Apple CEO John Ternus Calls Vision Pro ‘the Early Days of a Long Journey’ in New French TV Interview

CUPERTINO, Calif. — Apple Chief Executive Officer John Ternus offered his most detailed public defense yet of the company’s Vision Pro headset, describing the mixed-reality device as being in the earliest stages of a much longer technological journey, comparable to the first years of personal computing, in a wide-ranging new television interview.

Speaking on the French program Clique TV, host Mouloud Achour asked Ternus directly to characterize the device’s trajectory: “The Vision Pro: for you is it a test, a flop, or the first step to the future of what’s going to be… a computer?” Ternus responded with an unambiguous vote of confidence in the product’s long-term potential. “Vision Pro to me is an amazing device. It’s an absolutely amazing device,” Ternus said. “But I think of it as like the early days of computers. It is the early days of a long journey. That’s how I feel about Vision Pro.”

Ternus elaborated on that comparison by pointing to the unpredictable ways early personal computers found their footing with users. “What you see, if you think about the early days, people found different reasons where the computer allowed them, the Mac allowed them to do something never before possible,” he said. “Like desktop publishing, and it became a big thing in that industry.” Turning to Vision Pro’s current, more limited adoption, Ternus argued a similar pattern was already emerging. “What you’re seeing with Vision Pro now is, certainly there’s early adopters who love it and they’re using it and they’re enjoying it, but you also, surgeons are starting to use it in surgery because it’s just a fundamentally better tool for them than a monitor that’s kind of sitting over here.”

The comments carry particular weight given Ternus’s own reported history with the Vision Pro project. In September, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple had laid off more than 100 employees working on the headset, with Ternus, then still incoming CEO, reportedly moving to put the product category “on ice.” Gurman’s reporting at the time indicated Ternus had been skeptical of the Vision Pro project from its inception, viewing the device as too bulky and too expensive for mainstream adoption. Even amid those cuts to Apple’s Vision Products Group, employees were reportedly told that the Vision Pro hardware and its visionOS operating system were not being discontinued altogether.

Against that backdrop, Ternus’s enthusiastic framing of the device in the Clique TV interview suggests a more optimistic public posture than his earlier reported private skepticism, even as he stopped short of committing to any specific future roadmap or timeline for the product during the interview.

Beyond Vision Pro, Ternus used the interview to address broader questions about his leadership style following his formal transition into Apple’s top job on September 1, succeeding Tim Cook, who moved into the role of executive chairman after leading the company for roughly 15 years. Asked what difference it makes that Apple’s new chief executive is an engineer by training, in contrast to Cook, who was widely known during his tenure as an operations specialist rather than what some described as a “product person,” Ternus downplayed the idea that his background signals any fundamental shift in direction for the company. “I don’t think anything’s really changed,” he said. “I think, sure, I’m new in this job, but the focus on innovation, the focus on products, the focus most importantly on our customers, that has never changed, that’s been here from the beginning.” He went on to describe his own motivation for staying at Apple across his lengthy tenure with the company. “I am super passionate about products, I love building things, that’s why I’ve been here for so long and that’s why I love what I do,” Ternus said. “I don’t think of it as some radical change, I just couldn’t be more excited about the future.”

Ternus, 50, joined Apple’s product design team in 2001, beginning his career at the company working on external Mac monitors before rising through the ranks of Apple’s hardware engineering organization over more than two decades. Before joining Apple, he spent four years at Virtual Research Systems, a company involved in the earlier wave of virtual reality headset development during the 1980s and 1990s, an experience that gave him early exposure to display technology and human-computer interface design that would later prove directly relevant to his oversight of the Vision Pro’s development. Ternus graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 with a degree in mechanical engineering, where he was also a standout competitive swimmer, earning recognition as an all-time letter winner for the university’s varsity swim team.

At 50 years old, Ternus is roughly the same age Cook was when he first became Apple’s chief executive officer in 2011, a similarity that some analysts have pointed to as a factor the company’s board may have weighed favorably when considering the length of leadership stability a younger successor could offer relative to an older candidate.

With Vision Pro continuing to find a foothold in specialized professional applications, including surgical settings and film production, even as broader consumer adoption remains limited, Ternus’s comments in the Clique TV interview signal that Apple’s newest chief executive intends to keep investing in the spatial computing category over the long term, even if, as he suggested, that particular journey remains only in its earliest stages.