Apple changed its chief executive on 1 September 2026. John Ternus, the engineer who ran hardware for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Vision Pro, now runs the company; Tim Cook, CEO since 2011, has moved to executive chairman of the board.
The handover is the visible part of something bigger — nearly two years of turnover across Apple’s operations, finance, hardware, design, services and AI leadership. This is the reference page for that reshuffle, and we will keep it updated as the bench changes again.
What happened on 1 September 2026
Apple announced the transition on 20 April 2026: Cook would become executive chairman and Ternus, then senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, would become chief executive effective 1 September. Apple said the change was approved unanimously by the board and followed a long-term succession planning process. In its filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Apple confirmed the board had made the appointment on 17 April, three days before the public announcement.
Three things changed at the board level on the same date. Ternus joined Apple’s board of directors. Arthur Levinson, Apple’s non-executive chairman for the previous 15 years, became the lead independent director. Cook, who stayed on as CEO through the summer to work alongside Ternus, took the executive chairman seat, with a brief that includes engaging policymakers around the world — the China and Washington relationships he spent much of his tenure managing.
Cook marked his final day, 31 August 2026, with a memo to staff. He wrote that he was “not leaving Apple” but “stepping away from a role that I have loved deeply”, and said he took “enormous comfort in handing the helm to someone as brilliant and wonderful and capable” as Ternus, adding that “few people understand what it takes to build products that change the world the way John does.” We published the full memo separately: Tim Cook’s last-day memo to Apple staff.
Cook was 65 at the time of the announcement and had led Apple for 15 years. Apple’s market value closed at roughly $4 trillion on the day the succession was confirmed, up by more than $3.6 trillion over his tenure. Ternus is Apple’s eighth chief executive.
Timeline: how Apple’s bench turned over
- 1 January 2025 — Kevan Parekh becomes senior vice president and chief financial officer, succeeding Luca Maestri after more than a decade.
- 8 July 2025 — Apple announces Jeff Williams will hand the chief operating officer role to Sabih Khan later that month, as part of a long-planned succession. Williams keeps design, Apple Watch and health until his retirement.
- Late 2025 — Williams retires after 27 years. Apple’s design team begins reporting directly to the chief executive.
- 1 December 2025 — John Giannandrea steps down as senior vice president for Machine Learning and AI Strategy, staying as an adviser before retiring in spring 2026. Amar Subramanya joins as vice president of AI under Craig Federighi. The rest of Giannandrea’s organisation splits between Khan and services chief Eddy Cue. Apple also flags the retirements of Lisa Jackson, vice president for Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, and general counsel Kate Adams.
- April 2026 — Giannandrea leaves. Days later, Apple names Ternus as CEO-in-waiting and promotes Johny Srouji to the newly created role of chief hardware officer, effective immediately.
- Late August 2026 — Phil Schiller steps back from the App Store and Apple’s product events, staying on as an Apple Fellow.
- 1 September 2026 — Ternus becomes chief executive; Cook becomes executive chairman.
- October 2026 — Jennifer Bailey, who built Apple Pay, is due to retire after more than 20 years.
Who is John Ternus
Ternus, born in May 1975, is the youngest member of the executive team Apple has assembled around him, and one of the least publicly visible people ever to take the job. He graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, swam for the university, and built a head-controlled mechanical feeding arm for people with quadriplegia as his senior project. His first job was designing virtual reality headsets at Virtual Research Systems.
He joined Apple in July 2001 on the product design team, working first on the Apple Cinema Display. In 2013, he became a vice president of hardware engineering under Dan Riccio, with AirPods, Mac and iPad in his remit. iPhone hardware moved under him in 2020; he replaced Riccio as senior vice president of Hardware Engineering in 2021, and Apple Watch hardware followed in late 2022. By the time he was named CEO, he had spent 25 years at Apple and roughly the past five running the engineering behind every product Apple ships.
That is an unusually product-centred CV for the job. Cook came from operations and turned Apple into a supply-chain and services machine; Jobs came from product. Ternus is the first Apple chief executive since Jobs whose entire career has been about the thing in your hand. What he has never run is finance, sales, legal, government relations or procurement, which is why the composition of the bench below is the real story of this transition.
Apple’s executive bench after the transition
| Role | Person | In role since |
|---|---|---|
| Chief executive officer | John Ternus | 1 September 2026 |
| Executive chairman | Tim Cook | 1 September 2026 |
| Lead independent director | Arthur Levinson | 1 September 2026 |
| Chief operating officer | Sabih Khan | July 2025 |
| Chief financial officer | Kevan Parekh | 1 January 2025 |
| Chief hardware officer | Johny Srouji | April 2026 |
| Software engineering | Craig Federighi (SVP) | 2012 |
| Services, incl. the App Store | Eddy Cue (SVP) | 2011; App Store returned August 2026 |
| App Store, day to day | Carson Oliver | August 2026 |
| Artificial intelligence | Amar Subramanya (VP, under Federighi) | December 2025 |
| Industrial design | Molly Anderson (VP), reporting to the CEO | Design moved to CEO after Williams retired, late 2025 |
| Retail and people | Deirdre O’Brien (SVP) | Retail added 2019 |
| Product events | Nola Weinstein, under communications | August 2026 |
Two names carry more weight than the titles suggest. Srouji, the architect of Apple silicon, keeps the chip organisation and takes the hardware engineering group Ternus used to run, reporting to him — the closest thing Apple has to a second engineering centre of gravity. Cue’s services division has taken back the App Store, which it ran until 2015, along with Apple Arcade, putting Apple’s fastest-growing revenue line and its most regulated product under one executive.
Phil Schiller’s exit is the quiet headline
Schiller joined Apple in 1987, ran marketing until 2020, helped create the App Store alongside Jobs and took charge of it in 2015. Reporting by Bloomberg, published as Cook’s final day closed, says the 66-year-old has given up both the App Store and Apple’s product events, keeping his Apple Fellow title and working on unspecified projects; Apple declined to comment. Colleagues quoted in that reporting read the Fellow role as a step towards retirement.
The App Store job had become a regulatory one. Schiller was the person deciding which controversial apps shipped and the person rewriting commission structures under pressure from the European Union’s Digital Markets Act and the Epic Games litigation in the United States.
Handing that to Cue’s services organisation, with Carson Oliver running the store day-to-day and Ann Thai’s distribution tools team reporting to him, means the store is now managed as a business line rather than a marketing function.
Events pass to Nola Weinstein, Schiller’s events deputy since 2023, reporting to communications vice president Kristin Huguet Quayle — where events sat until around 2019.
What changes for Apple products
Nothing in the next twelve months. Apple’s product roadmap is locked years ahead, and the September 2026 line-up was signed off long before Ternus took the chair: our guide to Apple’s 9 September event covers the foldable iPhone, the iPhone 18 Pro pair and the new Apple Watches expected on stage. That event is Ternus’s first as chief executive, not his first as the person responsible for the hardware — he has been that for five years.
The medium-term questions are elsewhere. AI is the obvious one: Apple Intelligence and the delayed Siri overhaul cost Giannandrea his job, and the fix now runs through Federighi and Subramanya rather than a standalone AI division. Services is the second: with the App Store back under Cue during an active decade of antitrust and DMA pressure, commission policy is being set by the division that books the revenue. The third is pricing. Memory and storage shortages have already pushed Apple’s UAE prices up across Macs and iPads this year, and an engineer-CEO does not change component economics.
What it changes in the UAE
Apple’s Middle East business is a retail-and-services story, and it did not change hands. Deirdre O’Brien still runs retail and people; the UAE has five Apple stores — Apple Dubai Mall, Apple Mall of the Emirates, Apple Yas Mall, Apple Al Maryah Island and Apple Al Jimi Mall in Al Ain, which opened in September 2025 — plus a growing Apple Pay, iCloud and Apple TV subscriber base that now reports up through Cue’s expanded services organisation.
For UAE buyers, the practical takeaway is that decisions affecting local pricing, launch-day availability, and store expansion rest with Khan (supply chain), Parekh (finance), and O’Brien (retail), all of whom kept their jobs. The App Store move matters more here than the CEO change: regional developer commission rules, alternative payment options and store policy are now Cue’s call.
What to watch next
Four things, in order of likely impact.
First, Ternus’s 9 September stage debut and whether Apple’s presentation style shifts now that events report to communications.
Second, whether Siri’s Apple Intelligence rebuild ships on the promised timeline under Federighi and Subramanya.
Third, further retirements — Bailey’s October exit is confirmed, and Srouji and O’Brien are both long-tenured.
Fourth, Cook’s actual weight as executive chairman: his policy remit gives him a live role in Washington and Beijing that no previous Apple chairman has had.
Apple’s own record of the handover is its April 2026 succession announcement. We will add each subsequent change to this page as it is confirmed, and every future Apple leadership story on Tbreak will link back to this page.
