Apple's new CEO wants to put design back at the center of everything
Apple's design team has been losing influence for years — and incoming CEO John Ternus wants to fix that. Ternus, who officially replaces Tim Cook on September 1, 2026, has already met with the design group and told them he sees them as one of the core engines driving the company forward. The timing matters: Apple is preparing its most ambitious product slate in a decade, and it needs a strong design culture to pull it off.
The hollowing-out
The rot, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, started when Jony Ive stepped back from day-to-day leadership in 2015 and fully departed in 2019. Many of his team followed him out, some eventually joining his new studio LoveFrom. Under COO Jeff Williams, who absorbed oversight of the design group, the team lost its executive seat at the table and began reporting into operations rather than the CEO. Junior staff and interns filled roles once held by Ive-era veterans.
The departure of Alan Dye — Apple's chief UI designer and the creator of Liquid Glass — made things worse. Dye left for Meta in December 2025, per The Next Web, becoming its Chief Design Officer. The result, Gurman argues, was a prolonged stagnation: multiple generations of Apple Watch, AirPods, and Mac received only incremental updates, a rut that would have been unthinkable under Jobs and Ive.
The test ahead
Ternus took charge of the design team in January 2026 and has signaled he intends to return it to Steve Jobs's original principle — that design comes first in everything Apple makes. His engineering background, which covers Apple Silicon and hardware development, gives him credibility on the product side. The question is whether that translates into a genuine cultural shift inside the design group.
The stakes are high. Apple's roadmap for 2026 and 2027 includes a foldable iPhone Ultra (priced between $1,999 and $2,500, arriving fall 2026), camera-equipped AirPods, AR glasses, a touchscreen MacBook, and a heavily redesigned anniversary iPhone. That's nine iPhone SKUs in total, alongside entirely new product categories. Each one will need more than engineering precision — it needs design conviction.
Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold already owns the foldable category in most markets, and Meta's smart glasses are gaining ground in wearables. If Ternus can genuinely restore design authority at Apple, the product pipeline gives him an immediate opportunity to prove it.
