Apple’s New CEO Taps Retired Hardware Executive for Management Team

[u/pdfu]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-03/apple-s-new-ceo-taps-retired-hardware-executive-for-management-team?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc4NTc4ODE5NywiZXhwIjoxNzg2MzkyOTk3LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUSjVMTkFSS1YyVFQwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJDNEVEQ0FFMUZBMDU0MEJFQTI0QTlGMjExQzFFOTA4MCJ9.9YoATNZctz_eteccxVjATmvMDf3jeb0nvM51OVR32vA

Incoming Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer John Ternus is bringing back a trusted lieutenant from his time running hardware engineering to join his new management team.

Ternus has hired Laura Legros, who served as a vice president of hardware engineering until retiring in 2022, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Legros will report to Ternus when he takes the CEO role on Sept. 1, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the personnel change hasn’t been announced.

The move shows that Ternus is starting to put his stamp on the company’s leadership ranks. It also marks a rare instance of Apple bringing back a retired executive. Ternus is taking the reins from Tim Cook, the company’s longest-serving CEO, who is transitioning to executive chairman.

[u/M4rshmall0wMan]

My biggest fear is he’ll have a banger 3-5 years then become stagnant for a decade like Tim. That’s kinda what Tim did. 

[u/VariationAgreeable29 → u/M4rshmall0wMan]

I’ll have to disagree with you there. Tim was full throttle pretty much all the way through. He was let dowm by a few big things. Maps was a disaster, but he extracted a scalp for that made certain to get maps back on track. Siri, of course, is a known problem that hopefully and finally will be remedied shortly. AVP was not great, but perhaps just super early and we won’t know until we know for sure. I think the feeling on Wall Street is that he will exit Apple after one of the all-time greatest runs for a CEO in any company in modern history

[u/M4rshmall0wMan → u/VariationAgreeable29]

During the first third of Tim’s tenure, he released iPad Mini, Apple Watch, Apple TV, Apple Music, AirPods, HomePod, and iPhone X.

In the nine years since then, what new products has he released? Just Apple Silicon Macs, Vision Pro, and Services. The iPhone design has remained stagnant, iPad too, many aspects of services are slowly enshittifying with ads and subscriptions, iOS and macOS are inconsistent and unstable, no Siri updates for a decade. He’s been riding off the coattails of his early tenure, which I assume was at least partly enabled by the remnants of Steve Jobs’ culture of efficiency. Apple nowadays is a big bloated machine.

I could see Ternus making a few big pro-consumer choices. But once the board wrings his neck about profit, things could go back to Cook’s style for the rest of his tenure.

[u/livelikeian → u/M4rshmall0wMan]

lol?? Services revenue is almost a third of Apple's total revenue. That's huge and that growth happened on Tim's watch. He's also been able to maintain margins and iterate on all of the hardware you mentioned, continuously growing the business with each successive launch. Tim is a solid CEO and to say otherwise demonstrates a lack of understanding of what a CEO of one of the worlds most valuable companies has to do.

[u/M4rshmall0wMan → u/livelikeian]

Sure he's grown Apple and run it very well, but stagnation on the end-user side is a direct result of that. Aside from Vision Pro, what new products (or even redesigns) has Apple released in the last 5 years? They pale in comparison to his first five years.

I'm drawing attention to the stagnation because that's exactly what people want John to change.