Apple has a hardware guy as CEO. Here’s what people want him to do

Apple’s new CEO John Ternus wrote “hello” in his first X post on Tuesday after taking the helm from former CEO Tim Cook, and his replies were immediately inundated with with requests for products and product design changes. It makes sense. He’s a hardware guy.

A mechanical engineer who previously oversaw Apple’s hardware engineering, Ternus has significantly shaped the look and feel of Apple products that sell hundreds of millions of units cumulatively every year. For a company known for the elevated look and feel of its physical products, Ternus is uniquely positioned to bring Apple into a new era, hence the slew of unsolicited requests online when he got the job.

Ternus graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in mechanical engineering and his only job before Apple was in VR. He worked as a mechanical engineer at the virtual reality hardware company Virtual Research Systems before joining Apple’s product design team in 2001. Ternus became Apple’s vice president of hardware engineering in 2013 and its senior vice president of hardware engineering in 2021.

Ternus’s time in leadership has come as Apple grew into a $4.6 trillion company under Cook’s tenure as CEO thanks to factors like rising iPhone sales, recurring subscription revenue from services such as Apple Music and Apple TV, and new products, which Ternus played a pivotal role in shaping.

Ternus was key in introducing the iPad and AirPods, as well as new generations of products like the iPhone, Mac, and Apple Watch, and in March, the $600 MacBook Neo.

Ternus has also shaped the materiality of Apple’s products, leading the development of recycled aluminum that’s become the signature material of products like iPhones and laptops.

While Ternus has been behind many of Apple’s product design successes, not everything he’s led has worked out. He returned to VR to develop Apple’s Vision Pro VR headset, which was released in 2024, but has suffered from low sales.

Cook called Ternus “the perfect person for the job” and a “brilliant engineer” in an open letter in which he praised the new CEO’s experience in product design and highlighted traits like his obsession with details and making everything “better, bolder, more beautiful, and more meaningful.” Cook obviously sees Ternus’s experience in designing and building hardware as an important strength.

Ternus comes to the job at a pivotal moment for Apple as more tech companies fancy themselves hardware companies. Meta has been partnering with EssilorLuxottica on smartglasses, and OpenAI planning its own hardware, reportedly a smart speaker.

In the reply section of Ternus’s social media post, commenters seem less concerned with Apple’s response to AI-equipped devices and other high-level, future-forward decisions than they are in bringing back old favorites or fixing their personal product design pet peeves.

Some called for reviving the iPhone mini or iPods, and others for things like packaging headphones with iPhones again or making a way to charge the Apple Mouse without having to turn it upside down.

On Reddit, users discussed the possibility of Apple increasing its focus on health technology, while Bank of America analyst Wamsi Mohan wrote in a note he thinks Ternus has the opportunity “to be more prescriptive about device design and about preferences around [the user interface].”

Expectations are high for Apple’s new CEO, and Ternus takes the job at a moment when the company is facing new pressures to adapt. Apple will hold its first event with its new CEO on September 9, giving Ternus a public platform to unveil for the first time the look of Apple designs with him now at the helm.