John Ternus became Apple’s CEO on Tuesday, 1 September 2026, and will lead his first keynote at Apple Park in Cupertino on Wednesday, 9 September 2026, succeeding Tim Cook.
Tim Cook’s last day in the job was Monday, 31 August 2026, and he marked it with a farewell memo to staff, published in full as reported by 9to5Mac.
Cook stayed on as executive chairman, handling Apple’s relationships with governments worldwide, including the United States and China.
What the John Ternus Apple CEO handover changed
The handover was Apple’s biggest leadership change since Steve Jobs’s death in 2011. Cook had run the company for 15 years, and every launch in that stretch carried his voice on the keynote stage, which was what made the 9 September date unusual.
The memo read less like a corporate handover than a goodbye letter. Cook wrote about the people rather than the products, and he opened by explaining why he could not let the day slip past in silence:
“I love this company and the team behind it, and I couldn’t let this day pass without sending a note to you. I will miss leading you and being with you for every step, even as I take enormous comfort in handing the helm to someone as brilliant and wonderful and capable as John.”
Cook then turned to his successor. John Ternus had built his career inside Apple’s hardware organisation rather than its finance or operations arms, a different route to the top than Cook’s own, and the memo made that engineering pedigree the point:
“Few people understand what it takes to build products that change the world the way John does and I could not be more excited for his leadership.”
The memo closed on the thing Cook seemed most keen to hand over intact, which was not a product roadmap but the internal culture that produced it. He wrote about what the company believed it owed the world:
“This place is proof that culture triumphs over everything. We share a belief that what we build matters, and that we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to leave the world better than we found it.”
How John Ternus reached the Apple CEO job
Ternus joined Apple in 2001 on the Product Design team, the group that worked out how a device was physically put together before a single unit shipped.
He was promoted to senior vice president of Hardware Engineering in January 2021.
What the new Apple CEO will unveil in Cupertino
His first outing in charge was Apple’s “Surprise and shine” event at Apple Park in Cupertino, California, on Wednesday, 9 September 2026, at 10:00 local time (19:00 SAST).
Swisher Post set out that date and the foldable iPhone rumours when the invites went out on Wednesday, 26 August 2026.
Ternus will walk onto the Apple Park stage with the iPhone 18 lineup and new Apple Watch models expected, alongside a foldable handset leaks have called both iPhone Fold and iPhone Ultra. Cook will stay on as executive chairman, so the succession amounted to a handover of the stage rather than an exit.
