Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple's chief executive, handing the role to John Ternus, the company's hardware chief, in a leadership transition that exposes an uncomfortable reality. Apple has built a $3 trillion empire on the back of a single device. Now its new chief must prove he can find another.
Cook's departure marks the end of a 14-year run that transformed Apple from a company dependent on iPhone sales into a sprawling tech giant with a thriving services business and profitable accessories like the Apple Watch and AirPods. Yet for all that success, Apple has never cracked a major new product category that matters at scale. That burden now falls to Ternus, along with a pressing question about artificial intelligence that the company has not yet answered.
The company also promoted Johny Srouji, the architect of Apple's custom chip dominance, to chief hardware officer. Srouji's name has circulated in CEO searches at other companies for years, so the promotion signals Apple's effort to keep him invested in Cupertino's future.
Cook's record on hardware innovation beyond the iPhone reads like a catalog of near-misses and abandoned ambitions. Apple assembled a substantial team to pursue autonomous vehicles, only to shut down the project without ever bringing a product to market. The Vision Pro, the company's mixed reality headset, launched at a price point that has limited its appeal to mainstream consumers. Neither effort cracked through to become the kind of generational breakthrough Apple has become known for.
The AI challenge looms larger. In 2024, Cook unveiled Apple Intelligence, a vision of personalized artificial intelligence that would operate on private data without making that information accessible to Apple or anyone else. The concept was compelling. The execution has stumbled. Apple repeatedly delayed the most ambitious features it promised, and a redesigned Siri with enhanced capabilities remains forthcoming. The company also struck a partnership with Google to integrate Gemini models into its AI stack, a humbling acknowledgment that Apple couldn't deliver on its full vision alone.
There is a counterargument worth considering. While Meta, Google, and others have poured billions into data centers and computing capacity to power AI models, Apple has largely stayed the course, avoiding the massive infrastructure bets its peers are making. If artificial intelligence becomes a commodity, Apple's restraint could look prescient. The company's advantage in hardware and design might matter more than raw computational firepower.
But that calculation doesn't resolve the fundamental challenge. The industry is reshaping around new form factors. Jony Ive, the designer who shaped Apple under Jobs, is now leading a hardware initiative at OpenAI with $6.5 billion of backing. Meta is advancing both its Quest VR headsets and Ray-Ban smart glasses. Google and Samsung are collaborating on smart glasses and VR. All of this signals where the next era of computing might unfold.
Cook proved Apple could thrive without Steve Jobs by extending the iPhone's reign. Ternus must prove something harder: that Apple can still invent something people didn't know they needed.
Author James Rodriguez: "Apple doesn't need a new product category to stay profitable, but it needs one to stay relevant."
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