John Ternus Sits Down With Clique: Five Takeaways
September 29th, 2026. Hello everyone. Let's jump right into today's article.
John Ternus Sits Down With Clique: Five Takeaways
Following its “Surprise and Shine” event earlier this month, Apple did a handful of press interviews that mostly followed its usual PR playbook.
In what has become something of a mini tradition, John Ternus sat with Greg Joswiak for an interview with Tom’s Guide and TechRadar with iPhone Duo being the leading discussion topic. Ternus also sat for a very short interview with Esquire Germany. Craig Federighi discussed iPhone Duo software implementations while several other executives shared responsibility for discussing various new products and features with a few other publications. Based on the outlets that were granted interviews, it looked like Apple aimed a good portion of its PR effort outside the U.S.
The post-keynote interview that jumped out at me was Ternus sitting down with the Clique talk show from France for a nearly 35-minute chat (available to watch here via YouTube). Apple has familiarity with Clique. A few years back, Cook sat down for a near-identical interview with the show. Something can be said for how different the two interviews played out.
Over the years, Cook became more at ease talking about topics that extended beyond the latest Apple products. It was almost to the point in which Cook seemed to prefer talking about the ideals underpinning Apple’s product culture rather than the products themselves. Ternus is the opposite. Having overseen Apple’s HW team for the past five years, and being VP of hardware engineering prior to that going back to 2013, Ternus has developed a certain comfort talking about detailed hardware subjects with the press. Non-product questions are still new to Ternus. When Clique asked Ternus what he would leave to the world, he relied on Cook’s often said comment regarding leaving the world better than we found it.
While Ternus seemed more at ease talking about new products to Clique, it was his non-product answers that jumped out at me. This may have been due to the audience getting a bit more from the answers. But there was also an element of Ternus’s responses standing at contrast to much of the noise that has been written about the Apple CEO transition.
My notes and reactions were grouped into the following five topics:
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