After Cook, Apple handed $4.5 trillion to a hardware engineer! On September 1, John Ternus officially succeeded Tim Cook as Apple's CEO. On his first day in office, he made his debut on X with just one letter: 'hello.' Within hours, the post racked up tens of millions of views, over 200,000 likes, and even Elon Musk personally replied with a 'Congrats!' Ternus isn’t a salesperson, an operations expert, or an AI guru. He’s a mechanical engineer who’s been with Apple for 25 years, starting with Cinema Display and working his way up to head of hardware engineering. From the iPhone, iPad, Mac, AirPods, and Apple Watch to Vision Pro—and even the transition of Macs from Intel to Apple Silicon—he’s been at the core of it all. Apple’s official bio for him even emphasizes materials, reliability, durability, and hardware design—very much the hallmarks of an engineer. This says a lot about how Apple plans to approach the AI race. While OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are competing on models and computing power, Apple’s real advantage lies in its billions of devices and its ability to integrate chips, sensors, batteries, screens, systems, and AI into consumer electronics. If AI evolves from chat boxes to glasses, headphones, watches, phones, or even entirely new types of devices, Apple doesn’t necessarily need a CEO like Sam Altman. What it needs is someone who can turn AI into the next product that people actually want to wear or carry with them every day. After Jobs, Cook turned Apple into the world’s most powerful business machine. After Cook, Apple has handed the wheel back to a product engineer. In the AI era, can Apple create another iPhone?