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Steve Jobs invented the iPhone. His successor, Tim Cook, built the system that allowed Apple to sell billions of iPhones.
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Cook’s tenure taught his successor John Ternus a lesson: You don’t have Invent world-changing technologies and become a great CEO.
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On the other hand: What happens if the age of artificial intelligence makes the iPhone obsolete?
Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus, is no Steve Jobs.
This might be just fine. Apple’s current CEO, Tim Cook, is no Steve Jobs either. While some still miss the Jobs era, the Tim Cook era has been going well for Apple and its shareholders: About 3 billion iPhones have been sold, and the market value has jumped from $300 billion to $4 trillion in 15 years.
Perhaps the Age of Ternus will have similar results. Like Cook, the 50-year-old is not known for inventing Apple’s iconic products, but for working behind the scenes to make them available to you to buy and use.
For Cook, that means building a global supply chain that relies heavily on China to enable Apple to mass-produce iPhones and other high-priced, high-margin electronics. For Ternus, that meant doing the engineering himself to make sure the hardware Cook was selling actually worked.
This doesn’t make for a romantic biography — “Ternus stands out for overseeing the expansion of new iPad models and leading the development of AirPods and the company’s first 5G phone,” Bloomberg dutifully noted a few weeks ago, amid growing speculation that Ternus might take over after Cook departs — but Apple certainly needs someone with those skills. Why not CEO?
The question, of course, is whether being really good at this kind of interception and interception is enough to qualify you to be Apple’s CEO, or whether you need some other quality. Over the years, Cook has answered that question with record sales and stock prices. The fact that he never made the next iPhone, a world-changing consumer technology product, is no longer an issue, mostly because no one else did either.
But now we’re in the age of artificial intelligence, which may well rearrange our world just as Apple did with the iPhone. If that’s the case, it probably didn’t matter which CEO ran Apple during that era. What may matter is the AI strategy Cook adopted in his final years.
Apple is widely believed to have fallen far behind in artificial intelligence because it hasn’t invested as much in the technology as Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The counterargument is that Apple has stumbled upon a winning strategy after all: It lets everyone else compete against each other to produce the best AI products, and then when those competitors need access to billions of iPhone users, it sits back and collects (some kind of) rent.
