Matthew Rogers remembers Apple’s scrappy days when, as an engineer fresh out of college, he could debate ideas directly with Steve Jobs. Rogers was part of a team of only a few dozen who worked on the original iPhone—which they initially developed as a derivative of the iPod Nano, with a click wheel. But that mechanism wasn’t good enough for Jobs. He aimed for something close to perfection.
“I was 23, 24 years old, and I interacted with Steve Jobs. That’s crazy, right? But that’s the organization he ran,” Rogers told Fortune from his Silicon Valley office (he now runs food-recycling startup Mill).
Back then, Apple’s hierarchy was much flatter. What made Apple special, he said, is that Jobs surrounded himself with consumer-minded product leaders who were expected to argue. The mandate was to build “the best thing out there” and take real risks. Some of Apple’s most iconic products came out of a skunkworks team across the street from the main office.
That much-mythologized era continues to shape—and perhaps burden—Apple as it navigates its biggest leadership transition in 15 years. Somewhere along the way, Apple lost a part of its design and product magic, Rogers and several former design and hardware employees, investors, and analysts said. The September handoff from Tim Cook to incoming chief executive John Ternus, who currently leads hardware engineering, has Rogers and other longtime Apple watchers wondering: Can the company reclaim its product-first soul?
To be fair, any assessment of Apple has to start with the obvious: By the numbers, Cook’s tenure has been enormously successful. Annual revenue has grown by more than $300 billion since he became CEO in 2011, and profits have more than quadrupled. Few companies, if any, top Apple at building elite hardware fast with a sturdy supply chain, and it remains a gold standard in consumer products. Cook inherited a company reliant on one or two big bets at a time and turned it into one of the world’s most operationally disciplined businesses.
But the experts interviewed by Fortune argue it has come at a cost. They say it’s been years since Apple created or transformed a product category that became part of people’s daily lives, not since the Apple Watch’s debut in 2015 (some say not since the original iPhone). Apple has also had commercial disappointments, like the Vision Pro headset, and floundered on its Siri assistant. Critics say iPhone launches have settled into a rhythm of incremental updates.
Some also point to a new threat. Gene Munster, a veteran Apple analyst turned investor, said AI is rapidly reshaping how people interact with devices and services in ways that could endanger Apple’s consumer hardware grip. “They have to reinvent themselves,” Munster said. “If they don’t, somebody’s going to come out with something 10 times better. It won’t be overnight, but slowly. AI has that power.”
2.5 billion
Global installed base of active Apple devices
Source: Apple FQ2 2026 results
Apple declined to comment. Rogers, who also cocreated smart home company Nest with former Apple executive Tony Fadell, said Ternus now faces a defining test. “I’ll put it this way,” he said. “He has a tall task but a big opportunity.”
The magic years
Under Jobs, Apple’s industrial design team was an all-powerful force and the heart of the company’s product innovation. Jobs famously fused software and hardware into a walled garden across its devices, with star designer Jony Ive playing a definitive role in the look and feel of Apple’s products.
The pair collaborated nearly daily, and Apple’s culture prioritized people committed to figuring something out over those who cited technical limitations, former staff said. Jobs famously rejected focus groups, believing customers didn’t know what they wanted. The goal was to make products so intuitive they needed no instructions, and to say no to anything mediocre in order to focus on what was radical.
Much of this was survival instinct. Jobs’ Apple wasn’t nearly the cash cow it is today; it had to keep reinventing itself to stay alive, often betting the entire business on one or two products at a time.
There are numerous examples of Jobs and Ive obsessing over intricate details, regardless of costs. This included fusing separate components into a single fluid form for the iPhone, and engineering the exact friction of a box lid opening. One story from journalist Tripp Mickle’s book After Steve describes how Jobs nearly scrapped the entire 1998 iMac launch because the computer had a CD tray instead of the CD slot he insisted it needed.
How the magic was lost
The irony is that Apple’s greatest designer is now a competitor. Ive’s AI hardware startup, io Products, was acquired by ChatGPT-maker OpenAI in 2025. Ternus, appearing to sense the urgency, has reportedly told staff that the design team will continue to be central to Apple. On July 10, Apple sued former vice president Tang Tan and another former employee, accusing them of taking trade secrets to OpenAI. Before becoming OpenAI’s chief hardware officer, Tan worked closely with Ive at io, which is named in the lawsuit; Ive is not. OpenAI said it has “no interest in other companies’ trade secrets” and remains focused on building innovative technology.
Former Apple staff say the design obsession faded after Jobs’ death. Cook, an operational savant, hasn’t frequented the design studio as often as Jobs did. The design team’s influence waned as Apple poured its energy into manufacturing the iPhone and other bestsellers with military precision at massive scale.
Under Cook, Apple has protected profit margins and expanded services such as iCloud. It has lost many of its old guard of designers like Danny Coster, Rico Zorkendorfer, and Christopher Stringer.
Stringer left in 2017 after nearly 22 years, frustrated that the HomePod he worked on had been treated as an accessory rather than a core, innovative product. Other designers had grown tired of the yearly cadence of iPhone releases, and Ive had become a more elusive executive since Jobs’ 2011 death.
Even as one of the world’s biggest companies, Apple has struggled to capture the public imagination under Cook as it did during the Jobs years, which some analysts say carries real business risk.
“They were the underdog fighting, and now they’re the incumbent—that’s why it’s not as exciting anymore,” said former Apple investor Arif Karim.
Getting the magic back
Nearly every expert pointed to talent as the biggest lever Ternus can pull. Apple currently lacks a clear design or product star, they said, and it keeps losing respected staff. Two vice presidents, Paul Meade and Alan Dye, recently left for OpenAI and Meta, respectively. Ternus now has the power to build his own executive team and elevate rising talent who understand Apple’s founding culture of innovation.
Some of Apple’s old feistiness needs to return, too, several experts said, pointing to the underdog energy Elon Musk brings to Tesla and SpaceX as an example of what can drive real innovation.
51%
iPhone sales as a percentage of total revenue
Source: Apple FQ2 2026 results
Analysts say Apple can go back to a model where its existing businesses go to the design team for direction, rather than designers reshaping ideas to fit what operations and finance want. Designers should be leading on what consumers actually need, said Munster, the investor.
That could mean a more “problem-first” design approach—identifying core human problems and applying technology to solve them, rather than starting from what’s operationally convenient. It would likely also require deeply integrating AI (especially Siri) across Apple’s operating systems and devices, and the discipline to say no to launches that don’t clear a high bar for user experience.
Several believe Ternus is the right executive for this moment. While he is not seen as a visionary like Jobs, he is a genuine product person with engineering credibility. He’s won respect for projects like the company’s 2007 iMac, which was the first to feature the iconic aluminum casing; Ternus played a pivotal role in building it.
One former colleague described him as the executive who “quietly got shit done.” He’s known for a collaborative leadership style, has been a frequent presence at the design studio, and has delivered polished presentations at Apple’s secretive annual off-site meeting of its top 100 leaders. Analysts say Cook has also done well to set up Ternus for success. Ternus will take over just in time to unveil Apple’s next iPhone series, which reportedly could include Apple’s first foldable phone. And even as Apple has lagged in developing AI, it’s generated close to a billion dollars from App Store fees paid by AI companies.
“They are still the consumer brand with the broadest reach from a hardware perspective,” said longtime Apple analyst Carolina Milanesi. Her fondest Apple memory is watching the company unveil FaceTime in 2010, a moment that changed how people connected through their phones. Ternus, she said, has “an engineering mindset of understanding what is possible and what isn’t.”
Ternus can’t simply bring the colossus that is Apple back to its hungry startup days, Milanesi said. He needs to work within a system that ships more than 200 million phones a year. Rekindling the product-first focus may mean bringing that fire to only some devices, like foldables or glasses, while creating small, passionate groups that can bypass the institutional inertia of the larger organization.
Some of its old grit could be beneficial. Former staff who worked on the first iBook, the company’s colorful laptop, in the 1990s recall driving around Taipei in the early morning hours, encountering mom-and-pop shops with dirt floors and the occasional roaming chicken as they tried to assemble supply chains and troubleshoot issues with local vendors.
Those hardships forged a resourcefulness that no supply-chain optimization can manufacture on its own. It’s that instinct, more than any single product, that some hope Ternus can bring back.
“Apple has become the best in the world at iterating,” said Rogers, the former engineer. “This is about going from iteration to innovation. Those are different skill sets.”
This article appears in the August/September 2026 issue of Fortune with the headline “Can a new CEO bring back Apple’s design mojo?”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com