A former adviser to Steve Jobs says Apple’s new CEO is exactly what’s needed: an engineer from within.

Tim Cook’s plan to step down as Apple CEO, announced Monday, will put the tech giant in the hands of hardware engineer John Ternus, returning Apple’s flagship operation to its product roots after nearly 15 years under a leader who made his mark on operations and sales.

It’s the right call, says Mike Slade, a Seattle tech veteran who spent six years as Steve Jobs’ adviser at the company. Apple needed to pick someone inside who understood the culture, Slade said, and ideally someone who knew how the hardware fit together, inside and out.

Ternus checks both boxes.

“Apple is the last company left where there are people who can build computers, in the US, at least,” Slade said. “If you know that, you have an uncanny, intuitive ability to know what’s possible. That’s how things like the iPod and the iPhone came to be.”

Ternus, 50, joined Apple in 2001 and has been there ever since, rising from the product design team to senior vice president of hardware engineering. He controls the hardware for every major product line, including the iPhone, Mac, iPad, and AirPods.

Cook, 65, announced Monday that he will become executive chairman on Sept. 1, when Ternus takes over as CEO of the Cupertino, California-based company. The revolution ends the most successful period in the history of American business: under Cook, Apple’s market has grown almost tenfold, and in billions of dollars, from about $350 billion to $4 trillion.

Slade, founder of Seattle venture capital firm Second Avenue Partners, began his career at Microsoft in 1983 and later ran Starwave, Paul Allen’s Internet company, which he sold to Disney. He served as an advisor to Apple and Jobs on product strategy and marketing from 1998 to 2004, attending Apple board meetings and working with both Jobs and Cook.

We’ve known Slade for years through the Seattle tech community, and contacted him after seeing him quoted in a New York Times cover story about Cook’s departure. In that piece, he called Cook’s legacy “continuous improvement in all aspects and great new products.”

Speaking to GeekWire over the phone, Slade noted that he recently ran the numbers on the market value of Microsoft and Apple under different leadership. Cook is notable for increasing Apple’s value from $350 billion to more than $4 trillion during his tenure, more than 10 times.

Throughout its history, he noted, Apple has never been the first mover of hardware. Music players, cell phones, and VR headsets all existed before Apple got around to them.

“They weren’t very nice,” she said. “Apple made them beautiful.”

That’s exactly what a hardware engineer puts into the CEO role, he said.

Steven Sinofsky, the former head of Microsoft Windows and Office, called Cook’s tenure as Apple’s CEO “an incredible tenure,” writing in X that Cook achieved “a rare combination of innovation and innovation.”

But the big question facing Ternus is one that preoccupied Cook in his final years: what to do about artificial intelligence. Apple has largely watched on the sidelines as rivals pour hundreds of billions into AI, and its efforts, including a delayed fix for Siri, have stumbled. Its AI chief, John Giannandrea, left last year after being gradually sidelined.

Alex Zenla, co-founder and CTO of Edera, a Seattle-based container and AI security startup, said that Apple’s strength in recent years has been hardware, driven by Apple Silicon and the reversal of past missteps such as drastically reducing Apple hardware.

Ternus has overseen many of those changes, he pointed out, which makes him well-qualified for the top job. Apple has invested early in on-device AI with the Neural Engine, noted Zenla, and that positions the hardware-minded CEO well for what’s to come.

“If Apple wants to stand out with Apple Intelligence, hardware will continue to be at the forefront of its strategy, and ultimately I believe that bet will pay off,” Zenla said via email.

Zenla also praised Cook’s legacy on a personal note, calling him a source of pride as a fellow Alabama native and one of America’s most prominent gay business executives.

Slade said he doesn’t think AI is Apple’s problem to solve. The company’s edge, in his view, is building the hardware the AI ​​runs on, and for that, he wants an engineer at the top.

“I think the people who are going to be good at AI are not going to be Microsoft or Apple or Google or Amazon,” Slade said. Instead, he said, it will be companies like OpenAI and Anthropic that focus on the technology.

Cook will remain involved as executive chairman, and Slade said that was a key aspect of the announcement. The business and political sides of managing Apple are areas where Ternus may not have deep knowledge, and Cook isn’t going anywhere.

But the core of the job is the product, Slade says, and that’s where Ternus comes in.

If he had been asked early on who Apple should choose, Slade said, his answer would have been simple: Choose an insider who understands the product. “There you go,” he said.