Tim Cook ran Apple for fifteen years and left at the end of August. John Ternus, who had been the public face of hardware, took the job and immediately had to do the most Apple thing there is: stand in a theater and talk about a phone.
The phone folded. The stock did not move. That combination will follow him. Cook’s Apple was a services company that still knew how to sell aluminum. Ternus’s Apple has to prove the aluminum still matters when the rest of the industry is selling agents.
