Apple’s New CEO Has One Job: Make Apple Surprising Again

The smartest thing Tim Cook did when he replaced Steve Jobs as Apple’s CEO was: He didn’t try to be Steve Jobs. The smartest thing John Ternus, who makes his public debut as Apple’s new CEO tomorrow (Wednesday), can do is not try to be Tim Cook.

Jobs, of course, was the company’s prodigal founder who returned to rescue it and turned it into a global cultural force. He was simply irreplaceable, so Cook didn’t even try. In place of Jobs’s charismatic and visionary leadership, he leaned into his own strengths, delivering 15 years of operational excellence.

Operational excellence, it turned out, was exactly what Apple needed at that moment, and Cook succeeded brilliantly at it. In the 15 years of his reign, Apple went from a market capitalization of less than $350 billion to its current value of more than $4.5 trillion. Cook didn’t succeed despite not being Jobs; he succeeded because he wasn’t Jobs.

But just as Apple in 2011 needed a different kind of leadership from Jobs’s, it now needs something more than Cook’s managerial prowess if its next 15 years are to even remotely resemble its last 15. Specifically, Ternus will need to figure out how to re-inject excitement into the equation. 

Once upon a time, Apple product launches were events. Why? Because they were built on surprise—introducing consumers to products most couldn’t even imagine until they saw them. The Macintosh in 1984. The candy-colored iMac in 1998. The iPod in 2001. The iPhone in 2007.

And, of course, everything was introduced with Jobs’s flair for theatricality. The Mac’s “1984” Super Bowl commercial is still talked about after more than four decades. Jobs’s iPhone introduction—“an iPod, a phone and an internet communicator. An iPod, a phone … are you getting it?”—makes for entertaining viewing even today. A year later, his audience gasped when he produced the first, impossibly thin MacBook Air on stage by sliding it out of a manila envelope.

Compare those moments with the modern Apple launch event. No more bright lights, dramatic flourishes or, since the pandemic, live audiences. Instead, we get a slickly produced video that’s about as dramatic as a CNBC report.

As for the products, Cook is leaving his successor a full pipeline of ‘em, and they are certainly better than ever—that’s the nature of technology, after all. But the improvements are increasingly incremental. This year’s iPhone will look a lot like last year’s, and next year’s. A better camera, new colors, a brighter screen and faster chips are nice—but not life-altering.

And even when Apple does something new these days, it’s often … not really. This week, if reports are correct, its marquee announcement will be a new foldable iPhone called the Ultra. It may well be a big hit—but its impact will stem not from the technology, which Android users have had for the better part of a decade, but from the fact that Apple is finally embracing it. Just how excited will we be supposed to get when a Mac finally comes with a touchscreen?

All of which makes the 51-year-old Ternus a particularly intriguing selection as CEO. Jobs had been a celebrity for nearly two decades when he returned to save Apple in the late ‘90s; his first national magazine cover was in 1981. And Cook had years of public exposure as Jobs’s ops wizard and increasingly obvious heir apparent before taking over in 2011; Jobs died six weeks later. By contrast, Ternus—while well-known and seemingly popular within Apple—has little public profile: David Pogue’s exhaustive account of the company’s first half-century, published earlier this year, mentions him exactly once.

But his background at the company at least hints at the possibility he could put some excitement back into the pipeline. He played key roles in the development of the first iPad, the last major new device of the Jobs era, as well as the now-ubiquitous AirPods, which together with the Apple Watch were the two most successful new hardware products introduced during Cook’s reign.

While the AirPods and watch showed that Cook could introduce successful new devices, they aren’t really central to the story of his achievement. Far more important has been the spectacular growth of Apple’s services business, from iCloud and the App Store to Apple Pay and Ted Lasso, into a $100-billion-a-year behemoth. But if more seasons of Shrinking becomes a highlight of Ternus’s tenure, both he and Apple will have lost the thread. Exciting hardware remains the soul of the company, and the foundation of everything else it does.

That’s not to say Ternus needs to reintroduce Jobs-style showmanship; he needn’t worry about building a wardrobe full of black turtlenecks. What he should focus on is building products worthy of showmanship—something worth sliding out of an envelope. 

Maybe that’s impossible at this stage of the game. Maybe the personal-tech market has become so predictable because it’s now a mature industry, like appliances and autos. After all, it isn’t just Apple: Samsung, Google, the Chinese—everyone makes remarkably good devices that mostly get better at the margins. So if Ternus can make Apple surprising again, he won’t just be solving a problem for Apple, he’ll be solving one for the entire industry.

Not long before he died, Jobs gave Cook a sterling piece of advice: “Never ask what I would do.” Cook, who understood that following Jobs didn’t mean imitating him, has essentially given Ternus the same gift. Now Ternus needs to figure out what Apple needs from him.