The things Apple made me

There’s a version of me that never left that job.

I don’t think about him often. But I know he exists. The version of me who stayed, who convinced himself that a soulless nine-to-five was the responsible choice, who kept his creativity as a private hobby and his ambition as a quiet, manageable regret.

Apple killed that version of me.

And not metaphorically, but in the specific way Apple made things: the care, the intention, the absolute refusal to treat design as decoration or craft as an afterthought. Apple made it impossible for me to stay comfortable with anything less. It recalibrated what I thought was possible. It made me want to make things that mattered. To build something that was actually, genuinely, mine.

I say this without pride in the saying of it. It is a strange and slightly unsettling thing to acknowledge: that a corporation changed the direction of your life. That a company’s philosophy became part of your own. But the truth is the truth.

This week, Apple announced that Tim Cook is stepping down. John Ternus, the company’s head of hardware engineering, takes over on September 1st.

I have feelings about this. Of course I do.

I’ve already said what I need to say about Tim Cook. That piece is here, if you want the full picture. I don’t take any of it back.

But I’ve been carrying an incompleteness since I wrote it. A nagging awareness that anger, however justified, tends to flatten things that deserve more dimension. So let me give Cook his due. Properly, without a caveat softening the truth of it.

What he built is extraordinary.

The operational machinery Cook assembled is a masterpiece. The supply chain. The services empire: Apple Music, Apple TV+, the App Store at the kind of scale that prints money while you sleep. Apple Pay. And above everything else: Apple Silicon. The M-series chips are one of the most significant product transitions in computing in decades. The Mac went from a beautiful but declining platform to the best personal computer on the planet.

Cook did that. Quietly, without a single keynote revelation.

He took Apple from $300 billion to $3 trillion $4 trillion. He launched the Apple Watch and made wearables a category. He kept the stores feeling like the stores. He maintained the mythology—the packaging, the events, the details—with a care that is genuinely hard and largely invisible until it’s gone.

For fifteen years, Tim Cook protected something precious and made it vast.

He also, in January 2025, stood in a room and applauded the wrong people. I’ve written about what that cost. I won’t relitigate it here. What I will say is this: the thing Cook built was real, and valuable, and it survived him. And the person who inherits it has spent twenty-five years making sure the things Apple makes are worth inheriting.

I keep coming back to the pattern.

Steve Jobs.
Tim Cook.
John Ternus.

Take three steps back. Look at the shape of it.

Jobs was a Prophet. The kind of person who holds a product up in front of a room and announces: this is what this should be, and you didn’t know until right now. Every object was an argument. Every keynote was a sermon. He had a near-pathological belief in the legibility of the future—once viewed looking back—and the specific, unreasonable conviction that it was his job to show it to you. You either believed him or you didn’t. Most people, eventually, did.

Cook was a Custodian. His job was to protect the belief system, scale it to a size Jobs never imagined, and not let it break in the process. He succeeded at two of those things spectacularly. The third—the part about not breaking it—depends entirely on what you think was worth protecting.

Ternus is something else. Something older, in a way.

He’s a Maker.

Twenty-five years at Apple. Mechanical engineer. He worked on the Cinema Display, the iPad, AirPods, the Mac’s silicon transition, the iPhone hardware. He’s been in the room where the thing gets decided—the weight, the feel, the tolerance, the way the hinge moves—for his entire career. Cook said he has “the mind of an engineer, the soul of an innovator, and the heart to lead with integrity and honour”.

What I hear in that is someone who never stopped caring about the object.

Not anything but the thing you hold. The thing that sits on your desk. The thing that, if it’s made right, makes you feel—irrationally, stubbornly—that somebody on the other end of it gave a damn.

I don’t know Ternus well. None of us do. But he is not Jobs.

He won’t be, and the worst thing he could do, is try. The Prophet archetype arrives once. It blazes and it leaves and what comes after has to find its own shape or it’s just a tribute. An impression. A wax museum exhibit in a glass box.

What I’m hoping Ternus is—what the twenty-five years inside the machine suggests he might be—is someone who is constitutionally unable to ship something he doesn’t believe in. Someone for whom craft is not a value to be balanced against other values, but the starting condition.

Apple’s products have felt, for a stretch of time I won’t put an exact number on, like they were running on the residual energy of a belief system, rather than a living one. Technically brilliant, often. Beautiful, frequently. But somewhere in the optimisation, the soul got rationalised out of them. The feeling—that specific, irrational feeling that someone made this for you, and meant it—got harder to find.

That’s what I want back. Not nostalgia, really. Not a Jobs impression, definitely. And most pointedly, not the mythology for its own sake.

Just the object, made properly, by someone who knows what “properly” means.

Apple made me a designer. It made me a studio owner. It gave me a belief that how something is made is inseparable from what it means. A thing I have staked my professional life on.

I nearly lost faith. Not in the belief, but in the company that gave it to me.

But the Maker is in charge now. And I find myself, unexpectedly, staying. Not out of habit, nor out of the sunk cost of a decade and a half of ecosystem lock-in. Why? Well, for the first time in a while, that feels like a choice I’m making, rather than a habit I can’t break.

Because I am, in some non-trivial sense, one of the things Apple made. And I cannot wait to see what it makes next.