John Ternus to Become Apple CEO ➹

So this is happening. Cook moves to executive chairman, Ternus takes… his turn at the helm.

Cook turned Apple into the most efficient manufacturing and logistics company on the planet–something I’ve been reading about in detail via Patrick McGee’s Apple in China, which makes a painfully convincing case for just how deep that dependency runs. He also built a massive services and content business on top of it.

But despite all of that, the soul of the company has felt increasingly bland, and the accumulating faux pas in software quality–culminating in the Liquid Glass debacle and the general state of macOS and iPadOS–have tested even the most faithful.

Ternus is a hardware guy, and very likely deeply involved in the MacBook Neo. My hope is that he has a better feel for what good product actually looks like, and can drive the kind of change that has been overdue for a while now.

I’d start with fixing macOS and iPadOS, preferably in a way that matches what people actually expect from their devices rather than what a design committee thinks looks modern.

Whether that happens is another question entirely. But at least the new CEO isn’t from the services side.

(It would also be nice if Apple realized that remote work is a thing, but I think that boat has sailed)

Update: Hacker News broadly agrees with my hopes, and many takes are worth reading (with the usual HN sanity disclaimer)