A new Bloomberg report says that Tim Cook has tapped John Ternus to manage Apple’s design teams. Here are the details.
John Ternus takes on an increasingly broader role at Apple
Bloomberg’s report says that “at the end of last year,” Tim Cook quietly tapped John Ternus, Apple’s Senior SVP of Hardware Engineering, to take on oversight of the company’s design organization, acting as what the report described as the “executive sponsor” for all design across Apple.
In practice, according to the report, this means that Ternus will oversee design strategy at the executive level, while design leaders continue to report directly to Tim Cook “in both internal organizational charts and the company’s public disclosures”.
From the report:
“As senior vice president of hardware engineering, Ternus already worked closely with the industrial design team, which focuses on hardware. But he hadn’t previously been responsible for that group or the one developing the user interface in Apple’s software.”
The report also notes that “even with the change, there are no signs within Apple that Cook is poised to step down soon,” though Ternus is widely regarded as a top internal candidate to succeed him.
Interestingly, Bloomberg also notes that “Cook himself is trying to expose Ternus to more parts of the company’s operations,” and that “Apple has also increasingly positioned Ternus as a public face of the company,” adding to the sense that he could be on track to inherit the CEO gig.
Apple’s design leadership has been in flux since Jony Ive left, following years of executive departures and reshuffles that ultimately placed oversight in the hands of COO Jeff Williams, who has now also retired.
For this reason, despite being characterized by Bloomberg’s sources as a “strange arrangement,” the move is also seen as an acknowledgment that Ternus may be better suited to the design role than Cook, who “is known to keep a distance from design decisions.”
Finally, the report says that Apple’s design decisions are still made by consensus among senior leaders, although Ternus’ expanded role gives him greater influence than a typical hardware chief. Still, as noted by Mark Gurman on X, only a very small number of Apple executives have ever held that level of design oversight:
To read Bloomberg‘s full report, follow this link.
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