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Apple is about to witness its third power transition in company history.

In 1997, when the company was on the verge of bankruptcy, with only 90 days left before collapse, it welcomed back the once-exiled preacher. Jobs, with his obsessive artistic intuition and reality distortion field, pulled Apple back from the edge of the cliff, thus beginning a golden era dedicated to genius and design.

At that time, Apple’s existence hung by a thread, yearning for miracles, needing someone who could make people believe in the impossible. They found him.

In 2011, when the preacher left and the anxieties of smartphone production capacities and globalization surged, the one who took up the baton was a supremely calm master of supply chains. Cook utilized inventory turnover rates precise to two decimal places and geopolitical maneuvering to elevate Apple from a market value of $350 billion to $4 trillion, opening the silver age dedicated to business and capital.

At that time, Apple had burgeoned in scale, demanding order, and required someone who could ensure the massive machine meshed precisely, without a single misstep. They found that person too.

Now it is April 2026.

The times have changed again. The frenzy over large models is burning the map of the old world, with the once-proud closed ecosystem showing signs of sluggishness and clumsiness under the impact of AI; the looming tariffs in Washington and the undercurrents of the global supply chain have further trapped this behemoth.

At this critical juncture, yearning for a new myth, Cook handed over the baton.

Not to another genius designer, nor to another financial wizard. The one who took over the most precise and largest tech empire in the world is a young man who almost ruined the only CNC milling machine at his university.

His name is John Ternus.

While everyone else frantically tried to conjure a new world out of algorithms, Apple entrusted its hidden cards and future to someone who only believes in the laws of physics and respects the bottom lines of hardware.

A mechanical engineer carrying the nickname "The Destroyer" walked into Apple amidst the ashes of the early VR bubble. He seemed utterly mismatched with this company, which suffered from severe design obsessive-compulsive disorder. What qualifies him?

"The Destroyer"

At the University of Pennsylvania's engineering school in the early 1990s, Ternus was not the type of genius cloaked in a halo from childhood. The most conspicuous label on him was being a mainstay of the school’s swim team.

In 1994, he won both the 50-meter freestyle and 200-meter individual medley championships at a school competition and, with a record for the most appearances in team history, became a recipient of the symbolic "All-time Letter Award."

Swimming is destined to be a tedious practice. It does not seek flashy tactics, only requires constant repetition of strokes, kicks, and breathing under the water, until the actions are etched into muscle memory. In that pool, there are no shortcuts, no strokes of luck, only the accumulation of persistence that steadily wears down resistance. This near-monastic endurance has ultimately transformed into the deepest foundation of his entire career over the years.

For his senior design project, he did not chase after the trendiest internet concepts at the time but instead created a mechanical feeding arm for patients with high-level paraplegia, controlling the arm's motion via head movements to bring food to their lips. This was not a project to show off technical skills for high grades, but a bulky clump of iron trying to solve a real problem.

However, his most well-known affair at Penn was that he almost ruined the university's first, and at that time, only CNC milling machine. Due to one operational mistake, the tool crashed straight into the machine’s table. Committing such a basic error in front of such an extremely expensive precision instrument earned him a loud yet jarring nickname, "The Destroyer."

In the days that followed that year, the nickname shadowed him. He swallowed the laughter of his classmates until many years later, when he returned to his alma mater as an Apple executive, he took the initiative to unveil this dark history to the youthful audience at the graduation ceremony, provoking laughter throughout the hall.

He was not a prodigy who committed no mistakes; he was someone who messed things up, faced ridicule but always bowed his head to work. He didn't care about his image; he only cared about the results.

After graduating in 1997, he joined an early VR company called Virtual Research Systems as a mechanical engineer, responsible for the structural design of VR headsets and accessories. This company existed briefly during the VR wave of the 1980s to 90s and, like countless startups that could not survive the winter, vanished into the dust of history.

Reflecting on this past now reveals a strange sense of fate and recurrence. Twenty years later, it was he who personally led the creation of Apple Vision Pro, a $3,499 spatial computing headset believed to be one of Apple's largest hardware bets in history. What he learned from the VR bubble ultimately became invaluable in the next VR gamble.

With this not-so-successful resume, he knocked on Apple's door in 2001. That year, the iPod had just been released, and Apple was itching to make waves in the consumer electronics wilderness. However, what awaited Ternus was not the dazzling lights claiming to "change the world," but the long and endless nights in Asian factories.

Under the aura of artistry from Jobs and Jony Ive, how did Ternus manage to rise step by step within Apple’s power structure?

From screws to AirPods

Upon entering Apple, Ternus's first project was the Apple Cinema Display. This high-end desktop display from earlier years looked like a stark metal picture frame. On the back of the display, there were several stainless steel screws used for fastening. According to Apple’s industrial design requirements, the heads of these screws must be machined to feature concentric circular grooves. Thus, when light swept across, the screws would sparkle like a CD.

The design blueprints clearly specified: 35 grooves.

At that time, he found that the number of grooves on the back of the stainless steel screws was incorrect; the blueprints required 35 grooves, but the supplier only made 34.

This was actually a detail almost no one would notice. The display was placed against a wall; who would be bored enough to count the grooves on the back of the screws? But for the sake of this one groove’s error, he burned the midnight oil in the Asian factory under the glaring lights, counting the minuscule grooves one by one with a magnifying glass, even having a fierce argument with the supplier over it.

Later, reminiscing about this episode at his Penn graduation ceremony, he recalled that a thought abruptly flashed through his mind: "What on earth am I doing? Would a normal person do this?"

This was indeed abnormal, but that was very much Apple.

He proved his worth to the company’s genes through this stubbornness. Jobs once famously said that a great carpenter would make the back of a cabinet as beautiful as the front, even when no one was watching. Ternus that midnight in the Asian factory was putting that ethos into practice.

About three years later, he was promoted to manager. His first boss, Steve Siefert, assigned him a closed independent office. In the hierarchically strict Silicon Valley giants, an independent office symbolizes power. But he refused it, moving his desk into the open area to squeeze in with the engineers. In 2011, after Siefert’s retirement, he offered the office again, but Ternus declined once more.

He did not need a door to prove his status; he needed to be close enough to the battlefield, to hear the engineers discussing heat dissipation, motherboards, and tolerances at any time.

In 2005, he led the hardware engineering team for the G5 series iMacs. It was then that he dove deeply into the complexities of Asian supply chains, gradually accumulating the most raw and genuine understanding of manufacturing through hands-on experience on the production lines.

The birth of AirPods marked the first highlight of his career. In 2013, he was promoted to Vice President of Hardware Engineering. Under his leadership, Apple launched AirPods in 2016. When these earbuds first emerged, they were met with a torrent of mockery; people trivialized them as "EarPods with the cord cut off."

But Ternus chose silence. He knew better than anyone the incredible engineering achievement it would take to pack complex Bluetooth chips, batteries, and sensors into that tiny space, to minimize the latency between the two earbuds to the point that human nerves couldn't detect it, while ensuring the weak battery could last through a long day’s commute.

In the end, the market provided the answer. AirPods became the most successful wearable device in Apple’s history, not only redefining the wireless headphone category but subtly reshaping the way humanity listens to the world in public places.

He proved he was not just a repairman who counted screws but the driving force behind transforming concepts into iconic products.

Learning to be patient

In Apple’s golden era, Jony Ive held the position next to Jobs. His design philosophy became an unquestionable bible, even someone as business-minded as Cook had to concede some ground before that extreme aesthetic. During Ive's peak of power, there was an unwritten logic to Apple’s product decisions: determine the look first, then find a way to fit the functions in.

This logic sometimes indeed created miracles, such as the glass screen of the first iPhone and the wedge-shaped body of the first MacBook Air. But it also led to disasters.

During that period, in pursuit of extreme thinness, Apple made two poor decisions: the Touch Bar and the butterfly keyboard.

To make the MacBook Pro appear more futuristic, the design team decided to replace the traditional physical function keys with a strip of OLED touchscreen. To shaved a few more millimeters off the thickness, they invented the ultra-short travel "butterfly keyboard," making the typing experience feel like striking a block of wood, and a single grain of dust could cause the entire keyboard to malfunction.

These two designs caused Apple’s reputation to plummet, even sparking a $50 million class-action lawsuit.

This was one of the darkest moments in Apple’s hardware history. As the head of hardware, Ternus was thrust into the limelight, bearing the brunt of stormy criticism from the media, users, and even internal employees.

In this moment, he revealed a mature side to his character, patience.

He did not blame the design team or sever ties with Jony Ive. He quietly swept up the broken glass and spent years leading the charge to eliminate the Touch Bar, reinstate the thicker body, scissor-switch keyboard, MagSafe port, and SD card slot.

He valiantly reclaimed the pragmatism Apple had lost.

The MacBook Pro released in 2021 was dubbed "Apple’s apology to users" by the media. That generation of products brought back all the ports that had been removed over the past few years, the body was thickened, but performance and battery life saw exponential improvement. Ternus did not say at the release conference, "We corrected our mistakes," he merely showcased a better computer.

He did not shout slogans but demonstrated through action that a laptop should primarily be a useful tool, and secondly, a work of art.

However, this experience left deep cracks in Apple’s power structure. According to Bloomberg, the relationship between Ternus and the industrial design team became quite tense. Some core designers felt that he lacked an extreme pursuit of beauty and even tried to promote another executive, Tang Tan, to replace the then Senior Vice President of Hardware Dan Riccio instead of allowing Ternus to rise to the position.

In the power game, he is not a flawless hero; he can misjudge and face exclusion. But what is commendable about him is that he can rebuild from the rubble and continue to do what he believes is "right."

"Forced" out iPadOS, changed "the laws of physics"

Internally at Apple, the boundary between hardware and software is like an unspoken rule of mutual non-interference. Hardware personnel are responsible for building things, while software personnel are responsible for making them usable; both sides stick to their roles, strictly as water flowing in different rivers. Overstepping often leads to conflict.

But Ternus is an exception.

He participated in the development of every generation of iPads in Apple’s history, from the first generation to the latest, without missing a single one.

For a decade, he watched the hardware performance of the iPad, built by him and his team, continuously improve. The screens got larger, the processors stronger, and the extremely costly ProMotion refresh rate was even added.

However, the iPad’s hardware performance had surpassed needs—that still ran iOS, designed for phones.

Hardware surplus, software anemic. It was like equipping a Ferrari with a tractor's transmission. No matter how hard the hardware team squeezed tolerances, what users got was still just a large video player.

His thorough data, user feedback, and his thoughts on product boundaries directly led him to seek out software chief Craig Federighi. This was a transgressional act; a hardware chief instructing software is a huge taboo in any large company. But he forcefully persuaded Craig to develop a separate operating system for the iPad, adding desktop-level multitasking, split-screen operation, and mouse support.

In 2019, iPadOS was officially released. This move turned the iPad from a large toy into a productivity tool and completely shattered the stereotype of "he's just a repairman." He possessed a strong product intuition, daring to overstep and challenge the bureaucracies within the large company.

He was also the proponent of the LiDAR sensor. He suggested restricting this approximately $40 sensor to the Pro models, reasoning that users purchasing Pro models are often those excited by the technology itself and would pay for that feature, while ordinary users would not care. This judgment later proved to be correct, as LiDAR became one of the most valuable differentiating features of the iPhone Pro models.

What truly deified him was the M chip transition battle in 2020. This was the most adventurous and successful hardware migration in Apple’s history. Transitioning from Intel chips to Apple Silicon meant Apple had to abandon a mature ecosystem and start reinventing the wheel from scratch.

Ternus led this transition. Reflecting on this switch, he emotionally remarked, "It felt like the laws of physics were changed."

He did not use any fancy rhetoric, just expressed, in the simplest language of an engineer, his shock at the energy efficiency of this chip. This chip enabled the MacBook Air to achieve 18 hours of battery life while maintaining extreme thinness and not even requiring a fan for cooling. For someone who had counted screws in Asian factories for twenty years, this truly felt like the laws of physics had changed.

In 2021, with Dan Riccio stepping down, Ternus officially took over the entire hardware empire.

Upon taking over the hardware empire, what awaited him was not a smooth path, but a storm sweeping across the entire industry. A young man once called "The Destroyer" finally stood in that position, but what he faced was an era never encountered even by Jobs.

AI Earthquake

From 2023 to 2025, it was the most anxious three years in Apple’s history.

The storm of large models swept through Silicon Valley. OpenAI's ChatGPT accumulated 100 million users within two months, a pace that instilled a kind of unprecedented panic among all tech companies. Google announced a "red alert," Microsoft invested $13 billion into OpenAI, while Meta placed nearly all resources on AI.

Apple Intelligence’s experience was poor, and significant upgrades for Siri were repeatedly delayed. AI expert John Giannandrea, poached from Google for a hefty price, fell into a crisis of trust. Cracks began to appear within Apple, as those algorithm teams that had been highly anticipated seemed unable to deliver satisfactory results to the executives.

This was one of the most embarrassing moments in Apple’s history. A company worth $4 trillion seemed at a loss in the face of its most critical technological transformation. Amidst this chaos, Ternus revealed a cold and decisive side.

In April 2025, Apple underwent a significant internal restructuring. Giannandrea was stripped of leadership over Siri, and the robotics research team originally under the AI department was directly placed under Ternus's hardware department.

This included a desktop-level smart device with a robotic arm and a mobile robot that could follow users around the house. Bloomberg pointed out that this reorganization allowed Ternus not only to gain control of hardware but also to oversee certain AI operating systems and algorithm teams.

When algorithms could not immediately monetize, Apple chose to trust hardware.

Immediately following, in January 2026, the most core and sacred industrial design team’s reporting relationship also shifted to Ternus. He became the "design execution initiator," responsible for representing the design team in executive meetings. This was unimaginable in Jobs' era; the design team had once been a temple above all departments, now they had to report to a mechanical engineer.

In the midst of this power structure upheaval, he launched the iPhone Air in September 2025.

This phone measured just 5.6mm thick (excluding the camera bump), thinner than any competing product on the market, even thinner than the diameter of a USB-C port. Achieving this thickness required engineers to redesign the antenna, battery, and cooling structure, nearly dismantling and rebuilding the entire phone from scratch.

Ternus once said, "The best engineering work and inventions always arise from constraints. When you attempt to solve a seemingly impossible problem, real creativity and invention come to life."

But he also had shortcomings. After the Vision Pro launched, users discovered serious audio delays when connecting AirPods Pro to the headset. According to Bloomberg, his first reaction was to track down who was responsible, rather than addressing the fix immediately, leading to internal grievances.

Additionally, he opposed adding a camera to the HomePod, arguing it would increase costs, resulting in Apple being left behind in the smart speaker race by Amazon and Google. By the time Apple finally decided to introduce home devices with screens, competitors were already years ahead.

His "hardware fundamentalism" was both a moat and a limitation in the age of AI. He faced an era where everyone was attempting to create a world using algorithms. The only cards in his hand were hardware.

"We never want to release junk"

In April 2026, during the most recent interview about the affordable MacBook Neo, Ternus was asked if Apple would launch cheaper products to expand its market share.

This was a classic trap question, and most Silicon Valley executives would respond with a tight set of PR phrases: "We are always committed to providing the best experience for users," "We will make appropriate decisions at the right time." But Ternus did not.

His response was extremely firm: "We never want to release junk."

This is Ternus. This statement evokes the kind of arrogance from the Jobs era but isn't entirely the same; Jobs' arrogance was that of an artist, while Ternus' arrogance is that of an engineer. The former believes in beauty, while the latter believes in standards.

In the face of the overwhelming wave of AI, he did not throw out grand timelines like other tech giants, nor did he commit to revolutionizing the world. Apple’s marketing chief Joz mentioned in the same interview that AI is "a marathon, not a sprint," while Ternus firmly believed in the "inevitability" of spatial computing and the blending of virtual and physical realms. He believes Apple’s 2.5 billion devices are the best carriers for AI, with edge computing being Apple’s true moat.

In this fervent era, this calmness can even seem a bit out of place. But that is who he is.

His personal hobby is cycling, and he enjoys taking colleagues off-roading in Washington state. Within Apple, he is known for being "approachable."

At the University of Pennsylvania's graduation ceremony, Ternus told the young audience:

"Always believe you are as smart as anyone else in the room, but never assume you know as much as they do."

The three CEOs of Apple represent three different spirits of their times. Jobs was an artist who believed beauty could change the world; Cook is a manager who believes efficiency can conquer the world; Ternus is an engineer who believes standards can safeguard the world.

There is no hierarchy among these three spirits, only the choices of the times. In 2026, as the AI wave sweeps over, the supply chain reorganizes, and geopolitical games unfold, what Apple needs might just be someone who can ensure that every single screw is tightened properly.

In "Moneyball," Billy Beane overturned baseball’s traditional player selection logic through statistics, leading his team to an unprecedented winning streak with the lowest salary budget in history. A line from the movie states, "How can you not view baseball romantically?"

For John Ternus, his romance does not lie in slogans of changing the world, but in cutting every piece of aluminum alloy to perfection, squeezing every bit of energy efficiency from every chip, and making the keyboard that every user touches daily such an exquisite experience that it feels entirely natural.

Natural is the highest praise an engineer can give.

He is a person building a Great Wall out of the rubble. Now, that Great Wall is entrusted to him to guard.

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