Stephanie Flanders

overseeing the design teams it's a new sign that turnus is a leading contender to take over for ceo tim cook one day all according to our sources and the guy that broke the story blue most mark german is here introduce us to mr turnus what is your reporting tell us about his new workload and also that that signal that he's climbing the ranks here

John Ternes has been Apple's senior VP of hardware engineering since 2021.

That means he runs all hardware development for essentially every Apple product.

He's in charge of the iPhone, in charge of the iPad, in charge of the Mac, now in charge of the Apple Watch.

And he's been elevated to expand his role this year a couple times, taking, like I said, full oversight of the Apple Watch, but also taking charge of Apple's AI robotics teams.

Now, very recently, Tim Cook put him in charge of overseeing Apple's design teams for both hardware and software.

Now, design is the look and feel of the products, what the interface looks like, what the icons look like, how the software works.

Industrial design are things like the shapes of the devices, the colors, the weight and the feel.

It goes well beyond the engineering of making everything work.

And like you said, design is one of the most critical and prestigious functions at Apple.

It's really only been run by the most senior executives in the company's history, people like Johnny Ive, Steve Jobs himself, Tim Cook himself, and the COO Jeff Williams, who retired a few months ago.

months ago.

Now John Ternes adds to that list and it's yet another strong indicator that he's being groomed for a larger role and is at the very top of the shortlist of frontrunners of potential Tim Cook successors at one point when Cook ultimately does decide to retire.

Mark, what's interesting is how subtly this was done.

And I'm sure that's because they don't want to aggravate too much the investor base, but also those also in the running.

Talk about who else we could see being lined up in some way.

This is a very strange setup, organizationally.

The design teams are overseen by Ternus, but on paper, they report to CEO Tim Cook.

Various reasons why you'd wanna do that.

Apple previously announced that Cook would be running the design team, so you don't wanna take that away from him publicly.