Limitless Podcast - BREAKING: Apple Announces New CEO John Ternus, VP Hardware

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

Wow. It's finally happening. Tim Cook is resigning as Apple CEO after 15 transformative years, during which the company experienced a 2,000% stock increase and reached a $4 trillion market cap. We examine the challenges Apple faces in the AI sector and the potential of new CEO John Ternus to revitalize hardware innovation. With Cook's departure highlighting a shift in leadership, we reflect on his legacy and the exciting possibilities for upcoming AI-driven products.------🌌 LIMITLESS HQ ⬇️NEWSLETTER:    https://limitlessft.substack.com/FOLLOW ON X:   https://x.com/LimitlessFTSPOTIFY:             https://open.spotify.com/show/5oV29YUL8AzzwXkxEXlRMQAPPLE:                 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/limitless-podcast/id1813210890RSS FEED:           https://limitlessft.substack.com/------TIMESTAMPS0:00 Tim Cook Steps Down1:10 The AI Challenge2:28 Meet John Ternus6:44 Apple's Biggest Challenges12:29 Apple's $1 Billion Deal13:47 The Hardware Advantage17:55 Potential New AI Devices20:52 Transitioning Leadership21:26 Legacy------RESOURCESJosh: https://x.com/JoshKaleEjaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213------Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Yesterday, the most successful CEO in the history of technology announced that he's stepping down. Tim Cook, 15 years at Apple, saw the stock go up 2,000 percent, introduced the Apple Iwatch, the airport, and also led Apple to be the first $4 trillion company, announced that he's resigning. On paper, he's the greatest operator CEO on Earth. So why did he resign? It's because he can solve the one biggest problem that mattered to Apple, the AI race. Apple is losing pretty badly. trillion dollar company in the Mac 7 that is paying a competitor, Google, $1 billion just to license their AI model because they couldn't build their own. Their chief AI officer quit.

Johnny Ive, the head of their design firm left to join OpenAI, and there's a host of other failures. But the new guy that they picked, John Turner's 51-year-old hardware expert, he has over 25 years experience engineering all of Apple's devices, is the new guy to take the helm. And he might be the answer to building the next device that Apple uses to report. place the iPhone. I think that Tim Cook's replacement is simultaneously an admission of Apple's failure to win the AI race, but also the key to them winning the next stage. Yeah, well, moment for Tim Cook's tenure because, oh my God, what a run he's had. This is a 20 times gain on Apple stock since he took control of the company 15 years ago. For reference, when Tim Cook became CEO of Apple,

Apple was releasing the iPhone 4. Some of you listening may not even be old enough to remember that. It was a long time ago. We went from the iPhone 4 to the 17 Pro, which we are now at now. And over that time, Tim Cook has really just done an unbelievable job on stewarding the ship of Apple fovers into a place where it is profitable, it is sustainable, and it is larger. Now, if we compare the two 10 years, Steve Jobs took it from zero to 350 billion. Tim Cook took it from 350 billion to 3.7 trillion. One is a 14,000 percent gain. But the other is 1,000 percent in a market that is much more difficult.

to kind of navigate through. And the reason is because Tim Cook is a good operator. He's great at running businesses, where Steve Jobs was the visionary, who was great at creating products. And I think what we see with the Apple story today and their decision to move from over to John Turnus is a swing of the pendulum back to where we were. Tim Cook created a huge services business. That's what we have Apple TV for. ICloud became really large. Business that actually generates a lot of cash came from him. a lot of the products remain mostly unchanged. I mean, if you look at this lineup of things that came from Tim Cook, we have air tags, Apple Watch, AirPods, the Mac Studio,

mostly iterations on previous products, not a whole lot of net new things. In fact, Division Pro was actually Steve's last great idea. So that finally came to life a long time ago. But the services industry in the top rate of this graphic that we're seeing is the big win for Tim. And it's this really exciting change in one of the world's most valuable companies, starting with this new guy, John Turnus. Yeah, so who is this Turnus guy?

Because it's not exactly a name that's been floated around the technology headlines. He's kind of been like living in the VP exec shadows. Well, he is the hardware expert and the guy behind the engineering of every single Apple device that you have seen, heard or used yourself over the last 25 years. But he was also working in hardware before that. He has over 30 years experience. He was early on the VR trend, which is why Apple was so enthusiastic to hire him. So he knows the depths of every single device, how it's built, and why it was built in that

particular way. Every device that you use has his art or his stamp on it. But John Tennis is an impressive guy for a few other reasons as well. There was a recent interview that I watched with him on where people would describe him as a good replacement for Tim Cook because he's very likable but also kind of fierce behind the shadows. And the reason why that's good is he inspires a lot of loyalty in the teams that he works with. And he's the bet from the exec board to be the man that leads Apple into the next era of devices.

And you might have seen rumors about three new Apple AI devices that they're going to announce later this year. We'll get more on that later. But Turnus will be the man that is engineering behind that. And the reason why it's important and I think significant that Turner is stepping up right now at this particular point. It's not a coincidence is because Apple knows that, in my opinion, the iPhone is stretched, We've had like a million different versions, and the services businesses worked so well for Apple right now, but they need a new model, a new approach. And Apple's moat has always been hardware. It's not just software. It's because everyone has one of these or an Apple Watcher, a suite of different devices. And Ternus needs to figure out will be the answer to what the AI device of the next generation or next couple of generations is going to be. This guy rocks. I think we're going back to the hardware roots of Apple. If you have been a owner of Apple stock, you love Tim Cook. If you have been a, a lover of the Apple hardware products, you have probably, you felt there's a lot left to be desired.

And I think John is going to fill that desire as it relates to the products, just through his hardware nature. I mean, he is a hardware guy through and through. He's only had two jobs in his entire career. One was building VR headsets. One was at Apple, where he has remained for the last 25 years of time. So he's really a guy that started from the bottom, worked his way to the top, and is now appointed as the hardware CEO of one of the largest companies in the world.

Can I just point something out, Josh? I just pulled up his LinkedIn. Yesterday, this did not have a profile picture, and everyone kind of like exposed him for that on social media. It looks like since he's updated it. But yeah, like he only has two job postings in his experience. Look, VP and engineer. That's it. Yeah.

And since joining in 2001, I mean, his first product he ever launched was the Apple Cinema display. Most people probably don't even remember that. But also since then, he is responsible for a laundry list. of items, including but not limited to the iPad, every AirPods generation, the redesigned MacBook Pro, the redesigned IMac Pro, all of the hardware for iPhone over the last six years. Anything that is hardware and that is physical that you've touched over the last five, six years, he has been the one that has shepherded it and led that forward. It's to be noted that there are changes that have been happening already.

We have the MacBook Neo, which we never had before, which is a low-cost laptop that you can go and buy for $600. We have the iPhone fold coming later this year. That is a drastic pivot from anything that the iPhone has ever done. So we're already starting to see some of the risks that they're willing to take on the hardware front. And that's just the beginning. I assume this extends out to the AI hardware two that there are rumors of, which we'll get into. But he is the hardware guy through and through.

And I'm just so excited for this new paradigm, this new pendulum swing back from the business to the product. I want to play devil's advocate with you for a second, Josh. He's an amazing hardware guy. But as you probably know, like the CEO position requires so many other skills, right? You need to be operational and you need to understand every single core part of the business. That's why Tim Cook came in and he was the right guy at the right time, right? He built out the services business because he saw that we had the hardware mode. We need to like tack on products on top of that.

I don't know if John Ternis has proved himself in his history or tenure at Apple so far as to whether he can do that. He's definitely the hardware expert, but it looks like he's going to be hiring a really strong team around him, right? Turn as a CEO and then you got Sruji as the chief hardware officer? Yeah. So I think this was the board that did this, who just kind of did some reshuffling of all the positions of Apple. The most noteworthy is Johnny Srujee, which is the name most people probably haven't heard of. It has been promoted to Apple's chief hardware officer while John goes up to become the CEO. Now, Johnny, not to be confused with John, if you've ever watched the presentations of Apple events,

he's the guy that's down in the lab where he's talking about chips and processors and all of that stuff. He's the guy that is responsible with John Turnus for building probably the best hardware that Apple has built in the last decade, the M-series chips. Those are incredible. He is the chip guy. He is the lead architect of those chips. And that's not limited to the M-series chip. That's A-series chips that are in your iPhones. That is the wireless modems.

That is the wireless connectivity. Any sort of chip responsible for your iPhone getting incrementally better, year. He is responsible for this. And when I think about the best parts about Apple over the last five years, and I track down the source of where they came from, a lot of that comes from John and Johnny. And it's a really exciting new dynamic where there is now this All-Star cast who has built pretty incredible things at the helm and with the ability to make the decision to continue to push the envelope as it relates to hardware. And at the end of the day, like Apple really is the sum of its products. And when its products are excellent, the company does well. And I'm really hoping.

that this will usher in that new paradigm of hardware in the AI era. I mean, we've already seen this with how popular Mac minis are and Mac studios are, and I'm sure they won't be scared to lean into that even more in these next generations of products and chips. Yeah, and it's not just a fad either, right? These, like, chips and hardware mode that Apple has really puts them ahead of the competition in a very meaningful way. So, for example, like, with these M1 chips, we recorded this on a previous episode, it is the only hardware or consumer-facing hardware alone that allows you to run frontier AI models locally on your device. And what that unlocks is, you know, it can't be understated. You can run AI models personally on your own data without

exposing it to, you know, anyone. It's cheaper, it's quicker and overall quite better. And Apple over the last couple of years has really been leaning into locally, privately run AI models. They're going to do something similar with Siri where they privately inference and train off of Google's model and with that $1 billion deal, which we're about to get to. But the point is Apple's hardware is superior, because of people like Ternus and Sruji and the entire team and the exec team recognizes that. Another thing that I forgot to mention earlier is Ternus seems to be like the youngest board member of Apple. Like typically it ranges between like 55 to like 65 and ahead. He's 50 years old, 51 years old.

So he's going to be the youngest. It's some fresh young blood. But he has a really good understanding and instinct as to what Apple wants. He's he's observed and watched him cook build up the services business. He also observed Steve Jobs and knows of his tenure. So I kind of like to think of him as like the hybrid of both of these people. So I'm getting really bullish about it. There's some unknown lore that happens around these transitions that I'm not sure everyone's familiar with.

In the case of Tim Cook, when Steve Jobs asked him to be CEO and Tim found out that Steve was sick, he actually offered to donate a portion of his liver to Steve when he found out that he had pancreatic cancer because they had the same blood type, which I found really interesting. There was this true unrelenting commitment to, I guess, at that time, just helping a friend. Steve didn't accept it, but it's like that it's a fun story that not a lot of people know that shows the level of, I guess, like, gratitude and just, I don't know, teamwork that they have together.

What do you think? What do you think? Did he make a blood sacrifice? Perhaps an organ, like some blood, maybe he's Tim's blood, baby. We're unsure. but it is interesting. It's just funny. It's just to know some of the backstory in the lore.

The point is, I guess, like, is, his loyalty is pretty fierce at Apple, and, you know, you've got each other's back, and you kind of want collectively for everyone to win. In fact, we have the community letter from Tim here, which basically announced that he's stepping down, and he goes on to say, John cares so much about who we are at Apple, what we do at Apple, who we reach at Apple,

and he has the heart and characters to lead with extraordinary integrity, and he goes on to explain why exactly John is the perfect fit over, like, two entire paragraph. So there's a lot of camaraderie around Apple, but also they're not banding together for no reason, right? They're not making these decisions for no reason, Josh. There's been a series of what I would personally describe as failures or maybe unintentional successes,

and I'll explain that a little later, for Apple within the AI race. Now, it's the most important technology revolution, and they've just watched their competitors completely drive by them. Their competitors have built up now Frontier world-leading models. They tried to broker a deal early on with Anthropic. Anthropics said no. So Apple was kind of like shot in the foot.

They lost their AI chief. They lost Johnny I, the design guy. So any possible team that they could have used to build a frontier AI model, they kind of like lost them or bled them throughout the last couple of years. And so the question remains is, what is Apple's move next? One of the major announcements that gave us a bit of signal into this was, I believe this was like last year, Apple announced that they're striking a $1 billion deal with Google, specifically to license their Gemini model.

And the reason why they're doing this is they're going to feed that Gemini model into their personal assistant known as Siri. By the way, for those of you who use Apple who don't know what Siri is, it's that assistant that you just turned off as soon as you got the Apple device because it was so, so bad.

And since then, Apple has been announcing new AI features for Siri that will make it smart and more intuitive and do things for you on your own devices. Since then, they've been delaying it. It's over like, what's at two and a half years now and they delayed it again. We're meant to hear an announcement.

on the new Siri later this year. But the point is they're plugging in competitors, they're paying competitors for the privilege of getting access to AI, which leaves them quite vulnerable, you would think. But now that I kind of reframe this structure, I actually think it might be an advantage for Apple and specifically John Turner's right now

because he realized, or we, or rather I realized, you don't need to own the model layer. You can own the distribution layer. And the only way that you do that is knowing that every human will eventually need a device. Open AI is currently working on their own device. But guess who has 3 billion active devices live right now that they can turn on AI features tomorrow? Apple.

So it sounds like a genius move, and I think John Turner is going to focus on this. Yeah, it's the unique advantage of Apple. They have the hardware lock in. They have all of the best products in the world. They have them distributed to hundreds of millions of people in the world. And thanks to the work of Johnny, who is the chip master, they're all capable of running pretty solid models locally on device. And there was this huge slip up that happened at WWDC two years ago where they announced Apple Intelligence. and it was just a complete and utter failure.

But that isn't to say that they're out of the race by any means because they own the most difficult stack of this layer of this stack being the hardware. When you look at all the other frontier AI labs, nobody has the capability of manufacturing great hardware at scale. And you mentioned Johnny I, he's working with Open AI. He left Apple far before that to start love from. But then they acquired his company and now he's working with them. He is going to design the thing,

but he's not the guy who's going to get that manufactured at scale. And as we look at these charts in as it relates to progress in AI, they are vertical lines. They're moving so quickly. But the limiting factor, like we always mentioned, is the physical manifestation of that. It's moving around the atoms in the world to build the products that get into people's hands that can actually use it. And it's incredibly difficult. And Apple is coming from the harder side of the spectrum. If you view it as a spectrum on software to hardware, what's more effective and what's harder to use? Well, software has a lot more leverage, but it's a lot easier to make an iterate on, and that's why we see every company copying everyone else.

It's the hardware part that's difficult. We see it with the data centers, how difficult to just roll that out. And then we see it with the hardware, how difficult it is to make incredible products like the iPhone. There's no one else who's done it like that. And that is a huge advantage that John is going to certainly lean into and give them that edge when it comes to edge compute.

Now, will they be able to roll out their own proprietary versions that are good? We don't know. I think they're hedging that in a very smart way with Google and using Gem and I locally on device. but if they do figure it out, if they do roll out what they promised Apple Intelligence and Siri were to be at this year's WWDC in June, then I think we have something really exciting. And you'll note that the transition period for John from Tim happens in September. So there's still a six-month window or so in which Tim Cook is going to be CEO and there's this

transition period. And only once the new iPhone release comes along in September, will John take the stage for that event and become the proper CEO. So we're in the transition period. I expect to see a very strong pivot towards hardware. And in a really exciting way, man, I would love to get some good new products. Yeah, same.

And if we choose to believe the main leaker of Apple news, Mark German, he posted a few months ago that Apple's ramping up to work on a trio of AI wearable, specifically new smart glasses and AirPods with cameras on them, and a pendant that you can wear around your neck or leave kind of like, ambiently around your house and it can pick up information. Of course, the point of these three devices is to see what you see, hear what you hear, and also observe what you observe and feed all of this data presumably into an AI model, I'm guessing in this case, Chairman and I, a proprietary version of it,

and then recursively use that to build a smarter personal assistant called Siri that can not only inform you of different things, but predict things that you want and also do things for you. plugged into every single app that you own on your iPhone or device, seamlessly connect all context. It's a really exciting vision. It is very hard to pull off that vision. You see OpenAI has been delaying a lot of their device releases. I think their current puck-like device has been pushed back until early next year because of supply chain issues. But that's Apple's advantage. They already have dominance or monopoly on consumer hardware supply chains. In fact, there was a story

recently where apparently they've been buying up all the memory available, DRAM, just so that they can make sure that they can keep putting out their products on the shelf. So, for example, MacBook Neo, it sold out. They were able to release 10 million more units for people to buy. Whereas Microsoft had to pull products from the shelves just because Apple had bought up all the memory, and so it was pricing it too hard for consumers to, for Microsoft to sell to their consumers. So the point is, Apple has the scale that no other company does to build the winning device product. Now, the counter to this is Apple is typically waited for the product to form itself.

Like, they waited for the cell phone to be a thing. And then they were like, you know what, I'm going to build the best cell phone. This hasn't been the case just here. We haven't seen a new groundbreaking AI device just yet. So they might have to be the frontier here. And Apple hasn't done that before, unless I'm wrong. So I'm excited to see what happens. And they don't even necessarily need a dedicated hardware device for AI. The iPhone is very sufficient for now. And when you, think about like, I was just thinking as you're talking about this, Claude Mythos, the new Anthropic model, that's going to be compressed down to the size that can run on a mobile device

in the next 12 to 18 months. And when you're able to compress models that intelligent down to a size that can run locally on your laptop or your iPhone, is that enough? Like, I think that probably is, where the iPhone 20, which is their 28th year anniversary, if it's capable of running a mythos level model, locally on device, how much more do you really need? And I think that's like a good question to ask

as it relates to their competitors who are spending so much money on this frontier intelligence, because the average person does not need more than that. And if it can accomplish and achieve all the tasks, running on your local suite of devices that you know and love, that's a huge advantage that no one else really has. Yeah, I mean, that's the bet that mess is taking, right? They released their new model, what's it, two weeks ago called MuseSpark,

and it wasn't like a frontier model on like coding or reasoning versus Anthroping and Open AI. it kind of sucked, but it was really good at data-driven actions. And guess what meta has a lot of data? So they, like, built a model specifically for their users of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or whatever to build specific features that people actually care about. You don't actually need a huge model or the biggest model. You just need a model that works for your users and can unlock new use cases for you. And Apple's probably going to do the same thing. I think they'll probably play in both parks, to be honest. That's my guess. Yeah. Yeah, the problem is, though, is like, Metis hardware

sucks. So they have no actual hardware for it. No one has hardware. And that's the hard thing about it is like hardware is really hard. And people are building the software stack, but have no place to put it. They don't have consumers that are holding their devices in their hands. They're currently holding Apple devices. We're talking to you on a MacBook. We're calling our friends on an iPhone. And Apple owns that hardware stack. And oh my gosh, they have a really good opportunity and they have the cash balance because Tim Cook has handed off, what, $150 billion in cash to John to go and do what he pleases with it. So it's a really exciting paradigm shift to go from the Steve Jobs innovative era, visionary era, kind of a jerk, to Tim Cook being the pacifist who has generated a tremendous

amount of money just by turning it into a great business. Back to John Turnus, we're unsure of the sentiment. We don't know if he's, he seems like a nice guy, but back to John, who is a product guy who is kind of hell-bent on building great hardware for this next generation of intelligence. And I I think it's really exciting. Apple's in a really good position now. And it should be an interesting year to see how this transition goes. So I believe that's it for the episode. That is the complete end-to-end breakdown of Tim Cook's reign and the new guy, John Turner's coming in. I personally think this is a very good move for Apple and I'm excited to see what they build. Obviously, it's going to hurt. It's going to suck. There'll be a lot of speculation as to whether

John Thomas is the right guy for the job. We will find out after September, I guess, and I'm sure he'll be working closely with Tim Cook until then. But unless there's anything else, Josh, any final thoughts? I would encourage everybody to go and read the letter that Tim Cook wrote to the Apple community. It was so great. It made me emotional. It was really well written. And it's, I think it does a great job of summarizing the journey that he's had with the company and the changes and the impact that it's had on the world. And it was really heartwarming. So if you do anything today, go read the community letter from Tim. It'll make you feel good about, about a company like Apple existing and the journey that they've been on with all of us participating in it. So that is

the only ask for the day. Other than that, thank you for watching. We got a lot more coming this week. There's a lot of good, good topics. Open AI has a presentation coming out. There's a lot of new news that's going to be coming down the line this week. So we will be here to cover it all, as always. Yeah, so thanks everyone for listening. Whatever platform that you're on, by the way, the daily reminder, it helps us out massively. If you aren't subscribed to click that subscribe button, we'll give us a rating or leave us a comment. It helps us out. It gives us feedback as to what kind of content you guys enjoy. We know that there's a lot of you, so welcome.

And yeah, we'll see you on the next episode, probably tomorrow, probably about Open AI. See you soon.