Tim Cook will step down as CEO of Apple on September 1, 2026, becoming the company’s executive chairman, and John Ternus, the senior vice president of Hardware Engineering who has spent 25 years at the company, will take over as chief executive officer.
Apple announced the transition on Monday April 20, 2026. The board voted unanimously to approve it.
Cook will remain CEO through the summer, working alongside Ternus during a planned handover.
As executive chairman he will continue to engage with policymakers around the world and assist with aspects of the company’s operations. Arthur Levinson, who has been Apple’s non-executive board chairman for 15 years, steps to the role of lead independent director on the same date. Ternus joins the board.
In a separate announcement the same day, Apple said Johny Srouji, previously SVP of Hardware Technologies, will become the company’s first Chief Hardware Officer, effective immediately, taking on the expanded responsibilities that Ternus is leaving behind.
What Did Cook Say In His Statement?
Cook’s statement, issued through Apple’s official newsroom, was measured and clearly written with the weight of the occasion in mind. “It has been the greatest privilege of my life to be the CEO of Apple and to have been trusted to lead such an extraordinary company,” he said.
On Ternus, Cook said:
“John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honor. He is a visionary whose contributions to Apple over 25 years are already too numerous to count, and he is without question the right person to lead Apple into the future.”
Ternus’s statement acknowledged the two giants whose shadows he walks into:
“Having spent almost my entire career at Apple, I have been lucky to have worked under Steve Jobs and to have had Tim Cook as my mentor. I am humbled to step into this role, and I promise to lead with the values and vision that have come to define this special place for half a century.”
Tim Cook’s 15 Years Of Dominance
Tim Cook became CEO on August 24, 2011, when Steve Jobs resigned due to his deteriorating health. Jobs died six weeks later.
Cook was handed a company at the peak of its creative momentum, and was given the job of sustaining it without the person who had built it.
The argument against him was always the same: Apple was Jobs. Without Jobs, the magic would fade.
It did not fade.
When Cook took over, Apple’s market capitalization was approximately $350 billion. It is now $4 trillion, an increase of more than 1,000 percent. Annual revenue was $108 billion in fiscal year 2011.
It exceeded $416 billion in fiscal year 2025, having nearly quadrupled. The company’s active installed base has grown to more than 2.5 billion devices.
Apple now operates in more than 200 countries and territories, runs over 500 retail stores, and has more than doubled the number of countries where customers can visit one in person.
The product categories Cook introduced from scratch, Apple Watch, AirPods, Apple Vision Pro, would each represent significant businesses on their own.
The wearables business he created now includes the world’s most popular watch and the world’s most popular headphones.
Apple Services, which Cook made a central priority, grew from a secondary consideration into a more than $100 billion per year operation, the equivalent of a Fortune 40 company standing alone.
The transition to Apple-designed silicon, which he oversaw, moved the company from dependence on Intel chips to a family of proprietary processors that have produced industry-leading performance gains and power efficiency across Mac, iPad and iPhone.
Cook also made privacy a company identity rather than just a product feature, and reduced Apple’s carbon footprint by more than 60 percent below 2015 levels during a period in which the company nearly doubled its revenue.
None of those things require a specific genius to execute. They require sustained institutional discipline over many years. That is what Cook brought, and the results are documented in Apple’s financials.
Who Is John Ternus?
John Ternus joined Apple’s product design team in 2001, two years before the iTunes Music Store launched, three years before the iPod mini, six years before the iPhone.
He has been inside the building for all of it. He became a VP of Hardware Engineering in 2013 and joined the executive team as SVP of Hardware Engineering in 2021.
His name is not well known outside Apple circles because his job has been to build the things rather than announce them.
He holds a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Before Apple, he worked as a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems. He is 46 years old.
His fingerprints are on the products that define Apple’s current generation. He oversaw the work that produced the iPad and the original AirPods.
He drove the reliability and durability push that made recent iPhones dramatically more resilient than their predecessors. His team introduced the iPhone Air, Apple’s radically thin new form factor, and the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max this past fall, as well as the MacBook Neo, a redesigned laptop intended to bring the Mac to a wider audience.
Under his direction, AirPods added unprecedented active noise cancellation and, in a meaningful product evolution, received FDA clearance as over-the-counter hearing aids.
He has also driven materials innovation, a new recycled aluminum compound used across multiple product lines, 3-D printed titanium components in Apple Watch Ultra 3, and repairability improvements that have extended the lifespans of several Apple products.
Cook called him someone with “the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator.” The characterization fits the track record.
What Will Change At Apple?
The reorganization announced Monday goes beyond the CEO change. By moving Ternus up and naming Johny Srouji as Chief Hardware Officer, a newly created title, Apple is restructuring the leadership layer around the incoming CEO before he takes the chair.
Srouji joined Apple in 2008 to build the A4, the company’s first custom chip. He has led the silicon strategy ever since, overseeing breakthroughs across Apple silicon, batteries, cameras, storage controllers, sensors, displays and cellular modems.
He now also takes over the hardware engineering organization that Ternus previously ran, giving him a broader mandate than anyone has held at Apple below the CEO level in recent memory.
Levinson’s shift from non-executive chairman to lead independent director is the quieter change in the same announcement.
He has chaired Apple’s board since 2011, exactly as long as Cook has been CEO.
His transition out of the chairman role, with Ternus taking a board seat and Cook assuming the executive chairman title, completes the governance restructuring that the succession requires.
The End Of An Era For Apple
This is the second CEO transition in Apple’s history in the modern era, and the first one that was planned. When Cook became CEO in 2011, it happened because Jobs was dying.
The announcement came with no time and under circumstances that allowed for no orderly handover. Monday’s announcement is the opposite of that, a considered, boardroom-approved transition with a five-month runway, a specific effective date, and a clear rationale.
Cook is 65 years old. He has been Apple’s CEO for nearly 15 years. He joined the company in 1998, when Apple was in genuine danger of disappearing entirely.
He was there for the iMac, the iPod, the iTunes Store, the iPhone, the iPad, the App Store, Apple Watch, AirPods and Apple Vision Pro.
He ran the company through a global pandemic that disrupted the supply chains its entire business depends on.
He navigated antitrust scrutiny across multiple continents. He turned a $350 billion company into a $4 trillion one.
He is not disappearing. As executive chairman, he retains a seat at the table and a mandate to engage with the governments and regulators Apple must deal with around the world. That is not nothing.
The operational leadership of Apple, the decisions about what gets built and when and how, passes to John Ternus on September 1, 2026.
Apple just celebrated its 50th anniversary on April 1. Three weeks later, it announced who will lead the next chapter.
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