New Apple CEO John Ternus is overhauling the company to move faster and leaner

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, CEO John Ternus is moving to overhaul Apple with three central goals: accelerate product development, broaden its device lineup, and build a leaner organization with a sharper engineering focus.

• Management layers: Ternus is cutting layers between engineers and senior leadership.
• Release cadence: shifting away from Apple's long-standing traditional spring-and-fall product calendar toward more frequent, experimental releases spread throughout the year.
• Culture: prioritizing engineering efficiency, with existing staff expected to accomplish noticeably more rather than growing headcount to match ambition.

The catch: this isn't a future plan. Apple has already started acting on it.

Apple has dismissed several engineering program managers, or EPMs, a role that Gurman's reporting describes as central to Apple's product-development process for decades. Roughly half a dozen directors in that function have already been let go.

Removing a role that's been structurally embedded in Apple's product pipeline for decades, this early into a new CEO's tenure, signals Ternus isn't easing into the job. He's moving on his stated priorities immediately.

This isn't a sudden change of philosophy. Ternus has reportedly argued for years, predating his time as CEO, that Apple should accomplish more with fewer employees. Taking the top job gives him the authority to act on that view directly rather than advocate for it from within hardware engineering.

By the numbers: the shift comes with real friction. Reports describe the current internal environment as hectic, with managers under pressure to deliver more products, more frequently, and on tighter timelines than they operated under during Tim Cook's tenure.

Ternus succeeded Tim Cook as Apple's CEO effective September 1, 2026, following a board-approved succession process Apple announced back in April. Cook, who led Apple for 15 years, transitioned to Executive Chairman rather than leaving the company entirely, taking on a role focused on engaging policymakers globally.

Ternus joined Apple in 2001 and became Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering in 2021, the role he held immediately before becoming the company's eighth CEO. That background as a career engineer rather than an operations or finance executive is directly relevant context for why his first major moves as CEO are centered on engineering structure and product cadence rather than, say, supply chain or retail strategy.

Ternus's rise inside Apple was gradual rather than a lateral executive hire. He holds a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania, graduated in 1997, and briefly worked at a virtual reality startup before joining Apple roughly 25 years ago.

His early Apple work was genuinely unglamorous: he started as a relatively junior member of the product design team working on external Mac monitors, not exactly the kind of assignment that predicts a future CEO. By 2013, he'd been promoted to vice president of hardware engineering, overseeing AirPods, Mac, and iPad development.

His responsibilities kept expanding from there. He took charge of iPhone hardware engineering in 2020, and when Dan Riccio stepped down in January 2021, Ternus was promoted to senior vice president of hardware engineering, putting him on Apple's executive team for the first time. Notably, according to Apple's own leadership materials, he has worked on every single generation and model of iPad the company has ever released.

One specific area Ternus has flagged for repair predates his CEO appointment: Apple's industrial design team. In January 2026, months before officially becoming CEO, he was given direct oversight of industrial design, a move Bloomberg described at the time as a clear signal of his candidacy for the top job.

Why that team needed attention: nearly every senior designer from Jony Ive's era at Apple has since left the company, including figures like Evans Hankey and Alan Dye, leaving the design group without a genuine seat at Apple's executive table for the first time in decades.

Reporting has described the team as having effectively become a service bureau other departments visit to get specific needs met, rather than a group that shapes Apple's product direction from the top down the way it did under Ive.

Ternus has reportedly committed to restoring the design team's influence as part of his broader reorganization, a detail that connects his engineering-focused restructuring to a second, parallel effort to rebuild a part of Apple that had quietly lost institutional standing over the better part of a decade.

Ternus isn't only focused on engineering and release schedules. He's reportedly working directly with services chief Eddy Cue and CFO Kevan Parekh on launching new services and extracting greater revenue from Apple's existing offerings.

That detail matters because it suggests Ternus's restructuring ambitions extend past hardware development into how Apple monetizes its installed base more broadly, an area Cook himself had already grown substantially during his tenure, turning Services into one of Apple's largest and fastest-growing revenue segments.

The changes already underway are likely just the beginning of a broader leadership shakeup. Much of Apple's senior executive team is nearing retirement age, and it will fall to Ternus to replace them over roughly the next three years.

Who's expected to go: executives reportedly expected to be replaced include Johnny Srouji, who leads Apple's silicon engineering; Deirdre O'Brien, who oversees retail and people; Luca Maestri, a former CFO who has continued in other senior roles; and Greg Joswiak, Apple's marketing chief.

That level of turnover, layered on top of the organizational and product-cadence changes already in motion, means Ternus isn't just adjusting how Apple ships products. He's positioned to reshape nearly the entire executive team that will carry out that vision over the next several years.

Apple's deliberate, unhurried product cycles have long been treated as a feature, not a bug, a contrast to competitors racing to ship more frequently with less polish. Moving toward faster, more experimental releases risks eroding exactly the kind of careful execution that built Apple's reputation for consistency in the first place.

That tension is the real test of Ternus's tenure so far: whether "leaner and faster" translates into genuinely better products reaching customers sooner, or whether it strains an organization built around a slower, more deliberate cadence past what it can sustain without quality slipping.