Apple will end the Tim Cook (Tim Cook) era as chief executive officer on Sept. 1 and start anew with Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering John Ternus (존 터너스) taking over as CEO. Cook will move to chairman. It is the second leadership change since Steve Jobs.

Ternus is a long-serving insider who has spent 25 years at Apple. He led hardware development for multiple generations of the iPad, AirPods and iPhone. He also played a key role in Apple’s transition to in-house chips from Intel to Apple Silicon.

Cook said Ternus has “the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator and leadership guided by sincerity.” Ternus said it was a blessing to have been able to work under Jobs and with Cook as a mentor. He said he was happy to be part of something bigger alongside the most talented people on the planet.

But with the company’s market value reaching $4 trillion, the burden is not light. U.S. business outlet CNBC named resetting AI strategy as Ternus’ top priority. While Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta pour hundreds of billions of dollars a year into data centres and AI chips, Apple has delayed developing its own foundation model and has entrusted AI functions to Google’s Gemini.

‘Apple Intelligence,’ released in 2024, included image generation, notification summaries and ChatGPT integration, but consumer reactions were mixed. Apple’s official press release announcing the CEO change did not mention AI in a single line. Forrester Research analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee (디판잔 채터지) warned that as generative AI fundamentally changes how consumers use technology, the coming years will be a rough voyage for Apple.

Still, Ternus’ status as a “hardware expert” is seen as an opportunity. Timothy Hubbard (티머시 허버드), an assistant professor of management at the University of Notre Dame, said Apple’s choice of a hardware leader could be an expression of the belief that AI’s future lies not in software but in tightly integrated devices.

Apple has in fact embedded its own silicon chips capable of AI computing in devices since 2017. Bloomberg reported it is also accelerating development of three Siri-based AI wearables: smart glasses, a pendant and camera-equipped AirPods. Creative Strategies CEO Ben Bajarin (벤 바자린) said a foldable iPhone would be the most important hardware milestone in years, adding that the biggest question is what comes after the iPhone.

Legal risks are also formidable. TechCrunch reported the App Store’s revenue structure is now under direct threat from the courts. Apple was ordered in the Epic Games case to allow external payment links, but kept a 27 percent commission on external payments, was found in contempt of court, and lost on appeal.

A U.S. Justice Department antitrust lawsuit over the smartphone market is also continuing. In India, a fine of up to $38 billion has been raised over alleged abuse of app market dominance. It is seen as an unusually tough response given Apple’s market share in India is only about 9 percent.

Geopolitical risk is also being inherited in full. Cook has repeatedly made uncomfortable compromises in return for increasing dependence on China’s supply chain, including deleting VPN apps and storing iCloud data on state-controlled servers. TechCrunch analysed that Apple’s move to specify Cook’s role as chairman itself shows it would be difficult for Ternus alone to replace Cook’s diplomatic assets built over decades.

What lifted Apple from an ordinary computer maker to the strongest player in the global IT market was its ability to read the times and its constant innovation. The bigger it gets, the slower innovation is bound to become. What Apple needs now, having become a $4 trillion dinosaur, may paradoxically be the spirit of challenge from the Steve Jobs era, when it proclaimed it would change the world from a garage.