Apple’s Incoming CEO Wants to Build on the Company’s Film and TV Run
John Ternus made his name in hardware, but one of his first public signals as CEO-in-waiting was about the streaming business that keeps winning awards and losing money.
July 28, 2026 – 9:21 am
Image by: Apple
John Ternus has spent 24 years engineering Apple’s hardware, and when he takes over as chief executive on 1 September, he inherits a company defined by iPhones and silicon rather than prestige television. Yet one of the first things Apple’s incoming boss chose to talk about in public was neither.
Speaking to reporters at the Los Angeles premiere of the fourth season of Ted Lasso this week, Ternus said he wanted to keep building on the momentum Apple has found in film and television, describing a service full of "amazing programs with great characters and stories" according to Reuters.
It was a small remark, though a telling one. Ternus made his name as the hardware chief who oversaw the iPad and the shift to Apple silicon, and his rise to the top job was widely read as a bet on engineering discipline at a moment when Apple is playing catch-up on AI. So the fact that he used an early appearance to signal continuity in entertainment matters, because it suggests the division, expensive and unprofitable as it is, is not going anywhere.
Transition Settled
The transition itself has been settled since April, when Apple confirmed that Tim Cook would move to executive chairman after nearly 15 years as chief executive and that Ternus, currently senior vice-president of hardware engineering, would succeed him. Cook stays on to steer the handover and will keep a hand in policy and regulatory work, but from September the company is Ternus’s to run.
Streaming Successes
The progress he referred to is real, if costly. Apple launched its streaming service in 2019 and, three years later, CODA made it the first streamer to win the Academy Award for best picture. The hits kept coming after that. Severance helped carry the company to a record 81 Emmy nominations in 2025, and The Studio became the most-winning freshman comedy in Emmy history. This summer Ted Lasso returned for a fourth season, five years after the show first turned Apple’s platform into something people actually talked about. Then there was F1. The Brad Pitt racing film, released last summer, took more than $600m at the worldwide box office, becoming Apple’s highest-grossing original and Pitt’s biggest global hit before reaching the company’s own platform in December.
For a studio that had struggled to turn critical praise into commercial scale, the film was the clearest sign yet that Apple’s ambitions could pay off in cinemas as well as at awards ceremonies. The economics remain awkward, even so.
Apple’s streaming operation was losing more than $1bn a year with around 45 million subscribers, according to a March 2025 report from The Information, a rounding error for a business that recently posted $111.2bn in quarterly revenue, but a stubborn one all the same.
Cook built his tenure on returning cash to shareholders, and Ternus arrives just as Apple loosens that discipline, dropping its net cash neutral target.