The handover had been in the diary since April. Apple said then that Tim Cook would hand the chief executive job to John Ternus on 1 September, named the date, and stuck to it. What arrived on the day was the paperwork: an amended filing setting out what each man now gets paid.
Ternus gets a $3 million salary and a share award with a target value of $55 million from Apple's 2027 financial year. Three quarters of that pays out only if Apple's total return to shareholders beats the rest of the S&P 500, so most of the number is a bet rather than a payment. Bloomberg reckons the job he is leaving, running hardware engineering, paid about $25 million a year.
The job Apple built for Cook
Cook is not going anywhere. He becomes executive chairman on a package worth $47 million at target for 2027, against the $74.3 million he was paid as chief executive last year. Apple's own release says what the new role involves: engaging with policymakers around the world. The site 9to5Mac reads that as managing the company's relationships with the Trump administration and the Chinese government, which are the two things Apple cannot design its way around.
What Ternus inherits
The company he takes over is not the one Cook took over. Apple was worth about $350 billion when Cook got the job and is worth $4 trillion now, and yearly revenue has close to quadrupled over the same stretch. The installed base runs past 2.5 billion devices, and services on their own bring in more than $100 billion a year.
Ternus has been inside for most of it. He joined the product design team in 2001 and has run hardware engineering since 2021, with the iPad and AirPods among the launches he worked on. At 51 he is fifteen years younger than Cook, which is the sort of gap a company leaves when it means to keep someone.
The thing Apple has not solved with hardware is Siri, and the artificial intelligence race behind it is where Ternus will be judged. His first memo to staff, obtained by Bloomberg, went nowhere near it. There is “a huge launch next week”, he wrote, meaning the annual iPhone event on 9 September.
