As key talent leaves Apple, meet the new generation of leaders taking on the old guard

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 has led Apple’s sustainability efforts since 2013, is now set to retire in January as well.

There’s also a team of Apple employees who have been courted to work with OpenAI, in particular former Apple chief design officer Jony Ive after his freelance stint at LoveFrom. In 2024, Molly Anderson was appointed as 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 hired this week 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 changing talent, John Ternos, who has worked at Apple since 2001 and served as senior vice president of hardware engineering for the past four years, reporting directly to Tim Cook, stands out as the most likely candidate to succeed Cook as Apple’s CEO 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. He announced the iPhone Air on stage last September, and has appeared alongside other top Apple leaders in 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 Nepveu worked on the Apple Vision Pro team from 2017 to 2021, after Apple acquired his virtual reality headset startup Vrvana, and now runs Montreal-based VC firm Triptyq 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 Ternus as CEO working well with other personnel moves at Apple, including the news in March that Rockwell would take over Siri development from its AI chief, John Giannandrea. In another major reshuffle for the future, Giannandrea was replaced this week by Amar Subramania, who spent 16 years at Google, including work at Gemini and DeepMind, before spending six months at Microsoft.

“Mike Rockwell, I worked with him on the Vision Pro group, and I think he’s the right person for this because [XR and AI] “Work side by side,” Nepfo says. “He used to joke that Siri was crap. I liked him because he didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. I was happy when I saw that he was promoted. I think in tandem with someone who is more product focused [Ternus]”This is the path Apple should take.”