Apple’s Succession Wars Start. Here’s Who Might Take Tim Cook’s Spot

Tim Cook might be getting ready to hang up his hat as Apple CEO.

That’s according to the Financial Times, which reported on Saturday that the tech giant was stepping up succession planning with expectations that Tim Cook could resign from his position as soon as next year.

Cook, who will be turning 66 next year, took over Apple from founder Steve Jobs, and led the company through trillions of dollars worth of record market valuation spikes and a fair share of controversies for over 14 years.

Many are looking ahead to who could be the third-ever chief to lead the company after Cook leaves. For years, many names have been floated around, from Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi (famous for his presentations and his full head of hair) to Greg Joswiak, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, and Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer who was the top of that list before he resigned from his post earlier this year.

Now the Financial Times reports that the front runner is John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering.

Ternus, aged 50, is currently the youngest top executive at Apple, and has been with the tech giant for roughly 24 years.

His name was first brought into the spotlight in succession conversations after a Bloomberg report from 2024 claimed that Cook thought Ternus could “give a good presentation.” That report noted that Ternus is “very mild-mannered, never puts anything into an email that is controversial, and is a very reticent decision-maker,” according to Bloomberg’s anonymous source close to the executive team.

He has also increasingly played a more central role at Apple events, from unveiling Apple’s first in-house silicon chip, the M1, in 2020, to announcing the highly anticipated iPhone Air earlier this year.

When compared to Cook’s operations-heavy background, Ternus is more engineering focused. Equipped with both a bachelor’s in engineering and an MBA, Tim Cook rose through the ranks at Apple as chief operating officer, focusing on sales and supply chain management.

Ternus, on the other hand, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 with a major in mechanical engineering. He worked on virtual reality headsets as an engineer at Virtual Research Systems before joining Apple’s product design team in 2001.

He worked his way up the company’s hardware team to a leadership position in 2013 and got promoted to lead all of hardware engineering in 2022. AirPods, Macs, iPads, iPhones, you name it, Ternus has had a hand in its production.

Ternus has the potential to be a breath of fresh air to some Apple fanatics who have blamed Cook for a perceived slowdown of innovation. Under Cook’s leadership, Apple has released tons of new products, but the upgrades to said products have been deemed incremental rather than revolutionary, and even boring at times.

The company has also been criticized for the failed launch of Apple Vision Pro and its self-professed failure to catch up to competitors in the AI race, further ignited in light of the delayed launch of AI-enhanced Siri. Bringing in an engineer-first executive who has taken part in almost all of Apple’s most significant product launches in the past 24 years could, perhaps, help address some of these failings.