Can Apple’s new CEO John Ternus reinvent the big bang?

Steve Jobs once famously said, in a ‘Playboy’ interview no less, that he wanted to ‘put a dent in the universe’. He is also believed to have used an alteration of the phrase by quipping later, “I want to put a ding in the universe.”

The company that Jobs built to become the Apple of the universe’s eye gets a new big boss tonight – the third after Jobs himself, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2011, but not before tempting the world with epitomes of desires like the iPhone and Mac.

Those symbols of temptation are at a crossroad, as John Ternus takes over as CEO, with his first big outing being the next iPhone launch announcements, scheduled for next week (September 9).

Will he go the ‘dent’ way, or the ‘ding’ way?

Before language nazis ask their Siri to recheck the meaning of both words, hold your horses (and voice commands). There is a reason.

While the meaning of both words may be more or less the same – to leave a disproportionately big impact on the world around us, general public impression differs significantly. To many, a ‘dent’ is sort of an upheaval, a disruption of the order in an aggressive way, while ‘ding’ sounds more like a creative addition, a sparkling new idea, a positive signalling that means you change the world into something nicer and better.

And there couldn’t be a chalk and cheese (kind’a) difference between the two who have taken on the role of being apostles to spread the Book of Jobs far and wide in the techverse.

Steve’s own anointed successor, Tim Cook, who retired as CEO last night (he continues on as executive chairman) was an operations man, well-versed with supply chain logistics as well as manufacturing management.

This came in handy as Cook’s tenure saw an aggressive expansion of Apple across the world – new plants opened up, new markets saturated and massive marketing and sales frenzies were the order of the day, with Apple iPhone sales hitting record after record.

For example, while the Indian market was ignored for long during Steve Jobs’ era (he had his own reasons), Cook not only opened Apple stores and increased supply across emerging markets like India, he also pivoted Apple manufacturing into the country, with the smart trick of ‘Zero Cost EMI’ seeing sales not just pick up, but zooming up the charts, despite the nation’s obvious lack of purchasing power for such premium products – Apple India is estimated to have earned over 10 billion dollars from India alone last financial year!

Compare that with Ternus. Well liked across the company (and Cook batting for him in the Board of Directors), Ternus seems like the anti-thesis to his predecessor. He is a products and engineering man, better versed with hardware, design and pure technology.

So is Ternus the ‘ding’ to Cook’s ‘dent’? Will Ternus’s reign see a return to the design, innovation and problem-solving promise that Jobs-era products like iMac, iPod and MacBook Air seemed to offer? After all, Apple fan boys will be the first to admit that while Cook made Apple shareholders’ pockets deeper and heavier, every launch event in the last several years seemed to have just the bare minimum of incremental innovation, leaving everyone mostly with deja vu.

If it is, that may just be what the world’s most liked company needs right now – for all its excess of success, Cook’s aggressive expansion and domination has seen him turn from (what he should have been ideally) an innovative entrepreneur into a sort of cross between a bottomline chaser and an economic diplomat, more at ease negotiating deals with the likes of Trump and Xi than understanding the great expectations of the tech ecosystem.

In the meantime, innovation has suffered: while Apple shelved its ambitions of getting into autonomous cars several years ago, it has also floundered spectacularly in the realm of AI. It has been so bad that the company was forced to swallow humble pie by tying up with Google’s Gemini AI for the time-being.

Unlike Jobs who came up with path-breaking products one after the other (remember iMac followed by iPod followed by iPhone?) Cook’s reign saw just Apple’s smartwatch range as a new category, with him seemingly being complacent with building up on the success of the iPhone and increasing profit margins by thrifting on the likes of chargers and accessories.

Can Ternus bring back the breathtaking designs and the even-more breathtaking – and path-breaking, innovations Apple was known for? Will there be enough ‘ding’ for the ‘dent’? The universe would want nothing less than a big bang, though.