John Ternus Gets a CEO Poll Bounce From the Duo

John Ternus has 3.4 percent in a favorite-Apple-CEO poll, 19 days after taking the job on September 1. The foldable iPhone Duo he unveiled does not go on sale until October 23.

That score is being read as a fast start beside Steve Jobs and Tim Cook. It is a vote on a stage demo. Nobody in that poll has lived with the phone yet, and Apple set the calendar so the new boss would be the man holding it.

Three Votes in Four Still Go to Jobs

A weekend poll of smartphone enthusiasts asked readers to name their favorite Apple chief executive. Jobs took 75 percent, nearly 15 years after his death on October 5, 2011. Cook, who ran the company for 15 years and moved to executive chairman on September 1, took just over 13 percent.

Ternus, Apple’s eighth CEO and not yet a month in the chair, landed at 3.4 percent. That puts him a tenth of a point behind Michael Scott, the company’s first boss from 1977 to 1981, and well ahead of the 1980s and 1990s names most buyers could not pick out of a lineup.

HOW THE FAVORITE-CEO POLL BROKE

Michael Spindler, who ran Apple from 1993 to 1996, was not on the ballot. The shares above use the poll’s own ranges, so they are not meant to add to a neat 100. Ternus is not catching Cook on this list. He has drawn about as much love as a first CEO whose tenure ended when most of the voters were not born, after a keynote built around a $1,999 foldable that is still in the pre-order queue.

Apple Timed the Handoff for the Foldable

Apple announced the succession on April 20, 2026, with Cook staying through the summer and Ternus taking over on September 1. The board approved the plan unanimously. Cook used the moment to call Ternus a leader with the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, after 25 years inside the company.

People briefed on the foldable program said the September 1 date was chosen so Ternus, not Cook, would introduce the device, with Cook in the audience as executive chairman. Apple declined to comment on that account. Eight days later, on September 9, Ternus opened his first product event as CEO at the Steve Jobs Theater and put the iPhone Duo at the center of it.

Cook had already done more than hand over a finished demo. People close to the work said he came back from a trip through Asia around 2020 convinced Apple needed a folding phone after seeing devices from Samsung, Huawei and others in daily use, and that he was the earliest champion of turning the research into a mainstream iPhone. The project had been under study well before Samsung’s first Galaxy Fold in 2019, they said, and much of the early technology work sat with Dan Riccio, Ternus’s predecessor as head of hardware engineering. Ternus, they added, later used his authority to push the phone over the finish line.

If that reporting holds, the poll is cheering a hardware lifer for a product Cook spent years forcing into existence. The new CEO gets the clip. The old CEO still owns a large share of the bet.

FROM THE SUCCESSION MEMO TO STORE SHELVES

1. April 20, 2026: Apple names Ternus as the next CEO and Cook as executive chairman, effective September 1.
2. September 1, 2026: Ternus takes the job and posts a one-word greeting from his new account.
3. September 9, 2026: He unveils the iPhone Duo at Apple Park, with Cook in the house rather than on the mic.
4. October 16, 2026: Pre-orders open at 5 a.m.
5. October 23, 2026: The phone reaches stores.

On day one he posted a single word, and the replies treated it as a character test. That is the same instinct now dressing a 3.4 percent poll as a leadership race.

hello

— John Ternus (@johnternus) September 1, 2026

What Shoppers Are Being Asked to Buy

The iPhone Duo is Apple’s first foldable, and Ternus called it the most transformational change to iPhone since the original. Opened, it is the thinnest iPhone the company has shipped, with the largest display ever on iPhone, a 7.6-inch inner panel with a nano-texture finish meant to cut glare. Closed, a 5.4-inch outer display offers 90 percent of the screen area of iPhone 18 Pro in a body Apple likens to a passport. Both panels share the same aspect ratio so content scales instead of jumping shape.

Ternus told interviewers that rival foldables feel like two phones awkwardly stuck together, and that Apple waited until the idea cleared its bar for quality, durability and design. Greg Joswiak, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said what other makers had put out “wasn’t particularly inspiring,” and that Apple’s habit is not to rush in half baked. Software on iOS 27 moves the main controls to the right edge so a thumb finds the same place closed and open. Netflix, Slack and Zoom are among the apps Apple says it has been preparing for the wide inner screen.

WHAT APPLE PUT ON THE DUO

• Starting price: $1,999 in the U.S. for 256GB, with 512GB, 1TB and 2TB options, or $83.29 a month over 24 months.
• Body: Grade 5 titanium in star white and night sky, with a precision hinge Apple says is built to lay the inner panel flat.
• Durability pitch: IP68 dust and water resistance, plus Apple Pencil support due later this year and Touch ID in the side button.
• Calendar: Pre-orders on October 16, store availability on October 23, weeks after the iPhone 18 Pro line.

People close to development have already listed the trade-offs buyers will meet in October: a weaker camera system than the Pro phones, shorter battery life, and a device that may be less durable than a slab iPhone because it has to open. Those are the terms on which a CEO poll taken in September will age.

Twenty-Five Years Inside the Hardware Group

Ternus is a mechanical engineer who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, swam for the university, and worked on head-mounted displays at Virtual Research Systems before joining Apple’s product design team in 2001. He became a vice president of hardware engineering in 2013, took oversight of iPhone hardware in 2020, and joined the executive team in 2021 as senior vice president of hardware engineering, with the full device lineup under him.

Fall 2025 already put his group on a public stage with iPhone 17 Pro, the thin iPhone Air, and iPhone 17. Apple’s April memo also credits that organization with AirPods hearing-health features, MacBook Neo, and materials work that includes recycled aluminum and 3-D printed titanium. Francisco Jeronimo, a vice president at IDC, framed the succession as a turn from Cook’s operations record toward someone who might mix Jobs-era product bets with Cook-era scale, then added that the Duo itself was years into development before Ternus became chief executive, a legacy that will take five or ten years to judge.

John Ternus has the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and with honor. He is a visionary whose contributions to Apple over 25 years are already too numerous to count, and he is without question the right person to lead Apple into the future.

Tim Cook, Apple executive chairman, April 20, 2026 newsroom statement

Under Cook, Apple said, market value went from about $350 billion to $4 trillion, more than a 1,000 percent rise, while yearly revenue went from $108 billion in fiscal 2011 to more than $416 billion in fiscal 2025. The installed base is more than 2.5 billion devices, the company operates over 500 stores, headcount grew by more than 100,000, and services became a more than $100 billion business. That is the machine Ternus inherits. The poll is not about whether he can run it. It is about whether the first object with his name on the keynote still feels expensive in the hand.

He Never Treated the Stylus Line as Law

Jobs told the 2007 iPhone audience that if you see a stylus, they blew it, because a finger was the right tool for a touchscreen. The Duo will take Apple Pencil. Asked about that old line after the event, Ternus said he had never really thought of it as a rule, pointing back to iPad, which also launched without a Pencil and later gained one. On a device that is trying to be a phone and a small tablet, the accessory is a feature. On a popularity chart still headed by Jobs at 75 percent, it is also a small public break.

The more useful window on how Ternus wants to be seen is not the Pencil. It is the inner screen. Every book-style foldable puts polymer where glass would be, because glass that thin does not survive tens of thousands of folds. Ternus was blunt about what that has meant on other phones.

I think what you’ve seen out there are all these just kind of cheap feeling plastic surfaces that don’t feel good to the touch. They’re kind of wavy wrinkly, and the nano texture just wipes that all out. It’s beautifully flat, it feels amazing to touch, and it’s incredibly durable.

John Ternus, Apple CEO, post-event interview

When he first saw the treatment on a prototype, he said the reaction was “yes, that’s it,” then the long work of making it real. That is the sentence a hardware CEO campaigns on. It is also the sentence reviewers will test in October, dragging a thumb across a $1,999 polymer panel and deciding whether the waviness is gone. The louder fight around this launch is not whether Ternus seems pleasant on a stage. It is whether that surface still feels like laminate at twice the price of a standard iPhone.

The Other Tim Cook in Palmerston North

Samsung did not wait for that test. After the September 9 event, Samsung New Zealand put a real estate agent named Tim Cook, from Palmerston North, in a spot that mimics Apple’s spare white-set ads. He praises the Galaxy Z Fold 8, which went on sale in July at $1,899, with a 5.5-inch cover display and a 7.6-inch inner screen, and signs off as Tim Cook from Palmerston North. The joke only works because the actual Cook had just left the CEO job, and because Apple had just walked into a category Samsung has been shipping since 2019.

Cook’s just over 13 percent in the enthusiast poll is the other half of Ternus’s bounce. Fifteen years of scale made Apple a $4 trillion company on Apple’s own figures, and it also left a slice of the phone-fan audience cold. Ternus is collecting some of that leftover appetite in the first month, which is not the same as building a mandate. A ceremonial handoff on the event stage, a foldable that looks new in photos, and a boss who talks like an engineer will do that in a reader poll. They will not decide whether the Duo’s hinge still feels cheap after a month in a pocket.

The Duo Goes on Sale on October 23

IDC expects the foldable segment to grow 13 percent this year to 22.9 million units, against more than 1 billion smartphones in total. Nabila Popal, a senior smartphone researcher at IDC, said she expects Apple’s foldable to sell through whatever supply it can build, and that she would not be surprised if it became the Birkin of smartphones in China. That is a scarcity forecast, not a review, and it still sits in front of the October 23 on-sale date.

THE FOLDABLE MARKET TERNUS IS ENTERING

• Category size: 22.9 million foldables this year on IDC’s outlook, up 13 percent, inside a market of more than 1 billion phones.
• Apple’s ask: $1,999 to start, $100 above the Fold 8’s $1,899, for a form Samsung has been iterating since 2019.
• The untested claim: a nano-texture polymer inner display that Ternus says no longer feels wavy or cheap.
• The calendar: 19 days as CEO at the time of the poll, 44 days from the September 9 event to the October 23 store date.

On September 18 Ternus was at Apple’s Fifth Avenue store for the iPhone 18 Pro launch, walking the same first-weekend circuit Cook used for years. That is continuity. The Duo is the break, and the 3.4 percent is a snapshot of people responding to the break before they can buy it. When pre-orders open on October 16, the poll stops being a personality contest and starts being a pre-order number, a crease in sunlight, and a thumb on plastic that is supposed to feel like glass.