After Cook

I've been turning this over for a week now.

Apple announced that Tim Cook is stepping down as CEO on 20 April, and I've been turning it over since — partly because I wanted to see what other people would say first, and partly because my immediate reaction was "cautiously optimistic" and I wanted to know whether it would survive a week of thinking about it. It has, more or less, which is either a sign of genuine assessment or a sign that I've been too busy with other things to change my mind.

I've written before about my relationship with Apple hardware. A Love Letter to Mac, I called it — and I meant it, mostly, in the way you mean something when you've spent the better part of a decade running your entire digital life off a machine the size of a sandwich. I'm writing this on an M2 Mac mini. The server hosting this blog runs on a repurposed laptop on the shelf above my bed. I'm not a casual observer here.

So: Cook out, Ternus in, effective 1 September. Cook becomes executive chairman. The board approved it unanimously, which is how boards approve things when the decision was made months ago and the announcement is just the formality.

The right call

Let me get the obvious reaction out of the way: this feels like the right call.

Not because Cook has been bad at the job. He hasn't. The numbers are absurd — $350 billion market cap to $4 trillion, revenue nearly quadrupled, 2.5 billion active devices. Apple under Cook became the most valuable company on Earth. Twice. Thrice. I've lost count. He inherited a company that made beautiful phones and turned it into a company that makes beautiful phones and also the world's most popular watch, the world's most popular wireless headphones, a services business worth $100 billion a year, and an entire silicon architecture that caught the rest of the industry flat-footed.

But there's a particular kind of leadership that excels at scaling what exists, and a different kind that excels at asking what should exist next. Cook is the former. He's the supply chain savant who made Apple's operations genuinely absurd in their efficiency. The man who realised that owning your own silicon was the move, and then made it happen. That's not nothing. That's most of the reason the Mac mini on my desk can run my entire infrastructure without breaking a sweat.

The hardware guy

What strikes me about Ternus isn't his CV, though it's solid: joined Apple's product design team in 2001, which means he's been there longer than the iPhone. He's overseen hardware for iPad, AirPods, every recent iPhone and Mac generation. He led the push into recycled aluminium compounds, 3D-printed titanium in the Watch Ultra, and the repairability improvements that have actually made a difference in how long Apple products last. That last one matters to me — I'm someone who cares about the right to repair, and Apple's track record there has been, charitably, shite. The fact that the hardware guy is the one pushing for repairability is interesting.

What strikes me more is the framing. "The mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, the heart to lead with integrity and with honour" — that's Cook's description, and it's the kind of language that sounds like corporate theatre until you remember that Apple's corporate theatre is usually more restrained than this. They don't gush. The fact that Cook is gushing, even slightly, suggests this is someone he genuinely trusts.

The chairman stays

The transition to executive chairman is also worth noting. Cook isn't leaving. He'll be engaging with policymakers — which, given the current regulatory landscape facing Big Tech globally, is probably where he can do the most damage control. Apple is staring down the EU's Digital Markets Act, antitrust scrutiny in the US, and app store controversies everywhere. Having Cook as the diplomatic face while Ternus runs the product roadmap is a genuinely sensible split.

Hardware vs. services

And here's what I keep turning over: Apple has been a services company wearing a hardware company's clothes for a while now. The $100 billion services revenue. The subscription push. The bundling. The slow erosion of the "it just works" promise into "it just works, as long as you're paying for iCloud+, Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple One, and—" you get the idea. The hardware is what makes people love Apple. The services are what make the quarterly numbers. The question is which one the new CEO prioritises when push comes to shove.

Ternus is a hardware person. That's the bet. The bet is that the person who oversaw the M-series transition, who pushed for durability and repairability, who reportedly cares about the material reality of what Apple makes, will keep the company anchored to the physical products that people actually touch and hold and run their lives on. Rather than, say, chasing AI features that half-work and a services bundle that exists mainly to extract recurring revenue from people who already bought the phone.

What concerns me

I should be honest about what concerns me. The MacBook Neo — the "all-new laptop that makes the Mac experience even more accessible" — reads like a budget Mac, and Apple's relationship with "accessible" pricing has historically been "accessible for Apple," which means still expensive. Ternus oversaw that. The iPhone Air, the "radically thin" one, is the kind of design-for-design's-sake that makes engineers wince. Battery life traded for thinness. Again. The hardware guy signed off on that.

Then again: AirPods as hearing aids. The Apple Watch saving lives. The silicon that genuinely changed what laptops could do. The hardware guy also signed off on all of that.

Cook's letter

Tim Cook's letter to the community is worth reading. It's genuinely warm, in the way that corporate communications almost never are — the bit about reading user emails every morning, the mum saved by her Apple Watch, the mountain selfie. It's effective because it's specific. It doesn't sound like it was written by committee, even though it almost certainly was. The line about "I somehow got to be the person on the other end of those emails" is doing real work. It's vulnerable without being weak. It's the kind of thing Cook does well: the slow, measured, careful human touch that is indistinguishable from genuine feeling, because after 15 years of practice it probably is genuine feeling.

1 September

Anyway. 1 September. That's the date.

I'm cautiously optimistic, which is the most anyone should ever be about a CEO transition at a $4 trillion company. The hardware guy taking over from the operations guy could mean a return to products that surprise you rather than services that annoy you. Or it could mean thinner phones and more subscriptions. Probably both. Apple, like every large tech company, is capable of holding contradictory impulses simultaneously. The question is which one wins when the pressure is on.

What I genuinely want from this transition is more things I can hold, fewer things I have to subscribe to, and a continued commitment to silicon that makes the machines on my desk — and on my shelf — worth running. That's the selfish version. The broader version is: I want Apple to remain a company that makes physical objects that improve people's actual lives, rather than a company that makes revenue streams that improve its quarterly earnings.

Whether Ternus is the person for that, I genuinely don't know. But I think he might be. And after 15 years of supply chain excellence, that's an interesting enough possibility to sit with.