Apple New CEO John Ternus: Why fixing Siri and AI is his most urgent task

Tim Cook has officially handed the reins of the company to John Ternus after serving as captain of the ship for 15 long years. However, along with the title of CEO, Ternus has also inherited an AI crisis. Apple wasted almost three years trying to improve Siri, during which Google, OpenAI, and Samsung surpassed it, as the launch of “Apple Intelligence” failed to impress and was criticized. Now, only a week after taking charge of the company, Ternus has to handle the September 9 launch event for a new iPhone, the release of the very Siri powered by Gemini technology, which might determine whether his reign at Apple begins with success or failure. This is strange coming from a company that prides itself on releasing products only when they are fully prepared. Apple is suddenly falling behind. And Ternus, having an engineering background but facing a software-related challenge, does not have the luxury of time to find the solution.

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Who is John Ternus?

Ternus is not the type of candidate handpicked by Wall Street or the type of disruptor hired from the outside. He is a veteran of the company, having been with Apple for 25 years. The current CEO joined Apple in 2001 and studied mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. His career advancement has been rather straightforward. He held the position of Vice President of Hardware Engineering since 2013 before moving to the Senior Vice President of the same department in 2021. At age 51, Ternus is the fifth CEO in Apple’s history.

He has played an instrumental role in designing some of Apple’s best-selling hardware products. Ternus is responsible for engineering of the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch lines, which has made him one of the most prominent figures at the corporation who takes center stage in presenting some of the largest hardware announcements including this year’s MacBook Neo. Colleagues and journalists describe him as well-liked by internal employees, technologically skilled, and one of the very few executives who still has the corporate credibility gained over 2 and a half decades of service.

The one thing he is not, not yet, is an AI executive. The Apple board is gambling that the same person who is great at making hardware will be able to make the company’s software and AI work at a time when that might be the only thing that matters. It’s the same gamble the board took with Tim Cook in 2011, promoting an operations guy to run a company that needed someone with product vision. Tim Cook proved all his skeptics wrong over many years. Ternus does not have many years. He has weeks until the fall event and quarters until investors ask tough questions.

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The Siri-Gemini deal

Ternus’s first year as a CEO saw a significant decision that was not made by him. It was made by the outgoing Cook team, and it is a remarkable decision: Apple, a company that has based its entire brand on ownership of the technology stack, is renting Google’s AI to patch its own voice assistant.

Under the deal, which was first reported at the end of 2025 and officially announced in January 2026 via a joint statement, Apple is paying Google around a billion dollars per year to get access to a specially designed 1.2-trillion-parameter model of Gemini. This is about eight times bigger compared to the 150-billion-parameter models used in Apple Intelligence. The contract goes through the Apple Private Cloud Compute system and handles Siri’s advanced reasoning, planning, and summarizing processes, whereas the simpler ones remain on-device. Experts calculate that the entire multi-year deal is potentially worth $5 billion to Google.

This has certainly not been overlooked by anyone who has seen the interaction between the two companies. In fact, Google already pays Apple almost $20 billion annually to be the default search engine on iPhones. But now the cash is flowing in the opposite direction as well because Apple sends Google the cash to use the AI capabilities that Apple could not build on time. One former Apple executive summed it up bluntly to the Financial Times: the deal was less a masterstroke and more “a necessary byproduct of Apple’s decision not to go big on its AI investments” while OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft were pouring tens of billions into frontier models.

Being generous to Apple, there is a rationale behind the practical approach. The cost of creating a 1.2-trillion parameter model would have exceeded the cost of the whole Gemini licensing agreement by far and taken much time that Apple simply did not have. The upgraded Siri, introduced along with Ternus’s first autumn release, will bring actual improvements like Siri as a standalone app, cross-app activities, on-screen awareness, and answering questions based on the user’s context from messages, emails, and photos. The first reviews about the upgrade are said to be quite favorable.

Why Renting AI isn’t a strategy

The media coverage surrounding the acquisition has been pointing that this is a temporary measure until Apple’s own models become sufficiently advanced to replace them. But for now, the reality is that this promise is working really hard without much concrete results. As a separate capability of artificial intelligence within Apple, Apple Intelligence has been downgraded to nothing more than an interface sitting above the technology that Apple had to pay a competitor for.

It’s a problem for reasons that have little to do with optics. For starters, there’s the issue of dependency. By handing Google the reins on the AI engine at the heart of Siri’s most advanced features, Apple is putting its AI strategy at least partly into Google’s hands – of a competitor it rivals in search, mobile OS, smart home devices, and soon enough, automobiles. There’s also the issue of regulation. EU regulators were reportedly already preparing to examine whether Google’s dual roles as Apple’s search partner and AI engine provider make it harder for Google to abuse its power in the mobile ecosystem – triggering Digital Markets Act investigations. But perhaps most relevantly to Ternus is the issue of credibility. It’s been Apple’s selling point for years now that it offers the world’s best version of any particular technology because it owns the entire stack from chips through services.

This isn’t to suggest that Apple’s choice was wrong at this juncture, but what it does suggest is that, regardless of Ternus’ wishes, time is something he doesn’t have in his favor. The company’s own foundation models must catch up to Gemini, and quickly, lest the “bridge” become infrastructure of which Apple is paying a competitor a billion dollars annually to maintain. And while a hardware executive whose entire career has been defined by building chips, phones, and watches, now finds himself needing to prove that he can build an AI platform as well, not just license another’s until no one can remember why Apple’s AI wasn’t supposed to be their own from the beginning.

Ternus’ September 9 event is less an introduction than it is an opportunity for Apple’s new hardware boss to prove that, with a little borrowed AI power, it might actually have an early advantage.

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