John Ternus has spent 24 years engineering Apple’s hardware, and when he takes over as chief executive on 1 September, he inherits a company defined by iPhones and silicon rather than prestige television.
Yet one of the first things Apple’s incoming boss chose to talk about in public was neither. Speaking to reporters at the Los Angeles premiere of the fourth season of Ted Lasso this week, Ternus said he wanted to keep building on the momentum Apple has found in film and television, describing a service full of “amazing programs with great characters and stories,” according to Reuters.
It was a small remark, though a telling one. Ternus made his name as the hardware chief who oversaw the iPad and the shift to Apple silicon, and his rise to the top job was widely read as a bet on engineering discipline at a moment when Apple is playing catch-up on AI.
So the fact that he used an early appearance to signal continuity in entertainment matters, because it suggests the division, expensive and unprofitable as it is, is not going anywhere.
The transition itself has been settled since April, when Apple confirmed that Tim Cook would move to executive chairman after nearly 15 years as chief executive and that Ternus, currently senior vice-president of hardware engineering, would succeed him. Cook stays on to steer the handover and will keep a hand in policy and regulatory work, but from September the company is Ternus’s to run.
The progress he referred to is real, if costly. Apple launched its streaming service in 2019 and, three years later, CODA made it the first streamer to win the Academy Award for best picture.
The hits kept coming after that. Severance helped carry the company to a record 81 Emmy nominations in 2025, and The Studio became the most-winning freshman comedy in Emmy history.
This summer Ted Lasso returned for a fourth season, five years after the show first turned Apple’s platform into something people actually talked about.
Then there was F1. The Brad Pitt racing film, released last summer, took more than $600m at the worldwide box office, becoming Apple’s highest-grossing original and Pitt’s biggest global hit before reaching the company’s own platform in December.
For a studio that had struggled to turn critical praise into commercial scale, the film was the clearest sign yet that Apple’s ambitions could pay off in cinemas as well as at awards ceremonies.
The economics remain awkward, even so. Apple’s streaming operation was losing more than $1bn a year with around 45 million subscribers, according to a March 2025 report from The Information, a rounding error for a business that recently posted $111.2bn in quarterly revenue, but a stubborn one all the same.
Cook built his tenure on returning cash to shareholders, and Ternus arrives just as Apple loosens that discipline, dropping its net cash neutral target to free up money for AI and acquisitions.
Whether that new appetite extends to entertainment is unclear, since Apple has not said how much it intends to spend on content under Ternus, nor whether the F1 model, a big theatrical swing with a marketing budget to match, is one it plans to repeat.
What he offered at the premiere was a posture rather than a plan: the shows are good, the momentum is there, and the incoming CEO would like it to continue.
For now, entertainment is one of the few corners of Apple where the company can plausibly claim to be gaining creative ground even while it plays catch-up elsewhere.
Ternus, an engineer by training, will spend most of his early tenure on much harder problems, with Siri and the wider AI effort chief among them.
That he paused to praise a football comedy first says something about how much Apple has come to value the story it tells on screen.
