Bloomberg reports John Ternus has made himself Apple's de facto design chief a month into the job. What that changes this year, and what has to wait.
John Ternus has been Apple’s CEO for about a month. According to Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter on October 4, he spends several days a week in the design studio and sometimes goes back more than once in the same day. People in the department told Gurman that Tim Cook visited for about an hour a month, at most.
It’s the most interesting thing Apple did this month.
Who runs design now
Nobody with the title. Apple has had no single design chief since Jony Ive left in 2019. Jeff Williams held the teams until he retired in 2025, after which they reported to Cook on paper and, Gurman says, to Ternus in practice. During the April-to-September handover, the design leads were effectively Ternus’s only direct reports.
Gurman reports Apple is not searching for an outside chief design officer. Molly Anderson leads industrial design and Steve Lemay leads human interface design, the role Alan Dye left when he moved to Meta. Ternus is the final decision maker above both.
Ternus came up through hardware engineering. He ran that organization before he ran the company, so his time in the studio continues what he was already doing. What changed is that finance now goes to CFO Kevan Parekh and the supply chain to COO Sabih Khan, which frees the hours Cook used to spend on exactly those things.
What it changes, and when
Nothing on sale today. Design decisions take years to reach a shelf, so the first products shaped under a Ternus-run studio are still in the future. Applesfera’s read is that the iPhone Duo is already a more “Ternus” product, and the rumors point at next September’s 20th-anniversary iPhone as the first one planned start to finish under him.
Two nearer-term things are worth watching. Gurman mentions a noticeably lighter MacBook Pro with an OLED touchscreen that could be shown in October or November. And the studio is rebuilding: it lost senior people to LoveFrom, OpenAI and Meta, and hired Belgian furniture designer Julien Renault the week before Gurman’s report. Restoring the studio’s standing inside Apple is, per the report, one of Ternus’s first priorities.
If you buy Apple hardware because of how it is designed, the person at the top now spends his week on that. If you buy it for the supply chain, Cook built one that will outlast him. For the first time since 2019, those two jobs belong to different people.