His fingerprints are on the one Apple audio product nobody complains about.
Apple announced on April 20, 2026 that John Ternus will take over as CEO effective September 1, 2026. He becomes the third person to run the company since Steve Jobs returned in 1997.
Ternus is a 25-year Apple veteran with a mechanical engineering degree from Penn, class of 1997. He has run Apple’s hardware engineering org since 2021. That org built every AirPod ever shipped. It owns HomePod, Vision Pro audio, and every speaker pressed against an Apple Watch wearer’s wrist.
Because Ternus has overseen much of Apple’s recent audio hardware, his promotion gives audio fans a concrete reason to revisit the products that have defined Cook-era listening.
Audio Fans Heard a Hardware Signal
Many audio fans read the leadership change as a signal about where Apple may put its energy next. That reaction comes from a recent pattern in Apple’s audio business. Some of its most meaningful progress has come from hardware, especially in products tied to sound and hearing, while frustration has built around services and software.
An engineer is replacing an operator, so the shift suggests Apple may lean harder into the devices it makes rather than the layers of service built around them.
Besides, the Cook years gave the audio community plenty to file against. For example, Siri stalled on the AI overhaul Apple kept promising at keynote after keynote, Vision Pro landed with a spec sheet more impressive than its sales, and Apple Music drifted through a decade and still hasn’t caught Spotify on UI or polish.
Ternus’s clearest audio win sits outside all of that. His organization turned AirPods Pro 2 into the first FDA-cleared over-the-counter hearing aid software device, putting a clinical feature inside $249 earbuds. That gives supporters a concrete reason for optimism, even if it does not erase the rest of Apple’s audio shortcomings.
Four Audio Fixes on Ternus’s Desk
If Ternus’s promotion really signals a more hardware-led Apple, audio fans already know where they will look first. The case against Cook-era audio drift has been building product by product, and these are the clearest tests now sitting in front of Apple’s next CEO.
Five years, still no wireless lossless
Apple Music launched Lossless and Hi-Res Lossless on May 17, 2021. But not a single AirPods model could play it wirelessly.
The blocker is codec policy. AirPods ride Bluetooth AAC when paired with an iPhone, a lossy format, and Apple has pointedly declined to add aptX, LDAC, or LC3. Apple Music’s high-resolution catalog ships through a pipe that can’t carry it.
On the other hand, the USB-C AirPods Max got a partial concession in April 2025. An iOS 18.4 update unlocked 24-bit/48kHz lossless wired through the USB-C cable, still blocked from Hi-Res Lossless above 24/48. A fix that stays wired is not a fix.
Ternus’s own organization shipped AirPods without wireless lossless support year after year, so he shares responsibility for the limitation.
Reports suggest Apple may already have the technical foundation for a better solution in newer devices, but if that capability exists beyond Vision Pro’s low-latency use case, the obvious question is why it still has not reached ordinary Apple Music listening.
The HomePod Apple forgot
While the AirPods grievance at least keeps a loud forum, the HomePod grievance went quiet years ago.
The original HomePod shipped in February 2018 and moved an estimated 1 to 3 million units through that summer. Apple cut the price from $349 to $299 in April 2019, then discontinued the line on March 12, 2021. A second-generation HomePod returned in January 2023 with a press release and almost no follow-through.
That trajectory mirrors a familiar Cook-era pattern within a single product line: an ambitious launch, reduced momentum, and then long stretches of neglect.
Meanwhile, Ternus has no public HomePod track record worth reading. There’s no keynote headlining, no FDA clearance, no “world’s best speaker” quote, no pre-CEO victory lap pinned to the product.
For instance, the AirPods Pro 3 launch just came with a Ternus pull quote and the 2023 HomePod 2 came with a press release.
HomePod is the one audio product line where his signal is silence.
Public HomePod 2 sales data is thin, and nobody outside Apple knows whether Ternus has a roadmap for the line. That’s the point.
This makes HomePod the cleanest test of what hardware-first CEO actually means for Apple audio. Either Ternus greenlights the speaker bets Cook deprioritized, or HomePod stays in the corner where operations left it. A fresh speaker category or a serious HomePod refresh would be the loudest pre-keynote audio-fan signal he could send.
Hearing health, the bet that worked
Ternus’s strongest audio credential is already on the shelf.
On September 12, 2024, the FDA authorized AirPods Pro 2 as the first product allowed to serve as an over-the-counter hearing aid software device. The authorization opened up an addressable market of roughly 30 million Americans with mild-to-moderate hearing loss.
Before the clearance, traditional OTC hearing aids in that market ran $1,000 to $3,000. AirPods Pro 2 shipped the feature at $249, FSA/HSA eligible, through a firmware update to earbuds people already owned.
One year later, AirPods Pro 3 launched September 19, 2025 at the same $249 and expanded the stack. Hearing Test, Hearing Aid, Hearing Protection, and automatic Conversation Boost in loud environments all ship in the box.
His own pull quote landed on the ANC, not the hearing aid.
The claim was narrowly framed around in-ear wireless headphones, but it still gave Ternus a visible product win.
But fine print aside, this is the audio product where Ternus has a victory lap already filed. No other Apple executive can take credit for it.
The app Ternus can’t fix from hardware
Apple Music focuses on the opposite problem. It sits at the center of Apple’s audio ecosystem, but it falls outside the hardware lane where Ternus has his clearest track record.
Apple bought Beats Electronics and Beats Music for $3 billion in May 2014, the largest acquisition in its history at the time. The deal seeded Apple Music, which launched June 30, 2015. Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos and the Lossless tier followed in 2021.
But a decade later, the app still trails Spotify on subscribers and polish. The iOS 26 “Liquid Glass” redesign drew reader complaints for being hard to read, there’s no simple toggle between AAC, Lossless, and Atmos, and the Now Playing screen remains cumbersome, and excessive animations keep landing between users and their libraries.
Cook’s Ledger, Ternus’s Test
Cook’s record got its sharpest summary from The Register on the day the succession was announced.
That was meant as a Cook epitaph. It doubles as Ternus’s job description, and arguably his strongest credential on the way in.
A balance sheet favors Cook. Apple’s stock rose 18-fold under his run, and revenues and profits roughly quadrupled. None of that translated into the audio fixes that mattered to listeners.
Lossless launched and went nowhere on AirPods. HomePod went quiet. Apple Music drifted. Vision Pro audio launched in February 2024 with a wireless-frequency flaw that only the revised $249 USB-C AirPods Pro 2, which Ternus’s team had shipped five months earlier, could work around, forcing $3,499 headset buyers to spend another $249 on earbuds.
Analysts read the transition differently. Forrester’s Dipanjan Chatterjee offered the consensus take to MediaPost.
The hardware is already inside iPhone 17 and AirPods Pro 3. The switch is Ternus’s first test.