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John Ternus takes the Apple helm, eyes AI revolution and foldable iPhones

International Finance Business Desk — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:44 +0000

With the departure of Tim Cook and the arrival of his successor John Ternus as the new CEO, tech giant Apple has entered a new era, with the new boss zeroing upon his top priority: fixing the iPhone maker’s position in the global artificial intelligence (AI) race.

Ternus, a 25-year-old Apple veteran and the company’s hardware chief, who will be taking over the top boss’ role, inherits a business with enormous financial strength, a global installed base of more than 2.5 billion active devices, and an annual revenue of more than USD 416 billion, but one that has struggled to match the AI innovation pace set by rivals such as Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

After completing his 15-year record-breaking tenure as CEO, during which he led Apple to unprecedented heights, Cook will assume the role of executive chairman, allowing him to remain engaged in policymaking.

The choice of Ternus is significant. Unlike Cook, who built his reputation on operations and supply-chain management, Ternus is an engineer and product executive. He joined Apple’s product design team in 2001, became vice-president of hardware engineering in 2013, and joined the executive team in 2021.

He has overseen hardware developments across the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and AirPods. His work on Apple silicon strengthened the Mac business by giving Apple greater control over processors and improving performance.

Apple’s effort to build “Apple Intelligence” has faced significant delays, especially regarding a more advanced version of Siri. As it strives to deliver AI capabilities across its devices, the company has sought outside technology, including partnerships with OpenAI and Google.

That strategy gives Apple access to powerful models but also raises questions about whether the company can develop enough proprietary AI technology to compete over the long term.

ALSO READ | Apple Upgrade turns your next iPhone into a monthly lease

The challenge is broader than Siri. AI is changing how consumers search, create content, use software, and interact with devices. Apple faces significant challenges as its competitive edge has historically relied on its control over hardware, software, and services.

And it is also struggling with supply chain snags, especially on the chip front. To deal with the industry-wide chip shortages, the tech giant has already lifted prices across its Mac and iPad ‌line-ups. It has also braced up for dampening sales figures in the current quarter.

Ternus must determine how AI should reshape the iPhone and wider Apple ecosystem without undermining the privacy and security principles that distinguish the company.

The timing is demanding. Apple is preparing for a major product cycle, with its September 9 launch event expected to showcase new iPhones and potentially its first foldable iPhone. It will be Ternus’s first major public product moment as CEO.

Analysts see high-end devices like the upcoming foldable iPhone eventually becoming the main driver of Apple’s higher selling prices and margin growth.

Investors will also be watching whether he can revive a perception that Apple has become more evolutionary than revolutionary. Cook leaves behind an extraordinary financial record.

Apple’s market capitalisation rose from about USD 350 billion when he became CEO to roughly USD 4 trillion, while services grew into a business generating more than USD 100 billion a year.

The company also launched successful new categories such as Apple Watch and AirPods and developed its own chip technology.

Yet Apple’s recent AI missteps have created a strategic vulnerability. The company is competing with smartphone rivals and technology companies spending tens of billions on AI infrastructure, models, and talent globally.

That could push Ternus toward a more hardware-led answer to the AI race. His engineering background may prove useful as Apple seeks to build devices in which AI is embedded rather than simply offered as a cloud service.

Future products such as foldable phones, smarter wearables, augmented-reality devices, and more powerful Macs could become important parts of that strategy.

There is also a management challenge. Ternus must preserve the operational discipline that made Cook’s Apple extraordinarily profitable while encouraging greater risk-taking and faster decision-making.

He will also have to manage relationships with suppliers, regulators, and governments at a time when Apple faces scrutiny over its App Store practices and remains dependent on a complex global manufacturing network.

For now, Ternus has the advantage of continuity. He knows Apple’s culture, products, and senior leadership from the inside and has worked under both Steve Jobs and Cook. Apple’s board has described him as the right leader to take the company into its next phase.

But continuity may not be enough. Scale, efficiency, and financial expansion defined the Cook era. The Ternus era will be judged increasingly by whether Apple can turn AI from a weakness into a new source of product leadership.

His first job, in other words, is not simply to make Apple smarter. It is to make sure the company does not fall behind while the definition of “smart” is being rewritten.

Trying to break Samsung’s monopoly
Currently, Samsung Electronics dominates the niche called the “foldable smartphone market,” with the segment touted to be the next mainstream despite its premium price tags.

Foldable phones are anticipated to be a promising opportunity for consumer electronics companies that have encountered challenges due to a significant shortage of memory and storage chips, leading to price increases and a decline in overall consumer demand.

As per the research firm IDC, there will be a 12.6% jump in foldable phone shipments in 2026, whereas conventional smartphones will see a record ⁠16.7% export decline.

Analysts expect Apple to launch a foldable iPhone with a screen similar in size to an iPad mini. Earlier in 2026, Samsung unveiled a new ⁠passport-sized foldable phone as the South Korean tech giant seeks to consolidate its industry foothold.

Apple is expected to ship more than 17 million foldable iPhones by 2027, IDC predicted.

In 2025, Apple unveiled a slimmer iPhone Air and loaded its iPhone 17 base models with several better features. The iPhone 17 line-up helped drive a strong upgrade cycle among consumers.

The post John Ternus takes the Apple helm, eyes AI revolution and foldable iPhones appeared first on International Finance.

Tim Cook’s Apple legacy: How an operator built a four trillion pound titan

International Finance Business Desk — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 02:00:26 +0000

Steve Jobs cast a long shadow. When Tim Cook, then 50, inherited control of the most iconic technology company in the world, analysts and insiders alike questioned whether an operations specialist could maintain the creative fire that had built the iPhone, the iPad, and the ecosystem around them.

Many expected Cook to be a caretaker, a steward of Jobs’ legacy. What happened instead was something more interesting: Cook didn’t try to be Jobs. He became himself – and in doing so, transformed Apple from a products company into an ecosystem empire.

The numbers are stark and revealing. Apple’s market capitalisation has surged from 280 billion pound to more than 3.2 trillion pound, a tenfold increase. Total annual revenue has quadrupled from 72 billion pound to 333 billion pound.

But those figures, impressive as they are, obscure a more consequential shift in how Apple creates value. Under Cook, the company didn’t just grow larger; it became fundamentally different.

The market cap milestone
Apple became the first publicly listed company to cross the 800 billion valuation pound in August 2018. It hit 1.6 trillion pound in 2020, crossed 2.4 trillion pound in January 2022, and briefly touched 4 trillion pound in July 2026 – a moment that seemed nearly impossible when Cook took office.

To put this in perspective, Apple’s current valuation roughly equals the size of the entire British economy, the fifth largest in the world.

ALSO READ | Apple stock tumbles despite strong earnings, bucking Nasdaq trend

Yet market cap alone is a crude measure. What matters to shareholders, employees, and customers is what that valuation represents.

The creation of sustainable, recurring revenue streams. Here, Cook’s strategic choices become clearer. When he started, Apple was a company of peaks and troughs, dependent on product cycles. By the end, it had become a company of steady climbs.

The services revolution
In 2011, Apple’s services business – consisting primarily of the App Store, iTunes, and AppleCare – generated 6.3 billion pound annually.

This quarter, Apple reported 24.6 billion pound in services revenue alone. For fiscal year 2025, services reached £87 billion, making it Apple’s second-largest business after the iPhone, with a gross margin significantly higher than hardware.

This was deliberate strategy. Cook understood that the installed base of iPhone users represented not just a current revenue opportunity, but a platform for recurring income. Under his watch, Apple launched Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness+, Apple News+, and Apple Arcade.

The company monetised iCloud storage, expanding device lockdown and creating switching costs that few other tech companies could match.

By 2025, services contributed 21% of total revenue but a disproportionate share of profit. In the March 2026 quarter alone, nearly 43 cents of every pound of gross profit came from services.

For a company that built its reputation on sleek hardware, this represents a quiet revolution: Apple had become a subscription business wrapped around physical products, not the reverse.

This shift explains Cook’s willingness to step aside for John Ternus, a career hardware engineer. The infrastructure is now in place.

The recurring revenue flows. A hardware-focused CEO can innovate on devices without fear of destabilising the financial foundation.

The iPhone engine
The iPhone remains Apple’s cash engine. In 2011, it generated 31 billion pound – 42% of Apple’s total revenue.

By 2025, it had grown to 168 billion pound, a fivefold increase. Even as services exploded, the flagship product continued to climb, generation after generation.

This is perhaps Cook’s most significant achievement: He inherited the most successful smartphone ever created and made it more successful, not through revolutionary design, which few would argue Apple achieved under his tenure, but through relentless execution.

Incremental improvements in camera quality, processor speed, and battery life kept the iPhone relevant.

Careful marketing maintained its status symbol premium.

Tightening the ecosystem – locking users into iCloud, AirPods, Apple Watch, Apple Pay – raised switching costs and customer lifetime value.

A single three-month quarter in 2026 generated more iPhone revenue (43.5 billion pound) than the entire company did in 2011.

This is Cook’s most visible legacy: Making the world’s most profitable product line even more so.

Geographic expansion and China
When Cook took over, the Americas dominated Apple’s revenue. The company had presence in China, but it was nascent.

Today, China represents over 15% of Apple’s revenue, more than 51 billion pound annually, and represents far more than revenue.

It is the site of Apple’s manufacturing ecosystem, its supply chain resilience, and increasingly, its geopolitical vulnerability.

Cook’s supply chain background proved invaluable here. He didn’t just expand into China; he bound Apple’s entire manufacturing and sourcing strategy to it.

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The decision to move production offshore accelerated Apple’s margin expansion and growth, though it also created dependencies that haunt the company today as US-China tensions rise.

New products and ecosystem locks
Much criticism of Cook’s tenure centres on the lack of revolutionary new products.

Jobs gave the world the iPhone and iPad. Cook gave it the Apple Watch and AirPods – both significant, but neither transformed entire categories.

The MacBook Pro’s shift to Apple Silicon (the M1 and M2 chips) was genuinely impressive engineering, but it was a refinement and consolidation of existing designs, not a leap forward.

Yet this criticism misses Cook’s actual strategy. He wasn’t trying to invent new categories. He was trying to deepen moats around existing ones.

The Apple Watch sold poorly at first; under Cook’s stewardship, it became the world’s best-selling smartwatch. AirPods, similarly dismissed, became synonymous with wireless earbuds.

These products succeeded not because they were first, but because they were sewn into Apple’s ecosystem so tightly that switching costs became prohibitive.

By 2025, Apple’s wearables business (watches, earbuds, headphones) had grown to 28 billion pound in annual revenue. The entire category barely existed in 2011.

The innovation question
Here is where the nuance matters. Critics argue that Cook presided over a period of innovation stagnation.

The iPhone, they note, looks and feels roughly the same today as it did in 2015.

The iPad evolved incrementally. Even the much-touted transition to Apple Silicon, whilst impressive, was primarily a manufacturing and supply-chain achievement, not a product breakthrough.

They are not wrong. But Cook would argue, and reasonably, that innovation was never his job.

His job was to take Jobs’ foundation and build a company that could sustain extraordinary growth and profitability for decades. In that mission, he succeeded spectacularly.

Cook’s legacy is not revolutionary products. It is sustainable, compounding value creation. It is the recognition that the iPhone’s best years were ahead of it, not behind it.

It is understanding that a two-billion-person installed base could sustain an entire services business, independent of new hardware sales.

ALSO READ | John Ternus and Apple’s battle for the post-smartphone era

It is the cold, clear-eyed realisation that optimisation and execution could generate more shareholder value than invention.

Apple’s market cap growth, under Cook, increased from 280 billion pound to 3,200 billion pound, a +900% hike. Revenue growth increased from 72 billion pound to 333 billion pound (+363% rise). The tech giant’s services growth went up from 6.3 billion pound to 87 billion pound (+1,281% growth).

In a single quarter this year, Apple generated 87 billion pound in revenue. That exceeds the company’s entire annual revenue from 2011. Think on that: 15 years ago, a year’s work. Today, three months’ work.

Cook’s Apple is a different company than Jobs’ Apple. It is larger, more profitable, and far more complicated.

It is a hardware company that also happens to be a services company that also happens to be a payments company that also happens to be a media company. The portfolio is broader, the margins higher, and the dependencies more intricate.

Whether that is progress or compromise depends on your view. Investors have long since decided: It is progress.

Cook stepped down in September 2026, handing the company to John Ternus, a hardware engineer, at a moment when that expertise is needed.

Cook leaves behind not a company innovating at the frontier, but a company capturing value at an unprecedented scale.

The numbers tell the story better than any strategy memo could. And they will be his legacy.

The post Tim Cook’s Apple legacy: How an operator built a four trillion pound titan appeared first on International Finance.

Business Leader of the Week: Under John Ternus, Apple looks to battle AI concerns

IFM Correspondent — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:02:01 +0000

Tech giant Apple has named longtime hardware boss John Ternus as its new CEO, tapping an insider to lead the iPhone maker as the incumbent Tim Cook will become the Executive Chairman. Cook was handpicked by tech maverick Steve Jobs in 2011, the same year in which the iPhone maker nearly got bankrupt. Cook, who was vice-president of Corporate Materials for Compaq, was helping the company cash on the 1990s PC boom.

Under Cook’s leadership, Apple transitioned itself from a hardware-focused company into a services and ecosystem giant, apart from increasing its market value close to USD 4 trillion. The company has also become a dominant name in the wearables category (Apple Watch, AirPods).

Cook’s stint also witnessed Apple acing its supply chain diversification game, by engaging contract manufacturers in China, followed by rising investments in Vietnam and India under the “China Plus One” model.

The business move proved to be game-changer, by keeping expensive factory operations and product inventories largely off Apple’s books while maximizing profits.

Despite pumping hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in its American supply chain partners, Apple still performs a massive chunk of its production and subsystem sourcing activities in Asia.

Cook, as Executive Chairman, will assist with Apple’s certain operational aspects, including engaging with policymakers around the world. Johny Srouji, who oversaw Apple’s custom chip and sensor designs, will now be the chief hardware officer. He will now lead two divisions: custom chip and sensor designs and hardware engineering that Ternus once led.

“Arthur Levinson, who has been Apple’s non-executive chairman for the past 15 years, will become its lead independent director on September 1, 2026. Ternus will join the board of directors, also effective September 1, 2026,” the tech giant announced.

The promotion of John Ternus as the new Apple CEO comes at a crucial juncture, with the tech giant falling behind in artificial intelligence (AI). It has lost its position as the most valued tech company to AI chipmaker Nvidia, as investors have fretted over its lack of innovation in the AI domain.

Ternus, whom Cook described as “without question the right person to lead the company,” will face an immediate challenge as CEO: Integrating AI into the iPhone.

In January 2026, Apple struck a deal with Alphabet’s Google, to use the latter’s Gemini to improve its Siri virtual assistant. Despite introducing a form of AI in 2011 with Siri, Apple has not yet scored a hardware or software product hit based on Generative AI. Siri is not an “agent,” term that AI firms use for systems that carry out complex tasks like a human assistant.

John Ternus: An Apple Veteran

John Ternus graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in mechanical engineering. During his college days, he worked on an assistive engineering project to design a mechanical feeding device for people with paralysis.

Ternus worked as a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems, a company specializing in early virtual reality hardware, before joining Apple’s product design team in 2001, where he helped design the hardware for the Apple Cinema Display. He eventually became more involved in the core product engineering of major Apple devices over multiple generations.

Ternus was behind the reinvention of products like the Mac, which has grown market share against PCs, apart from being quietly influential in the development of iPads and AirPods.

From 2013 until 2021, when he was elevated to Senior Vice President, Ternus had been Vice President of Hardware Engineering for Apple, overseeing the research and development of key product lines like the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and AirPods.

“Ternus’ work on Mac has helped the category become more powerful and more popular globally than at any time in its 40-year history. That includes the recent introduction of MacBook Neo, an all-new laptop that makes the Mac experience even more accessible to more people around the world. This past fall, his team’s efforts were on full display with the introduction of a redefined iPhone lineup, including the incredibly powerful iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, the radically thin and durable iPhone Air, and the iPhone 17, which has been an incredible upgrade for users. Under his leadership, his team also drove advancements in AirPods to make them the world’s best in-ear headphones, with unprecedented active noise cancellation, as well as the capability to become an all-in-one hearing health system that can serve as over-the-counter hearing aids,” Apple said.

“Ternus also led much of the company’s focus in areas like reliability and durability, introducing new techniques that have made Apple products remarkably resilient. He has also driven much of Apple’s innovation in materials and hardware design that have reduced the carbon footprint of its products, including the creation of a new, recycled aluminium compound that has been introduced across multiple product lines, the use of 3-D printed titanium in Apple Watch Ultra 3, and innovations in repairability that have increased the lifespans of several Apple products,” it remarked further.

Ternus also has a low-key management style and a strong product development detail focus. He is known as a “hands-on” executive, who often works directly with engineering teams to connect design vision with technical execution.

Ternus will be the CEO at 50, the exact age Cook took over leadership duties from Steve Jobs. Apple gave a glimpse of Ternus’ possible elevation in September 2025, as he spoke with the media regarding Apple’s products, apart from unveiling the iPhone Air.

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Health-tracking AirPods, mixed-reality headsets: Apple goes aggressive at tech front

IFM Correspondent — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 03:43:41 +0000

In the coming days, Apple plans to add health-tracking capabilities to its AirPods.

According to The Verge, the tech giant has debated adding health-related functions to its AirPods for years.

According to Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, this is now finally taking place.

In the next year or two, the iPhone manufacturer “may improve the AirPods to become a health tool,” and they “could even come with the capacity to receive hearing data of some form,” Mark Gurman claims.

It was revealed in 2020 that the tech giant intended to include ambient light sensors in the subsequent iterations of the AirPods to track information like blood oxygen saturation and pulse rate.

Another rumour from later in 2021 stated that the business was looking towards new health-related capabilities for its AirPods.

Nevertheless, in 2023 January, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said that the tech giant will begin shipping new AirPods Max, which might cost USD 99, in the second half of 2019 or the first part of 2025.

Meanwhile, photos from a Twitter account named MrWhite128 reportedly showed ribbon cables that look like they’d fit perfectly in a set of eye-shaped goggles, thus giving rise to chats that the tech community might have just witnessed the looks of cables and sensors for Apple’s upcoming and much-rumoured virtual/ augmented reality headset.

The account also shared pictures of a cable that has three bulbous sections, which, for The Verge, could be some sort of sensor/camera array. The headset is rumoured to have colour-passthrough capabilities that let the users see the real world outside of it, similar to the Meta Quest.

There are rumours that Apple may announce the launch of the interactive headset at the 2023 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) and release it before the end of the year.

These developments come at a time when the tech giant is facing a talent exodus at the leadership level. Since the second half of 2022, Apple has lost about a dozen high-ranking executives, as per media reports.

Most of these people carried the title of vice-president, which is just below the senior vice-president level that reports to the company CEO Tim Cook. They are some of the most important figures at Apple, responsible for the daily operations of many core functions.

The departures included vice-presidents overseeing Apple’s fields like industrial design, the online store, information systems, cloud efforts, aspects of hardware and software engineering, privacy matters, sales in emerging markets, subscription services and procurement. In total, close to 12 key officials have left the company so far.

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