Three of Apple’s most senior roles turned over before Ternus touched the CEO chair. CFO Luca Maestri, COO Jeff Williams, General Counsel Kate Adams, and environment chief Lisa Jackson have all stepped back or exited since 2024. New CFO Kevan Parekh (54) and COO Sabih Khan (59) are locked in. Cook choreographed this deliberately, staggering exits to prevent investors from reading a fire alarm into what was actually a controlled demolition.
The unresolved part is where it gets interesting. Johny Srouji, 61, Apple’s chief hardware officer, told Cook in 2025 he was considering leaving—and stayed only after taking on expanded responsibilities as a transitional move. According to Bloomberg reporting, sources expect his departure within one to two years. He’s described internally as “the biggest domino.” When Srouji goes, Apple is expected to split hardware back into separate engineering and technologies divisions, because nobody on the current bench has his full range of AI chips and silicon expertise.
Greg Joswiak, 62, a 40-year marketing veteran, faces a similar clock. Deirdre O’Brien, 60, runs both retail and HR—a combination she reportedly didn’t want—and is also nearing the end of her tenure.
What Ternus Actually Inherits
A hardware thinker stepping into a job that demands the full stack.
To longtime Apple observers, Ternus needs no introduction. He’s the engineer’s engineer, elevated to oversee Apple’s design teams in late 2025 as explicit succession prep. That’s his native territory. Finance, legal, and government affairs are not. That gap makes his reliance on Parekh, Khan, and Eddy Cue in services more load-bearing than Cook’s equivalent dependencies ever were.
Ternus has already moved to shore up his weakest flank, bringing retired hardware VP Laura Legros back from retirement to join his management team — a move that echoes broader concerns about ex-employees and institutional continuity at Apple.
Ternus isn’t just picking lieutenants. He’s building the institution that will define Apple for the next decade and a half.
Eight days after becoming Apple CEO, he’ll stand on a stage to introduce Apple’s first foldable iPhone at the Sept. 9 “Surprise and shine” event—his opening act as the public face of the company. Apple also internally prototyped a shorter, stubbier Apple Pencil designed to magnetically attach to the foldable’s side—a direct callback to Steve Jobs’s famous 2007 line, “Nobody wants a stylus.” Per Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, it’s unlikely to ship, partly due to ergonomic awkwardness and real concerns about the foldable display’s soft layer being vulnerable to stylus pressure.
The Pipeline Exists. The Clock Is Running.
Succession ladders are sketched in—the question is whether Ternus can move fast enough to fill them.
Apple isn’t walking into this blind. The org chart has answers — written in pencil, but answers nonetheless:
- Vanessa Trigub has been elevated to VP of all retail store operations, positioning her as O’Brien’s internal successor.
- Priya Balasubramaniam is lined up to move up under Khan in operations.
- Oliver Schusser and Adrian Perica sit beneath Cue in services, ready to absorb a domain that is almost certainly too broad for any single replacement.
Watch for how Ternus handles the Srouji succession announcement as the clearest early signal of his management instincts. Whether he can execute a full leadership rebuild while simultaneously shipping the products Apple has already promised to the world—foldable iPhones, refreshed watches, an AI strategy that’s supposed to be “job No. 1”—that’s the only equation worth solving right now.
