For 15 years, Tim Cook ran Apple like a masterful, risk-averse supply chain calculator. The Apple Watch, AirPods, the very slow drip-feed of iPhone redesigns and MacBooks — everything was about safety, iteration and guaranteed profit margins (minus Apple Vision Pro).
Apple didn’t do “experimental,” and they certainly didn’t do hardware tricks just because it looked cool.
Fast forward to September 2026, John Ternus officially took the CEO chair. And in just under two months, the entire Cupertino playbook has been thrown out the window.
I know chances are the iPhone Duo and MacBook PROLED have been in the works for years, but it’s a philosophy thing, you know? Cook almost certainly approved the R&D budgets, but Ternus was the chief engineer pulling the levers. Debuting his leadership with these unapologetically disruptive devices sets quite the tone.
The hardware may be fragile, there may be flaws and it might serve mainly as an incredible demo. But for the first time in a decade, Apple is actually making tech exciting again.
Let me explain.
Safe, polished and predictable
Covering the tenure of Cook, I ended up comparing the iterative upgrades to adding a slightly better spin cycle to washing machines. The tech is good, don’t get me wrong, but nothing really made me go “wow, that’s cool as hell.”
His defining products, the Apple Watch and AirPods, were masterclasses in this iterative dominance. Nothing was flashy or rushed; it was slow-cooked to perfection over years of minor tweaks until they owned the market.
Even when he took a swing at spatial computing, the Vision Pro was made in a safe way to be austere, pristine and luxurious — taking years of secretive R&D and prioritizing a hyper-polished, isolated ecosystem over mass-market accessibility or playful experimentation. That’s probably the reason why it didn’t really make its mark.
The Ternus pivot
As a former hardware engineering chief who spent 25 years building Macs and iPads, Ternus seems perfectly happy to break the old rules just to see what happens — and I am so here for it.
The iPhone Duo, for example. Apple did its Apple thing by showing up late to a market and going its own way. And as recent durability tests and tear downs have shown, it’s quite a bit more fragile than the standard slabs.
But physically folding a massive OLED screen in half and snapping windows together into a dedicated session is undeniably cool. For the first time in years, an iPhone feels like a futuristic conversation starter rather than just a utility.
And now his most recent announcement: The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR display. Apple shattered its oldest hardware taboo by putting a touchscreen on this thing.
Does macOS 27 have the updates it needs to be touch friendly? Sort of, but some of the changes (namely magnifying the traffic light buttons rather than just making them bigger from the moment a finger is recognized/changing the UI paradigm) is going to be a little problematic.
A closer look at how window controls in macOS respond to touch. https://t.co/OT8NIiVM4SOctober 28, 2026
As Steve Jobs said himself, it’s not going to be the most ergonomic way to use a MacBook. But slapping a touch panel onto a Mac is exactly the kind of chaotic hardware swing I haven’t seen from Cupertino since the candy-colored iMacs of the late 90s.
Things are fun again!
You are the beta tester
There is a catch to this new “Why Not?” era. When a company pivots from cautious, bulletproof iteration to shipping experiments, there’s a risk you have to absorb.
Kinks have to be smoothed over, hardware issues may arise. But as a gadget nerd, I’ll absorb that risk any day.
And then there’s the price. Ternus is injecting massive amounts of life into Apple’s product lineup, but he is doing it by selling $2,000 foldables with durability questions and a $3,000 MacBook Pro that operates as an ergonomic experiment.
It is a wildly exciting time to be a tech journalist, and a nervous time to be an early adopter. So just know if you are buying into Apple’s new experimental sandbox, you’re paying top dollar to beta test John Ternus’s vision for the future.
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