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Start the music. Players walk clockwise in a circle. When the music stops, everyone sits on a chair. Big tech companies are implementing their plans for the next generation of lead designers, engineers, AI heads, and even CEOs.
In Cupertino, Apple executives with familiar faces are retiring or reducing their responsibilities. Who comes in and who goes out? Well, Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams retired in November, and speculation is that CEO Tim Cook could succeed him in the near term. Lisa Jackson, who led Apple’s sustainability efforts Since 2013, he is now scheduled to retire in January as well.
There is also a team of Apple employees who have been lured to work with them OpenAIparticularly Apple’s former chief design officer Jony Ive After his freelance work in Love from. In 2024, it was Molly Anderson His name Industrial Design Lead, heading up a team of mostly new faces. Others have gone Meta, like Apple’s vice president of human interface design, Alan Dye, who was there just this week boiled to head up the new Reality Labs design studio. At Apple, he was replaced by longtime UI designer Stephen Lemay. Oof.
In this vortex of shifting talent, John Ternos, who has been at Apple since 2001 and served as senior vice president of hardware engineering for the past four years, reporting directly to Tim Cook, is… Emerging As the most likely candidate to succeed Cook as CEO of Apple, as soon as next year. WIRED asked Apple for comment but did not receive a response before publication.
Besides the constant drip of “leaks” about succession planning and Ternus’ position at the front of the pack, since 2023 Ternus has been given greater prominence in product launch events. And he announced iPhone Air On stage last September, appearing alongside other senior Apple leaders at press interviews and Apple in-store events.
“I think they’re testing to see what the sentiment is,” says Anshil Saag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “Apple likes to control the narrative. So these ‘leaks’ don’t happen accidentally.” “Apple has lost a lot of people. I think that might actually be a positive thing because it will create a new group of people who now have more power than they did before.”
New names to know
It’s always difficult to capture an individual’s contributions to Apple, beyond individual details, such as that John Ternus himself was behind the MacBook’s TouchBar. Bertrand Nebvieux worked on Apple Vision Pro The team from 2017 to 2021, after Apple acquired His startup, Vrvana, is for virtual reality headsets, and he now runs a Montreal-based VC firm Tryptic Capital. During his three-and-a-half years, spent mostly on Vision Pro’s scrolling capabilities, the team has ballooned from 300 to about 1,200. “John Ternos, even though I’ve never worked with him, the feedback I’ve gotten is that he’s a great product guy, and I think that’s what’s needed for the next phase of Apple, especially with AI and XR,” he says.
With that future in mind, Nepview sees the combination of Ternos as CEO working well with other personnel moves at Apple, including the news in March that Rockwell would take over. Siri development From the head of Amnesty International, John Gianandrea. In another major reshuffle regarding the future, Gianandrea was replaced this week by… Amar Subramaniawho spent 16 years at Google, including work at Gemini and DeepMind, before spending six months at Microsoft.
“Mike Rockwell and I worked with him in the Vision Pro group, and I think he’s the right person for this because they (XR and AI) work hand in hand,” Nepview says. “He used to joke that Siri sucked. I liked him because he didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. I was happy when I saw he got a promotion. I think combined with someone more product-focused (Ternus), this is the right way to go for Apple.”