Apple’s John Ternus Era Begins ⇥ nytimes.com

Kalley Huang, New York Times (gift link)

John Ternus became Apple’s chief executive on Tuesday, succeeding Tim Cook, the company’s leader for the last 15 years. The long-anticipated handoff, Mr. Cook has said, will be “perfectly smooth.”

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This summer, Apple hired Nate Gatten from American Airlines to lead government affairs, replacing Kate Adams, who will retire this year. Laura Legros, a hardware engineering vice president and deputy of Mr. Ternus’s before retiring from Apple in 2022, has rejoined the company, three people familiar with her hiring said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Ms. Legros, who reports to Mr. Ternus, could act as his adviser and emissary to various parts of the company, the three people said.

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

Apple’s Phil Schiller is no longer going to run the App Store or oversee product events, reports Bloomberg. Schiller isn’t leaving Apple, but he is narrowing his responsibilities and working on unspecified projects.

Employees at Apple told Bloomberg that 66-year-old Schiller appears to be taking another step toward retirement.

Cook and Ternus each sent pretty anodyne company-wide memos about the transition. Cook’s tenure was the longest of any CEO in Apple’s history and he was the one who turned it from a successful company into a global behemoth.

The thing I have liked about Apple — one of the things that made me a longtime customer and someone who writes about the company — is that it has historically been a very simple kind of business: it designs products and sells them to people, mostly. Every one of its peers is a more complicated business. They often balance the needs of massive institutional and government customers, advertisers, or two-sided marketplaces.

That change began in the latter years of Jobs’ tenure and accelerated under Cook. Most software, including operating systems, was accounted for as part of device purchases, and was turned into a software-as-a-service model. Its subscription-based business became a revenue growth centre, which was important for Wall Street because it was a way to turn the company’s successful but inconsistent device sales into predictable money printers. And there are now ads and upsells throughout the operating systems, which are shown to all users regardless of how much other money they have already given Apple.

Ternus has inherited that Apple. Regardless of how much he gives off the vibe of a cool Californian — by way of Philadelphia — who just cares about the best stuff, he is also selling ad space and making sure more people upgrade to Apple One.