John Ternus has run Apple for less than a month, and he is already testing how much of the company’s machinery he can move. The changes, reported by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, target the parts of Apple that have not changed in years: how often it releases products, how many managers stand between engineers and executives, and how it finds its next sources of revenue.
Ternus took over as chief executive on September 1, succeeding Tim Cook, who led the company for 15 years and now serves as executive chairman. The overhaul he has begun, according to Gurman, aims to speed up product development, expand the hardware lineup, and push more decisions and resources toward engineering, with a thinner layer of management in between.
Ternus is the first of Apple’s chief executives to come up through the hardware bench rather than operations. He joined the company in 2001 as a product design engineer and went on to lead the engineering of the iPad, the Mac, the AirPods and, most recently, the iPhone, championing the move to Apple’s own silicon along the way. His rise is itself a statement about where the company thinks its next decade will be decided: in the devices, not the spreadsheets.
The most visible shift concerns the calendar. Apple has long organized its launches around a spring and a fall event, a rhythm so predictable that suppliers and fans plan their year around it. Ternus wants to depend less on that pattern and release products more often throughout the year, according to the report, a change that would reshape how the company builds anticipation and manages its supply chain.
The product road map attached to the plan stretches into next year. Apple is preparing camera-equipped AirPods, its first smart glasses, and a redesigned iPhone to mark the twentieth anniversary of the original device, according to Gurman. Each is a bet on a company trying to find growth outside the smartphone, which still produces the bulk of its revenue but is no longer expanding the way it once did.
The strategic pressure behind the changes is plain in Apple’s numbers. The iPhone still generates most of the company’s revenue, but its growth has flattened, and the services business, long the counterweight, has begun to slow. New categories, from smart glasses to the camera-equipped AirPods, are attempts to build revenue streams that do not depend on a single product line that is no longer expanding.
The cost-cutting is smaller and quieter. Over the past two weeks, Apple’s hardware engineering group has eliminated some engineering program manager roles, about six director-level positions, and those not reassigned will leave later this year, according to the report. The company has also made small cuts across several departments, trimming early projects in Siri, Vision Pro and AI software engineering, with minor changes in the Fitness+ team.
The management cuts follow the same logic. Removing a layer of engineering program managers puts the people designing products closer to the executives making the calls, a structure Ternus is said to favor from his years running the hardware group. The tradeoff is that fewer managers means fewer people whose job is to keep a program on schedule, a discipline Apple has leaned on heavily.
The revenue question is open. Ternus has been discussing new sources of income with Eddy Cue, who runs the services business, and with Chief Financial Officer Kevan Parekh, according to Gurman. Services have been Apple’s most reliable growth engine for years, but that growth has slowed, and employees expect further adjustments by the end of the year or early next year.
The larger moves remain under discussion. This summer Apple had planned to cut roughly 5,000 AppleCare customer-service jobs on the theory that AI could handle much of the work, but it shelved the plan. That restraint, alongside the piecemeal cuts now under way, suggests a leadership trying to reshape the company without a single disruptive stroke.
The plans are still internal and Apple has not confirmed them. But the direction is clear from the details that have surfaced. Ternus, an engineer by background who spent his career inside the company, is betting that Apple’s next decade depends on shipping more kinds of hardware more often, and on a management structure lean enough to let the people building those products move faster.
Whether the changes work will depend on execution, not announcement. A company of Apple’s scale does not simply abandon a launch rhythm it has used for a decade and a half, and cutting managers does not by itself produce better products. What Ternus is attempting is the harder thing: changing how Apple decides what to build, and how quickly, before the market forces the choice on him.
