The king is dead, long live the king 🍎

So it finally happened: Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple's CEO after 15 years. And as was rumored, John Ternus is replacing him.

I'm sure the "Applesphere" will be filled with absolutely everyone posting their take on this for the next few days… and I don't really have that many smart things to say, I'm not really an "Apple blogger". But I felt like I should still say something, having been in this community of Mac/iOS devs since around 2008-09, part of it working on it full time. And after all, that "mac" in my handle means something…

I didn't manage to (virtually) get to know Steve Jobs as well as I know many other people did, since I only really got interested in Apple things around 2007, so about 4 years before his death. But still, I knew he was the person who made Apple the company it was, and that he would be very hard if not impossible to replace. I was a bit worried if the company I felt a strong connection to both as a user and as a developer would be able to stay as cool, fun and innovative as it was, if it won't go to crap and become another boring American corporation. But I had a lot of hope that things would turn out just fine.

And I think in his first years as CEO they have. He brought the iPhone and the Mac through several different generations of products, massively increasing the number of people who used them. He turned the company into a well designed machine for planning, designing, producing and distributing any kind of hardware in enormous numbers, as optimally as physically possible. Tim Cook's Apple launched Apple Watch, Retina Macs, FaceID & OLED iPhones, Swift, SwiftUI, visionOS, Apple Silicon chips and ARM-based macOS, and many other interesting things. The company itself is surely doing extremely well financially.

But I feel like somewhere along the way, some good parts of the old Apple have been lost, and in the second half of the Cook period, more and more things have started to go in a wrong direction:

I don't want to sound too negative. I'm still a fan of Apple OSes and hardware, I love my thin and light ARM MacBook Air and my Mac Studio (less so the iPhone that I can't easily upgrade, because every current model is way too large). I'm pretty happy with my current macOS (Sequoia), with the ecosystem of first and third-party Mac and iOS apps I use, with iCloud and other system APIs they're built on. I'm not even close to seriously considering switching to Linux, Windows or Android. I know I will buy another Mac and another iPhone again in a couple of years and will probably be very happy with it. I still have fun building the occasional iOS or Mac app from time to time. I don't hate Apple or Tim Cook, far from it – I think he tried as best as he could to follow the vision for Apple he had – I'm just disappointed with a lot of things.

So here we are, in 2026, with all of the above and an upcoming new CEO. I don't know much about Ternus, but from what I've read, he seems like a nice and smart guy, it sounds like people like him and put a lot of hope on him. So I will try too. There are enormous expectations that everyone has for him, and he surely knows it.

I don't think it's realistic to expect that everything that's bad will be fixed and fixed soon, I know that things don't really work this way in real life. But there have been cases of companies getting fixed in a noticeable way, e.g. I feel like Satya Nadella has changed Microsoft for the better in a lot of ways when he took over after Ballmer. I will be happy if at least one or two of these improve in some noticeable ways after a while: