sears/CompUSA Performa strategy just did not work. Then it wasn’t when Steve Jobs came back and pulled the cloth off the iMac when the company was the voice of the revolution.

Then, in the minds of some, it was doomed again when Tim Cook took over, right after Apple stopped being the voice of the revolution and was instead a dominant force with iPod and a growing dominance with iPhone under the last years of Steve Jobs.

Apple won, it needed Tim Cook to evolve, and Steve Jobs knew it.

And it’s not doomed tomorrow, or for the next 16 years, under John Ternus’ control.

Tim, I’m going to miss the prayer-hands at every event, they were fun. I’m going to miss the exuberant good morning, good afternoon, and one single good evening.

It’s been fun covering you for 22 years between your two temporary stints and your CEO tenure, for the feds, for MacNN, and for AppleInsider.