Apple’s New CEO Is Running Design Himself: John Ternus Emerges as De Facto Design Chief

CUPERTINO — Apple’s chief executive has a new office habit, and it tells you nearly everything about the company’s direction. John Ternus, who became CEO on September 1, is spending several days a week inside Apple’s design studio — sometimes returning more than once in a single day — according to Mark Gurman’s latest Power On newsletter. His predecessor, Tim Cook, reportedly stopped by for about an hour, once a month at most. Ternus is, in effect, running design himself.

People familiar with the department describe the change as substantial, per Gurman’s reporting. This is not a CEO doing a walkthrough; it is the chief executive embedding himself in the room where Apple’s products get their shape. And Apple, notably, has no plans to change the arrangement. The company has not started a search for a single design chief to oversee both the industrial and human-interface teams — the role Jony Ive held until he left in 2019. Instead, per the newsletter, Ternus sits above both groups as the final decision-maker. He has effectively chosen himself for the job.

The de facto design chief

The two design groups keep their own leaders. Molly Anderson leads industrial design — she has run it since 2024 and was featured alongside the iPhone Duo launch — while Steve Lemay heads human interface design after Alan Dye’s departure. But according to Gurman, neither reports up to a dedicated design overlord anymore. They report, in practice, to Ternus.

The division of labor inside the company explains how he can afford the time. Gurman notes that Ternus is leaving financial operations to CFO Kevan Parekh and the supply chain to COO Sabih Khan, while spending more of his time with Chief Hardware Officer Johny Srouji and hardware engineering leader Tom Marieb. The product work is where the new CEO lives. Cook’s Apple was run from the operations spreadsheet; Ternus’s Apple is being run, visibly, from the studio.

How it happened: the transition that already happened

The setup did not appear on September 1. After Jeff Williams retired as COO in 2025, Apple said its two design teams would report to Tim Cook. Instead, per Gurman’s reporting, they began answering to Ternus — Cook’s designated successor — in practice. During the April-to-September CEO transition, the design leaders were effectively Ternus’s only direct reports.

That was the tell, in retrospect. Bloomberg reported as early as January that Ternus had quietly taken oversight of the design teams, a move widely read as the signal that he was Cook’s likely successor. Apple announced the transition in April; Ternus became chief executive on September 1, with Cook moving to executive chairman. The design reporting line that arrived with it was not a new power grab — it was the formalization of a structure that had been running for months.

Ternus’s résumé makes the arrangement unusual but coherent. He joined Apple in 2001 on the product design team and rose through hardware engineering, becoming senior vice president of hardware engineering in 2021, per Bloomberg’s reporting. He is an engineer with twenty-five years of exposure to Apple’s design process — closer to Ive’s product sensibility than to Cook’s operations mastery, but grounded in the manufacturing and durability constraints the industrial design team actually lives with. Decisions about form, materials, repairability, and production now run through someone who has spent a career at that intersection.

The rebuild: Meta and OpenAI have been raiding the studio

Ternus’s direct involvement also comes as Apple tries to rebuild its design bench. Alan Dye, who previously led human interface design, left for Meta, while OpenAI has hired several former Apple employees. Apple has reportedly responded by promoting junior designers and bringing in talent from outside. That turnover is the quiet crisis inside the story: a design organization losing senior people to the two companies fighting hardest over the future of personal computing.

The structural answer Apple chose is the same one it chose after Ive: no single heir. Ive left in 2019, and the company has reorganized its design operation rather than appointing a direct successor with the same company-wide authority. What changed under Ternus is that the seat at the top of both teams is no longer empty — it is occupied by the CEO. Whether that is a stabilizing move or a bottleneck depends entirely on how many decisions actually need Ternus in the room, and how often the room can get him.

The overhaul behind it: faster launches, possible job cuts

The design control is one piece of a broader Ternus overhaul. Gurman reported September 30 that the new CEO is leading changes aimed at faster, more frequent product launches, with possible job cuts as part of the restructuring. Recent reporting has also pointed to plans to reduce layers of management and give engineers more direct access to senior executives. The Ternus era is being framed, internally and externally, as an operational rewiring of a company that had settled into an annual cadence.

The product calendar is where the overhaul gets tested. Apple’s October 13 event — expected to bring a smart home hub and new Macs — will be the first launch fully owned by the Ternus organization. Gurman has separately reported that a redesigned MacBook Pro with OLED and a touchscreen could be “significantly lighter” than current models, and that the Apple Watch Series 12 and Watch Ultra 4 arrive later this year. For the full foldable-phone picture, see our coverage of the iPhone Duo preorder. The question hanging over all of it is whether hands-on CEO design oversight produces better products faster — or just slower products with more meetings.

What it means

There is an obvious historical echo here. The last time Apple had one person sitting atop both hardware and software design was Steve Jobs and Jony Ive — a partnership that produced the company’s defining products. Ternus is not Ive, and he does not pretend to be; he is the first engineer to hold the CEO job, and his version of design leadership is a decision-maker’s authority rather than a designer’s instinct.

But the echo is the point of the story Gurman is telling. Apple spent the Cook era proving it could run flawlessly as an operations company. The Ternus era’s bet is that flawless operations were never the product — the product is the product, and the CEO is now in the studio to prove it. If the October 13 launches and the redesigned MacBook Pro land faster and sharper than the Cook-era cadence would have produced, nobody will question why the chief executive spends his afternoons in the design studio. If they don’t, the same habit will read very differently. For now, the studio has a new regular — and his name is on the door.

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