Apple has a hardware guy as CEO. Here’s what people want him to do

Apple’s new CEO John Ternus wrote “hello” in his first X post on Tuesday after taking the helm from former CEO Tim Cook, and his replies were immediately inundated with with requests for products and product design changes. It makes sense. He’s a hardware guy. A mechanical engineer who previously oversaw Apple’s hardware engineering, Ternus has significantly shaped the look and feel of Apple products that sell hundreds of millions of units cumulatively every year. For a company known for the elevated look and feel of its physical products, Ternus is uniquely positioned to bring Apple into a new era, hence the slew of unsolicited requests online when he got the job. Ternus graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in mechanical engineering and his only job before Apple was in VR. He worked as a mechanical engineer at the virtual reality hardware company Virtual Research Systems before joining Apple’s product design team in 2001. Ternus became Apple’s vice president of hardware engineering in 2013 and its senior vice president of hardware engineering in 2021. Ternus’s time in leadership has come as Apple grew into a $4.6 trillion company under Cook’s tenure as CEO …