John Ternus has officially taken over as the chief executive officer of Apple, succeeding Tim Cook, who ended a 15-year tenure leading the tech giant.

Ternus, who took the helm on Tuesday, had been serving as the senior vice president for hardware engineering at the Cupertino, California-based company since 2021.

When Apple announced the transition in April, the company said that Cook will move into the role of executive chairman.

Ternus is an old hand at the company. He joined Apple’s product design team in 2001 and climbed the ranks. He was appointed vice president of hardware engineering in 2013 and was promoted in 2021 to the senior vice president role that he has now moved up from.

A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Ternus had previously worked on virtual reality headsets at a company called Virtual Research Systems.

Since joining Apple, Ternus has overseen the launch of a range of its most well-known product lines, including the iPad and AirPods.

Given Ternus’s background in hardware engineering, analysts saw his appointment as a sign that the company, best known for its iPhone, is pushing to double down on innovation across its device portfolio.

“The appointment of Ternus is Apple’s subtle way of [doubling down] on hardware innovation as a core strategy. It doesn’t refute the Tim Cook era; it marks a new stage in Apple’s history by intertwining AI with hardware, rather than treating AI as a standalone product,” Babak Hafezi, professor of international business at American University, told Al Jazeera.

Ternus’s task

Ternus is set to hit the ground running in the new role. On September 9, Apple is expected to unveil its latest iPhone as well as a foldable device, a new product in its lineup. The foldable phone market, although still niche, is a growing segment of the consumer phone sector that is currently dominated by Samsung, which launched it in 2019.

Analysts forecast that Apple will make headway quickly. Apple is expected to ship 17 million foldable iPhones and reach 40 percent of the market share by the end of next year, according to IDC research, a tech intelligence firm.

Apple is also slated to launch a new version of Siri, its personal assistant, with the newest version of its iOS software planned for release this month. It is intended to be more conversational and provide more personalised content for individual users, including scanning personal emails and text messages.

In a news statement announcing the new feature, the company used the example of using Siri “to find a restaurant recommendation a friend messaged them about, surface a hotel confirmation number from an old email”.

Ternus comes into his new role at a time that Apple has been criticised for a slower rollout in the generative AI space, falling behind companies like OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and Anthropic, the maker of Claude.

However, Aleksandar Tomic, associate dean for strategy, innovation, and technology at Boston College, argues that focusing on its core products could help Apple lead the AI boom in the long run.

“To use a metaphor, there were people during the gold rush mining for gold, and then there were those selling the picks and shovels for the prospectors. Apple has really stayed in the picks-and-shovels lane,” Tomic said.

“They have not done any kind of data centre, industrial-grade chips, but they have developed their own chips that they put into the Macs and MacBook Pros that allow people to run local LLMs [Large Language Models] and so on. The iPhone becomes kind of an AI access engine.”

In June, analysts at Morgan Stanley expressed concern that Apple may struggle with an AI Siri rollout because its older phones lack the capability to run advanced AI features.

This comes as Apple also faces supply chain strains. In June, the company raised the price on some MacBooks and iPads as the cost of computer memory increased due to AI companies driving up demand for chips and servers.

It also has to walk a tightrope between Washington, DC’s trade war with China, where it has a huge market and major supply chain, even as it has attempted in the last few years to diversify some of that to India and Vietnam. Apple has announced plans to invest billions of dollars in the US, and President Donald Trump wants the company to make its iPhones there.

For investors, Cook is a tough act to follow. Under his leadership, the company’s stock jumped 2,258 percent. Apple’s stock has grown steadily over the last year, too. It is up more than 37 percent since this time last year, and more than 16 percent since the beginning of 2026.

On Tuesday, the company’s stock rose by 2.2 percent in midday trading as Ternus took over his new role.