Former advisor to Steve Jobs says new Apple CEO is exactly what’s needed: an engineer from the inside

Tim Cook’s plan to step down as Apple’s CEO, announced Monday, will put the tech giant in the hands of a hardware engineer, John Ternus, returning Apple’s top job to its product roots after nearly 15 years under a leader who made his mark in operations and supply chain.

It’s the right call, said Mike Slade, a Seattle tech veteran who spent six years as an advisor to Steve Jobs at the company. Apple needed to pick an insider who understands the culture, Slade said, and ideally someone who knows how hardware comes together, inside and out. 

Ternus checks both boxes. 

“Apple’s the last company left where there are people that know how to build computers, in the U.S., at least,” Slade said. “If you know that, you have an unfair, intuitive ability to know what’s possible. That’s how crazy things like the iPod and the iPhone came to be.”

Ternus, 50, joined Apple in 2001 and has been there ever since, rising from the product design team to senior vice president of hardware engineering. He has overseen hardware across every major product line, including iPhone, Mac, iPad, and AirPods.

Cook, 65, announced Monday that he will become executive chairman on Sept. 1, when Ternus takes over as CEO of the Cupertino, Calif., company. The transition ends one of the most successful tenures in the history of corporate America: under Cook, Apple’s market cap grew roughly tenfold, and by literally trillions of dollars, from about $350 billion to $4 trillion. 

Slade, a co-founder of Seattle venture capital firm Second Avenue Partners, started his career at Microsoft in 1983 and later ran Starwave, Paul Allen’s internet media company, which sold to Disney. He served as an advisor to Apple and Jobs on product and marketing strategy from 1998 to 2004, attending Apple executive meetings and working with both Jobs and Cook.

We’ve known Slade for years through Seattle’s tech community, and got in touch with him after seeing him quoted in the New York Times’ coverage of Cook’s departure. In that piece, he called Cook’s legacy one of “continuous improvement in every aspect and fantastic new products.”

Speaking with GeekWire via phone, Slade noted that he had recently been running the numbers on the market value of Microsoft and Apple under different leaders. Cook stands out for having grown Apple’s value from $350 billion to more than $4 trillion during his tenure, more than a 10-fold increase.

Throughout its history, he noted, Apple has rarely been a first mover in hardware. Music players, cell phones, and VR headsets all existed before Apple got to them.

“They just weren’t very good,” he said. “Apple made them good.”

That’s exactly the skill set a hardware engineer brings to the CEO role, he said. 

Steven Sinofsky, the former Microsoft Windows and Office chief, called Cook’s run as Apple CEO “just an incredible incredible tenure,” writing on X that Cook accomplished “the rare combination of improved execution and strategic innovation.” 

But the biggest question facing Ternus is one that dogged Cook in his final years: what to do about artificial intelligence. Apple has largely watched from the sidelines as rivals poured hundreds of billions into AI, and its own efforts, including a delayed Siri overhaul, have stumbled. Its AI chief, John Giannandrea, left last year after being gradually sidelined.

Alex Zenla, co-founder and CTO of Edera, a Seattle-based container and AI security startup, said Apple’s strength in recent years has been hardware, driven by Apple Silicon and a reversal of past missteps like over-thinning of Apple hardware.

Ternus oversaw many of those changes, she pointed out, making him a natural fit for the top job. Apple invested early in on-device AI through its Neural Engine, Zenla noted, and that positions a hardware-minded CEO well for what’s ahead.

“If Apple wants to shine with Apple Intelligence, hardware will continue to be at the forefront of their strategy, and ultimately I believe that bet will pay off,” Zenla said via email.

Zenla also praised Cook’s legacy on a personal level, calling him a source of pride as a fellow Alabama native and one of corporate America’s most prominent gay executives. 

Slade said he doesn’t think AI is Apple’s problem to solve. The company’s edge, in his view, is building the hardware that AI runs on, and for that, you want an engineer at the top.

“I think the people who are going to be best at AI are not going to be Microsoft or Apple or Google or Amazon,” Slade said. Instead, he said, it will be companies like OpenAI and Anthropic that have been singularly focused on the technology.

Cook will remain involved as executive chairman, and Slade said that’s an important aspect of the announcement. The corporate and political sides of running Apple are areas where Ternus may not have deep experience, and Cook isn’t going anywhere.

But the core of the job is product, Slade said, and that’s where Ternus fits.

If he’d been asked in advance who Apple should pick, Slade said, his answer would have been simple: Pick an internal person who understands product. “So there you go,” he said.

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