2026-04-21 11:59:41
It’s a profoundly different feeling today than the last time Apple’s CEO announced his transition to chairman of the board, and his chosen successor was promoted to replace him as CEO.
In August 2011, Steve Jobs was sick. For years he’d managed to stay a step, sometimes two, ahead of the pancreatic cancer he’d been battling since 2003, but no more. Jobs wrote, in his letter to the company’s board and the Apple community: “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.”
Unfortunately, indeed. Cook inherited a company with extraordinary potential growth in front of it, but in deep existential grief. He led the company — and its community — through that grief and achieved that potential.
The transition Apple and Tim Cook announced today is entirely different. No one’s hand was forced. There is nothing unpleasant. Apple’s business is firing on nearly all cylinders. This year’s iPhone 17 lineup is arguably the best ever. The Mac is more popular than ever — exemplified just last month by the introduction of the $600 MacBook Neo, a machine so fun, with a price so low, that the only problem is that it’s selling so well that Apple is reportedly running out of A18 Pro chips to put in it. The iPad lineup is strong, AirPods remain dominant, and I see Apple Watches on wrists everywhere I go.
Tim Cook is 65 years old, has been CEO for 15 years, and is going out on top. Looking only at the numbers, Cook is the GOAT. But Cook, by all accounts, would be the first to tell us he doesn’t want to be judged by the numbers alone. Or as he famously put it himself at a shareholders meeting, early in his reign, “When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don’t consider the bloody ROI.”
Jobs made the right pick for his successor. And while only time will tell, it sure feels today like Cook has too. Cook has never been a product person and to his credit, he never once pretended to be. (That was John Sculley’s downfall, in a nut.) With the table set by the budding iPhone and nascent iPad products Jobs left behind, Apple didn’t need a product person at the helm in the 2010s. They needed someone to let the existing products blossom and expand. Today, it feels to me like Apple needs a product guy at the helm again. Someone with the itch to spearhead the creation of new things. Of course Cook’s successor came from within the company’s ranks. And John Ternus, more than anyone else at the company, seems like that person.
Here’s Cook, quoted in Apple’s announcement today: “John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honor. He is a visionary whose contributions to Apple over 25 years are already too numerous to count, and he is without question the right person to lead Apple into the future. I could not be more confident in his abilities and his character, and I look forward to working closely with him on this transition and in my new role as executive chairman.”
Regarding that new role, Apple’s announcement states:
As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.
Back in December, linking to the Financial Times’s blockbuster scoop accurately foretelling this announcement, I predicted:
I would also bet that Cook moves into the role of executive chairman, and will still play a significant, if not leading, role for the company when it comes to domestic and international politics. Especially with regard to Trump.
Sounds right. The only problem I can see with this arrangement is the potential for Cook to stand over Ternus’s shoulder — keeping Ternus in his shadow. That doesn’t sound like Tim Cook to me. A Bob Iger situation, I do not foresee.
After I gathered my thoughts back in August 2011, under the title “Resigned”, I wrote:
Apple’s products are replete with Apple-like features and details, embedded in Apple-like apps, running on Apple-like devices, which come packaged in Apple-like boxes, are promoted in Apple-like ads, and sold in Apple-like stores. The company is a fractal design. Simplicity, elegance, beauty, cleverness, humility. Directness. Truth. Zoom out enough and you can see that the same things that define Apple’s products apply to Apple as a whole. The company itself is Apple-like. The same thought, care, and painstaking attention to detail that Steve Jobs brought to questions like “How should a computer work?”, “How should a phone work?”, “How should we buy music and apps in the digital age?” he also brought to the most important question: “How should a company that creates such things function?”
Jobs’s greatest creation isn’t any Apple product. It is Apple itself.
I remember writing that piece with such a heavy heart. It hurt. But there was hope. Those words stand up, and I can quote them today in the context of Cook handing the mantle to Ternus with nothing but the hope, and none of the hurt.
CEOs typically leave companies in one of three ways: with a hook, on a gurney, or on their own terms. Cook, seemingly, is doing it entirely on his own terms. One can reasonably argue with certain of his strategic decisions over the years. I certainly have. But I don’t think you can argue that Cook ever did anything for any reason other than what he believed was in the company’s best interest. Not his personal interest. Not employees. Not users. Not shareholders. Not developers (ha!). The company’s interest always came first. There’s a nobility to his singleminded focus on Apple itself, as an abiding institution, and his faith that what’s best for Apple will ultimately prove best for everyone involved with it: employees, shareholders, users, and, yes, even developers. If he’s made mistakes, they’re errors in taste, not mistaken priorities. He is the ultimate company man at the ultimate company.
Cook has transformed Apple in his own image. The company is much more predictable now than it ever was, or could have been, under Jobs. It now runs on an annual schedule that can be printed on a calendar. There is far less drama, and no scandal. And there is seemingly no drama, at all, in this particular transition, despite the incredibly high stakes and the (justifiably) large egos in Apple’s leadership team. Cook inherited the greatest company in the world. He’s handing it over to Ternus in even better shape than what Jobs handed to him. Even the timing of the announcement and the transition, on Apple’s annual calendar, seems perfect. Cook oversees one last WWDC in June, then Ternus takes the helm on the cusp of Apple’s announcement of new iPhones in September. It’s hard to imagine a more orderly, confidence-inspiring, exciting-but-not-at-all-surprising, this-feels-right way to do this.
All of that, I am sure, is just the way Cook wants it.
And, if you agree that Apple itself was Jobs’s greatest product, Cook really is a product person after all.
2026-04-21 05:38:00
Daring Fireball t-shirts and hoodies are back. Order now, and we’ll start printing shirts at the end of this week and shipping them out next week. Go ahead and place your order now, while I gather my thoughts about today’s Apple leadership news.
2026-04-21 05:37:22
Tim Cook, in a letter addressed, simply, “To the Apple community”:
For the past 15 years I’ve started just about every morning the same way. I open my email and I read notes I received the day before from Apple’s users all over the world.
You share little pieces of your lives with me and tell me things you want me to know about how Apple has touched you. About the moment your mom was saved by her Apple Watch. About the perfect selfie you captured at the summit of a mountain that seemed impossible to climb. You thank me for the ways Mac has changed what you can do at work and sometimes give me a hard time because something you care about isn’t working like it should.
In every one of those emails I feel the beating heart of our shared humanity. I feel a sense of deepening obligation to work harder and push further. But most of all, I feel a gratitude that I cannot put into words, that I somehow got to be the person on the other end of those emails, the leader of a company that ignites imaginations and enriches lives in such profound ways it defies description. What an honor and a privilege it has been.
The language here feels looser, more casual, more real than anything Cook has said or written in public since his historic, seminal coming-out essay at Businessweek back in 2014.
Just a wonderful note. This feels like a very happy day for Tim Cook. Where has this guy been?
2026-04-21 04:44:58
Apple Newsroom, with a veritable “boom”:
Apple announced that Tim Cook will become executive chairman of Apple’s board of directors and John Ternus, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple’s next chief executive officer effective on September 1, 2026. The transition, which was approved unanimously by the Board of Directors, follows a thoughtful, long-term succession planning process.
Cook will continue in his role as CEO through the summer as he works closely with Ternus on a smooth transition. As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.
Ternus will become the 8th CEO in Apple’s 50-year history:
At just over 50 years old — the same age Cook was when he took the job — Ternus is young enough for decade-plus run, joining only Sculley, Jobs, and Cook.
In a separate announcement: “Johny Srouji Named Apple’s Chief Hardware Officer”.
This is all very exciting, but also all very low on drama. It’s all very, very Cook-ian.
2026-04-21 01:09:30
Apple Newsroom:
In its annual Environmental Progress Report released today, Apple marked progress toward Apple 2030, the company’s ambitious goal to be carbon neutral across its entire footprint by the end of this decade. Apple’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2025 remain down over 60 percent compared to 2015 levels, holding constant from 2024 even in a year of significant business growth. The report highlights additional progress in renewable energy, materials innovation and recycling, water stewardship, and zero waste.
On the packaging front:
Apple completed the transition to 100 percent fiber-based packaging last year, fulfilling its pledge to remove plastic from packaging by 2025. Over the past 10 years, Apple engineers and designers have developed alternatives to common packaging components, replacing plastic screen protectors and trays with versions made with recycled or responsibly sourced paper. They also innovated to make packaging more recyclable, designing the largest boxes, like for the new Studio Display XDR, to collapse into smaller pieces that fit into a home recycling bin. Apple avoided more than 15,000 metric tons of plastic in the past five years alone — the equivalent of about 500 million plastic water bottles.
Apple made this shift while not compromising a whit on the design quality of its packaging. If anything, I’d say Apple products have better packaging than ever. How they look, how they feel, the experience of opening them. Some of the company’s most talented and most effective designers work on the packaging team.
Earlier in the announcement:
As Apple celebrates Earth Day with its teams, partners, and customers around the world — including with a special offer for users who bring in their Apple devices for recycling at participating Apple Store locations — here’s a look at the progress the company is making across its environmental initiatives.
That special offer, the 2026 Earth Day Promotion, is a PDF. That PDF file is not the work of Apple’s best designers. Jiminy.
2026-04-20 02:51:43
Marc Malkin, Variety:
Jessica Chastain says Apple TV is finally going to release her political thriller series “The Savant.” [...]
“Before it was like, ‘I don’t know if we’re going to see it,’ but now I can say, ‘We’re going to see it,’” Chastain told me exclusively on Saturday at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony in Santa Monica.
As for when, sources tell me that Apple is planning for a July release.
Previously, re: The Savant’s limbo release date.
