Apple’s new chief executive wants everyone to know that design still sits at the heart of the company, and his own background suggests he means it more literally than most CEOs would.
In a newly released full-length video interview with TIME, John Ternus was asked how involved he remains with design now that he runs Apple. His answer leaned on his history rather than his new title. Ternus, a mechanical engineer who spent his career on the hardware side, explained that product designers work most closely with Apple’s industrial designers, and that he has collaborated with that group since he first joined the company.
He went on to describe design as central to everything Apple does, arguing that its software and hardware designers understand engineering constraints while its engineers genuinely value design. The key point, in his telling, is that the two disciplines work together from day one rather than designers handing over a finished sketch and leaving engineers to figure out how to build it.
That last detail is worth reading carefully. Since Ternus formally took over as CEO last month, reports have suggested he is spending a significant amount of time directly with Apple’s design teams. His comments neither confirm nor deny that. He framed his involvement as a continuation of a long working relationship, not a new hands-on mandate, which is a diplomatic way to sidestep the question of how much control he personally intends to exert.
The question matters because Apple’s design leadership has been unusually diffuse in recent years. After Jony Ive left in 2019, there was no single design chief with his level of authority, and the studio’s direction became harder for outsiders to read. A CEO with deep hardware roots and an appetite for design reviews could restore a clearer line of accountability, or it could concentrate decisions in one person at a time when the company is pushing into new categories.
The timing gives his words extra weight. The iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable, launches on October 23, and the company has a “Pro and tell” event lined up for October 28. Both are precisely the kind of hardware-led launches where the engineering-meets-design philosophy Ternus described gets tested in public.
