Just weeks into the job, Apple’s new chief executive is already trying to shake the company out of its long-running rhythm. John Ternus, the longtime hardware engineering chief who succeeded Tim Cook on September 1st, is pushing Apple to move faster, launch more often, strip out layers of management, and put engineers closer to the top of the organization.
That account comes from Bloomberg News’ Mark Gurman, who reports that Ternus, a product person, has begun discussing an overhaul internally: accelerate product development, broaden the device lineup, and build a leaner company with a sharper engineering focus after operations manager Cook’s 15-year iterative slog.
The first visible change is the calendar. Apple has long clustered its biggest announcements around spring and fall. Ternus has told colleagues the company needs to introduce products more quickly and become more experimental if it is going to stay competitive. The idea is not an instant rewrite of how Apple designs hardware — those cycles are deeply established — but a shift toward more frequent releases throughout the year rather than two big seasonal waves.
The product pipeline already points that way. After the recent foldable iPhone Duo launch, work is underway on additional hardware next year, including camera-equipped AirPods, smart glasses, and a redesigned iPhone tied to the device’s 20th anniversary, along with refreshes such as a new HomePod mini, iPad mini, and Apple TV.
The organizational piece is more immediate. Ternus wants fewer middle-management layers between working engineers and senior executives. Over the past two weeks, Apple’s hardware engineering group has dismissed a number of engineering program managers — the people who for decades have managed timelines and coordinated work across teams. The cuts reached several program managers and about half a dozen directors, one of Apple’s most senior employee ranks. Those affected were given a short window to find other jobs inside the company; anyone who does not will be laid off later this year.
Smaller cuts have already hit other groups, and some early-stage projects judged less essential have been scaled back or canceled, including work in Siri, Vision Pro, and AI-related software engineering. Internally, the mood is described as more hands-on and hectic, with product managers being pressed to deliver more devices, more often, on shorter timelines.
None of this is a sudden conversion. At 51, Ternus has argued for a leaner Apple for years. While running hardware engineering, he told employees at an all-hands meeting that the company should hire fewer people, demand more from the engineers it already has, and cut organizational bloat. He once showed a slide of annual headcount growth and said Apple should be accomplishing more with fewer employees.
Cost-cutting is part of the same brief. Apple considered laying off about 5,000 AppleCare customer-service workers over the summer on the theory that AI agents could take over phone and web support; those plans were put on hold. Even so, employees in several divisions expect more reductions later this year or early next, even as some 2027 planning still assumes higher budgets and headcount. A smaller cultural signal: some teams were told they could not bring plus-ones to upcoming holiday parties for the first time in years.
Ternus is not only looking at expenses. With services chief Eddy Cue and CFO Kevan Parekh, he has discussed new services and ways to pull more revenue from products and offerings Apple already sells. More frequent hardware launches, the thinking goes, would also widen the base of customers who then buy subscriptions and other services.
The contrast with the Cook years is intentional. Cook built an operational giant and, via financial engineering(massive buybacks) a roughly $5 trillion company. Ternus, a 25-year Apple veteran who oversaw hardware across iPhone, Mac, Watch, iPad, and AirPods and helped drive Apple silicon, is betting that an engineering-first, less layered company can ship more ambitious products without waiting for the next September event. Cook remains executive chairman and a government-relations presence; how far the two men stay aligned on strategy will be one of the tests of the foreseeable future.
For now, the message from the new CEO is blunt: fewer layers, more products, tighter teams, and less patience for the old cadence. Apple is being told to get back to work.
MacDailyNews Take: Better late than never!
You know, some people get upset when we point out that Tim Cook is a boring, reactive caretaker who’s not really the best person to be running Apple today or for at least the past several years.
Operations manager Cook should have been a 3-5 year stopgap after Steve Jobs’ untimely passing, running the iteration playbook, providing continuity for the company while it found a real CEO. Instead, he hung on — and keeps hanging on — well past his sell-by date.
Sigh.
You can be upset with us for having the temerity to call it like we see it, but the fact remains that Apple would be doing significantly better today with a visionary who’d have seen AI on the horizon, who’d have recognized the intrinsic importance of Siri and therefore invested in it instead of criminally neglecting it, and who wouldn’t have squandered the company’s gigantic leads in things like personal assistants and podcasting. – MacDailyNews, August 22, 2024
Apple needed new blood years ago, but the old blood simply won’t let go. – MacDailyNews, January 22, 2025
See also: Steve Jobs never meant for Tim Cook to still be Apple’s CEO in 2025 – MacDailyNews, July 9, 2025
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