The year 2026, rapidly approaching, may herald the end of one era and the dawn of another filled with uncertainties for the Apple empire.

According to various sources, Apple's board of directors is quietly and meticulously planning for the succession of Tim Cook at the helm. The leading candidate for this role is not a software or services strategist but the head of hardware engineering—John Ternus.

This choice is far from a mere personnel shift; it serves as a lens, reflecting Apple's deep contemplation of its core strengths and strategic gamble on its future amidst the global AI wave.

Under Cook's leadership, Apple has constructed an unparalleled business empire with peak financial health. However, in the AI race that will define the next generation of technological paradigms, Apple has seldom led the pack and is even perceived as a 'follower' by outsiders.

The crux of this transition lies in a pivotal decision: how to leverage the company's financial strength as a gateway to the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) era?

01 Cook's Legacy

To comprehend the choices in the post-Cook era, one must first examine the vast legacy left by Cook.

In 2011, he inherited from legendary founder Steve Jobs a company renowned for disruptive products like the iPhone but still harboring operational vulnerabilities. Cook's mission was thus to become an exemplary 'empire architect' and 'operations maestro.'

Tim Cook

During Cook's tenure, Apple's market value surged from approximately $350 billion to around $3 trillion today, even reaching $4 trillion at its peak, marking the first publicly traded company to achieve such heights in human business history.

He successfully expanded Apple's horizons:

On one hand, he maximized the potential of the iPhone, a 'super product,' establishing a hardware ecosystem encompassing over a billion active users globally.

On the other hand, he vigorously promoted service businesses, including the App Store, Apple Music, iCloud, and various subscription services, bringing their annual revenue close to $100 billion. These services not only contributed nearly a quarter of the revenue but also, with their recurring income nature, smoothed out the cyclical fluctuations in hardware sales.

Additionally, the Apple Watch and AirPods emerged as dominant players in their respective categories. The self-developed M-series chips fully replaced Intel processors, revitalizing the Mac product line.

It's worth noting that behind these hardware achievements lie significant contributions from Ternus and his team.

In essence, Cook successfully transformed Apple from a startup reliant on personal charm into a mature enterprise operating continuously through systems and processes. He demonstrated that excellent operations are, in themselves, a potent form of innovation.

02 Reconstruction of Power

However, just as Cook polished Apple's business machine to near perfection, the tech industry's power dynamics were undergoing drastic reconstruction due to the AI explosion, particularly generative AI.

In recent years, capital markets have accorded extremely high valuation premiums to companies demonstrating clear leadership in AI—such as Microsoft, with its cloud infrastructure and collaboration with OpenAI; Google, fully betting on the Gemini model; and NVIDIA, providing AI computing 'ammunition.'

In comparison, Apple's stock price increase pales in significance.

This exposes Apple's current core challenge: during the Cook era, the company has not launched a product capable of redefining the entire industry like the iPhone.

The Apple Watch and AirPods are successful business ventures but refinements of existing categories. The Vision Pro headset, released in 2023, showcases astonishing engineering capabilities but remains an exploratory product with a high price and niche positioning.

More pointed criticism is directed at artificial intelligence.

Apple introduced the concept of mass AI through Siri as early as 2011, but over the following decade, Siri's progress has been sluggish, gradually being surpassed by competitors like Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa in terms of understanding and capabilities.

The emergence of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 completely altered the AI competition landscape. It is no longer just a voice assistant but a 'general intelligence tool' capable of generating text, code, and images. Microsoft and Google swiftly integrated such large models deeply into their core products, attempting to reshape the future of productivity, search, and cloud services.

Apple's response, however, has long focused on device-side machine learning, emphasizing its privacy-protected experience in photo processing, input prediction, etc., lacking a clear and grand narrative of a generative AI strategy for a time.

Wall Street analysts have begun to question whether Apple needs a different type of leader in the new AI-driven cycle. Former Apple CEO John Sculley even bluntly stated that AI is Apple's weakness and that OpenAI could become its 'first true competitor' in decades.

This criticism directly points to the 'Achilles' heel' of Cook's background—he is an unparalleled operator and business expander but does not seem to be the most prominent figure when it comes to conceiving and defining entirely new technological paradigms from scratch.

This implies that when industry rules are rewritten by AI, Apple's successful 'wait, integrate, and surpass' model faces unprecedented timeliness tests.

03 The Significance of Ternus

Against this backdrop, the board's inclination to choose John Ternus becomes a highly symbolic decision. It clearly reveals how Apple intends to participate in this AI competition:

Ternus is a quintessential 'Made by Apple' hardware expert. He joined Apple in 2001, starting as a product design engineer, deeply involved in the development of the initial iPad, multiple generations of iPhones, and Macs. He also played a pivotal role in driving Apple's strategy of self-developed M-series chips.

John Ternus

Choosing him means Apple firmly believes that its competitive advantage in the AI era still lies in its most proficient areas: the physical design of hardware, the ultimate performance and energy efficiency of custom silicon chips, and the vertical integration of software and hardware.

This seems to go against the industry mainstream.

Microsoft's Satya Nadella and Google's Sundar Pichai are both seasoned professionals in the software and platform fields, committed to making AI an ubiquitous cloud service. Apple, on the other hand, appears to be preparing to hand over the company's reins to a hardware leader who firmly believes the answer lies in the 'device side.'

Observing through Apple's strategic prism, this aligns with its consistent competitive logic: Apple rarely strives to be the 'first'; it excels at waiting for technology to initially mature and then creating a 'come-from-behind' and more complete user experience through top-tier industrial design, in-depth chip optimization, and a closed but seamless ecosystem. This holds true for the iPod versus MP3 players, the iPhone versus smartphones, and the Apple Watch versus smartwatches.

Therefore, Apple is likely betting that the next AI breakthrough will come from efficiently running powerful models on personal devices with limited battery life, achieving a more instant, private, and personalized experience—in stark contrast to the model of continuously sending user data to the cloud.

Ternus is well-versed in designing neural network engines in chips, balancing performance and power consumption, and customizing devices for local AI computing. If the next stage of this AI competition is decided on the 'device side' rather than just in the 'cloud,' then Ternus is undoubtedly the most suitable candidate to execute this strategy.

04 The Empire's Regent

If John Ternus ultimately takes the reins, he will not merely ascend to the CEO throne but will be more like an 'empire regent' entrusted with heavy responsibilities: Ternus faces not a simple task of maintaining the status quo but a series of difficult balances between continuity and transformation, perfection and adventure, that are crucial to the empire's fate.

The first challenge he must confront is the 'curse of growth.'

The pinnacle of Apple's $3 trillion market value also constitutes the greatest gravity for continuing to climb. In today's globally saturated smartphone market, inertial growth relying on the single 'super product,' the iPhone, is approaching its physical limits.

Although the service business is as strong as a second engine, its growth depth relies on the vitality and closed nature of the hardware ecosystem—and this closed nature is under continuous attack from global regulatory agencies.

Creating the next 'iPhone-level' new category is the only way to break the curse, but this has been an unresolved ultimate question since the Cook era. The Vision Pro showcases the empire's technological ambition and engineering strength, but it is more like a reconnaissance ship sent to the future. Whether it can discover new continents and lead the main fleet is far from certain.

Ternus's trial lies in the fact that he must simultaneously become an expert in two areas: he must be an extreme 'efficiency expert,' squeezing ultimate profits in the red ocean, and he must also be a visionary 'explorer,' finding that unopened billion-dollar growth door for Apple in the uncertain blue ocean.

Secondly, there is the 'disintegration and reconstruction of rules.'

During the Cook era, Apple was not just a player but, to a considerable extent, the rule maker of its own ecosystem. Through the closed garden of software and hardware integration, it enjoyed unparalleled control over user experience and commercial profits.

However, the outside world is rebelling against this control. The sideloading door forced open by the EU's Digital Markets Act is not just adding a functional option; it is more like a wedge that is prying open the foundation stone on which Apple's business model relies—the walled garden.

At the same time, walking on the tightrope of geopolitics, Apple's dance steps must become increasingly cautious, requiring the successor to be not just a business leader but also possess the wisdom and resilience of a diplomat.

Ultimately, all challenges converge on one point: the battle for discourse in the age of artificial intelligence.

This is perhaps the decisive battleground for Ternus's fate. His hardware genes are both Apple's greatest asset in this battle and may become its deepest constraint.

The 'device-side AI' path that Apple is betting on is an idealized but technically perilous road. It promises privacy, immediacy, and personalization, but it also means that all intelligence must be compressed into the chips within a few square inches, limited by the physical laws of batteries.

Ternus needs to prove that the Apple under his leadership can not only build the fastest hardware for running AI but also enable this 'local intelligence' to generate 'killer experiences' that can disrupt user habits and create entirely new demands.

He faces not just rivals but also time—Microsoft and Google are rapidly iterating and defining the capability boundaries of AI with the boundless computing power of cloud services. Can Apple's 'perfectionist' hardware cycle keep up with the crazy pace of AI's 'agile iteration'? This is a question that is difficult to judge in the short term.

Therefore, Ternus's trial is essentially about how to make a perfect system born for 'certainty' learn to navigate or even lead in the torrent of 'uncertainty.'

He does not need to become the second Cook, nor does he need to play the second Jobs. What he needs to do is complete a sublimation from a 'hardware philosopher' to a 'strategic architect,' elevating his profound understanding of silicon crystals and metals into a grand vision of future human-machine symbiosis.

He inherits an empire for which Cook has laid the most solid foundation; now, it is his turn to build on this foundation a new palace that can withstand the AI storm and look forward to the next decade.

05 The Skyscraper on the Palace

Apple's board's choice of Ternus is essentially a 'reinforced bet' on past successful paths.

It conveys the message that the board believes the 'integrated software and hardware' model perfected and deepened by Cook remains effective and even more valuable in the AI era. They expect Ternus to continue this core advantage while making more aggressive and successful breakthroughs in device-side AI with his hardware expertise.

However, the market seems to be sending a different signal: in today's world where AI technology iterates on a weekly basis, relying too much on the long-cycle hardware development rhythm may cause Apple to miss opportunities to define new platforms. Integrating AI capabilities deeply into cloud services and operating system levels and opening them up as platforms is the path currently taken by leaders.

Tim Cook's historical merit lies in proving that Apple can not only survive but also achieve unprecedented commercial success after losing Jobs. He has built a powerful, stable system capable of continuously generating huge cash flows.

Regardless of whether Ternus becomes his successor, the new leader will face a far more intricate mission: demonstrating that the ecosystem established by Cook is not only capable of safeguarding Apple's position but also of proactively evolving and setting the pace amidst the disruptive technological transformation driven by AI.

Apple in the post-Cook era does not have to rebuild everything from the ground up. Instead, it is akin to constructing a cutting-edge skyscraper, potentially with a dramatically different architectural style, atop a meticulously crafted and splendid palace, adapting it to the climate of the new era.

This leadership transition represents more than just a change at the helm of a company; it is a definitive test for the future trajectory of the tech industry—determining whether device-centric approaches will experience a resurgence or if cloud intelligence will reign supreme.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the technological power landscape, and Apple is opting to shape its role using the tools it knows best. The ultimate outcome of this endeavor will profoundly influence the global tech industry's configuration over the next decade.