With new leadership, Apple will re-define success

Apple CEO Tim Cook becomes chairman of the company board tomorrow, with John Ternus taking over the top job in Cupertino. Both men followed in the footsteps of visionary Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and both have found they must build their own definition of success. The past is a guide, but not a template Think back to 2011 when Jobs pushed Cook into the CEO seat. It was a tragic start, as cancer took Jobs much too early. When Cook stepped into the role, people didn’t seem to expect much from him as CEO. He was a strategy and operations type, after all, not a visionary. He had no product design background, they said. That opinion never seemed to shift, no matter what Cook did. It’s as if Apple Music, AirPods, Apple Watch, Vision Pro, AirTag, Apple Pay and other services, the development of Apple’s own processors, and the company’s financial success (despite challenging disasters such as COVID-19) counted for nought. Cook’s ethical commitments, particularly toward LBGT+ and Black representation, privacy, and the environment have also become far more fundamental to corporate DNA than they were under Jobs. The Jobs-era Apple was worth a healthy $350 billion when he stepped down; as Cook moves on, Apple has become a $4 trillion corporation with hundreds of millions of consumers contributing monthly recurring fees for a variety of compelling services. You need to follow your own star Perhaps it didn’t matter that critical opinion didn’t shift. Cook’s tenure saw the man define his own measure of success. Some may recall that when Jobs launched the iPhone in 2007, he said, “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.”  Jobs argued that the Mac, iPod, and then iPhone were all such products. It’s important, I think, to remember that Cook was part of the team that launched the last two of those and arguably contributed to the iMac, which redefined the first. My point is that revolutionary products do not grow on trees; even Jobs understood that. So did Cook — and his work on the Vision Pro and AI showed how challenging it is to build revolution. Success is seldom a straightforward journey. Jobs himself might have found himself considering the difficulty of such voyage on April 11, 1985, when ousted from the company he loved. But Cook didn’t look to his predecessor for a definition of success. That’s what lazy journalists and an expectant public did. Instead, what Cook did was lean into his strengths to build on what was already there for the benefit of the company he also loved.  It is arguable that changing the payment habits of the entire global economy from cash to cashless has been something revolutionary. So much so that even Walmart has at last caught up. Apple Pay now has something like 92% share among US mobile wallet users. I truly believe that a future honest appraisal of Apple under Cook’s leadership will identify an extensive number of major successes that have been buried by the lazy and inaccurate “not a product guy” narrative. Eyes wide open Which brings me to Apple’s new CEO, Ternus. What kind of leader is he going to be? His colleagues describe him as collaborative and even-tempered, with a deep focus on product refinement. We’re told he is working to rebuild Apple’s famed design department, gutted by high-profile departures and aggressive recruitment by OpenAI. While we do know he has been groomed for the role for a few years, we don’t really know a huge amount about him — except that he’s being presented to us by Apple and its media satellites as a “product guy.” He’s a hardware engineering veteran taking his position as Apple heads into the AI era and he’s going to be under pressure to prove the company has what it takes to succeed going forward. The way Cook’s Apple has designed this transition leans into the perceived strengths and weaknesses of both men. Ternus turns up just in time Apple to introduce an expected wave of exciting AI-enabled products including the first folding iPhone, a future glass 20th anniversary iPhone (in 2027), amazing new Macs and exciting smart products, including pendant and smart home accessories. (There is still no car yet — can you imagine how much RAM that thing would need?)  Under Ternus’ leadership, Apple is going to try to redefine the company as a product innovation factory, with AI as the secret sauce to hold its hardware dream together. The ongoing litigation against OpenAI shows how deeply competitive things are likely to get. Things might even become politically tough, though Ternus will have the strategic and operational genius of Cook available to him on the executive board. Stay hungry, stay foolish Looking at the transition, its important to point out that both Cook and Ternus have been working together (along with the wider Apple team) to set the stage. You only need to look at the big decisions that have slipped out from Apple in just the last couple of months to see how Cook wants to give his successor as clear a slate as possible to ease that transition. They are doing succession by the book, and the company is probably already working on similar succession plans to support future departures from its current aging senior leadership. I suspect Ternus already knows both who his executives are today and who will be in place tomorrow. Under Jobs, the company became visionary, under Cook, it became vast, and under Ternus, the measure of success starts with the idea of him being a “hardware guy,” though that success remains to be defined.  Which is the point. We shouldn’t measure Ternus by comparison with either predecessor, any more than we should gauge Cook in comparison with Jobs. Each CEO reflected a company going through different times, and we don’t know what the future holds. We just know that for Apple, it’s now for Ternus to try to define what success for him should look like. “Stay hungry, stay foolish, don’t settle,” as someone once said. Please subscribe to my daily Apple-related news headline summary at The Core. You can also follow me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.