John Ternus takes Apple’s CEO chair this week, and Mark Gurman writes in Sunday’s Power On newsletter for Bloomberg that one of his biggest challenges will be remaking a management team that has steered the company’s culture for decades, the same Jobs-era bench Tim Cook largely kept intact after he took over 15 years ago.
When Cook inherited that group, it was fiercely loyal to Steve Jobs and mostly still in the middle of their careers, and even though people wondered how an operations guy would follow a product visionary, Cook kept the vast majority of those top leaders in place, including hardware engineering chief Bob Mansfield, who tried to retire in 2012 and was persuaded to stay in various roles until around 2020, and Jony Ive, who Cook kept in a full-time seat for years after the handoff.
Gurman says Apple’s heads of retail, marketing, and services have each been at the company around four decades, and the newsletter walks through who is likely to replace them in the coming years as Ternus starts making the table his own, with services chief Eddy Cue in the photo that ran with the column alongside Cook and Ternus.
Cook never really tore up the room he walked into, which is why the next shake-up sits with Ternus now that the job is actually his, only days before he has to walk on stage at Apple’s September 9 event and sell the foldable iPhone he helped engineer.
The incoming chief already told staff Apple is about to change the world again, and a sharper product focus is the public pitch, but Gurman’s point is more practical because the people who have defined Apple’s culture for decades will not all still be in those chairs for the whole Ternus era.
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