Four Top Contenders at Apple to Succeed Tim Cook

To be clear, Cook doesn’t need to leave—Apple has no mandatory retirement age for executives—and there seems no pressure on him to do so. Notwithstanding the company’s recent stumbles in artificial intelligence, he has delivered spectacularly for shareholders, driving up Apple’s market capitalization by more than an order of magnitude since he took over the top job in 2011.

Apple’s longtime Chairman Art Levinson is 75, the age after which Apple board members generally step down. Cook, already an Apple director, could level up to chairman and make room for a new chief executive or take on both titles for a time like many of his S&P 500 peers.

The top potential successors include four current Apple executives, each overseeing a different part of the company. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.

John Ternus, 50, Hardware

Though young compared with other potential candidates, Ternus has been at Apple for 24 years. He is considered a front-runner in part because Apple is a hardware company and he runs hardware engineering. He worked on the iPad, then later the Mac and AirPods before taking over responsibility for all of Apple’s products, including its most important, the iPhone.

Hardware engineering is where Apple’s products come together. Its design team maps out what products look like. Silicon and software teams are instrumental in determining features. Ternus’s job is to make sure it all works.

Among his accomplishments was working with Apple’s in-house silicon team to replace Intel chips inside Mac computers with chips designed by Apple itself. The chips proved more energy efficient than Intel’s, meaning they can run faster and generate less heat. Many PC laptops still have fans to cool off internal components. Mac laptops don’t.

Mac sales soared after the change was made beginning in 2020, helped also by pandemic-era purchases as more people bought computers to work from home. Mac sales have since retreated, though remain above prepandemic levels.

Craig Federighi, 56, Software

Federighi is one of the best-known executives at Apple. As head of software engineering for the company, he often has a starring role at Apple’s annual developer conference, where he introduces new versions of Apple’s operating systems and apps, as well as the many features that go into them. He is responsible for all that software, which runs on more than a billion devices worldwide, the way Ternus is responsible for all hardware.

Those who have worked with Federighi describe his management style as decisive. He is known for bringing his team together around a conference room table to hash things out and settle on a direction. People leave the room understanding clearly what needs to be delivered, say people who have worked for him.

His ability to deliver software products was a reason that he was given more responsibility for Apple’s AI efforts after another executive struggled to improve the company’s offerings. Most prominent is Apple’s personal assistant Siri, which can still only handle basic queries 14 years after Apple launched it, while rival chatbots such as ChatGPT converse more like humans.

Eddy Cue, 61, Services

An Apple lifer, Cue has been with the company since the late 1980s and has long overseen the division of the company that may be the most successful during the Tim Cook era: services. The iPhone is like Disney World. Once you are inside, it is hard not to spend a lot of money.

Games, subscriptions, storage, search. Whatever you want, Apple provides it, or collects a big fee from a partner that will.

Cue is especially gregarious, a larger-than-life type who loves sports, cars—he sits on Ferrari’s board—and is known as a dealmaker for Apple. He has negotiated deals with music labels, book publishers, movie studios and recently Formula One racing. In years past he was also a fixer for the company, relaunching a failed data syncing service as iCloud, and taking over Apple Maps after its disastrous launch.

Cue was close to Steve Jobs. He was one of a handful of executives who visited the Apple co-founder to say goodbye the day before Jobs died, according to the book “After Steve” by Tripp Mickle. Only a few years younger than Cook, it is unlikely he would be a long-term chief were he picked.

Greg “Joz” Joswiak, 61, Marketing

Next year will be Joz’s 40th at Apple, and he leads another function that has long been core at the company: marketing. Apple engineers its brand as carefully as its devices, helping it charge premium prices that in turn drive outsize profits. That makes Joz another of the company’s most important executives.

He is also another well-known face outside the company for his own starring role at Apple’s annual iPhone launch event and subsequent press tours where he touts the company’s latest devices. He plays a key role in the creation of company keynotes, which used to be live, but since the pandemic have been taped.

He also handles tricky press situations Apple sometimes finds itself in, given the expectations it creates for its brand. Most recently that has been addressing the company’s AI struggles, including some features promised in 2024 that it failed to deliver. 

Joz, along with Federighi, delivered the mea culpa that Apple’s AI efforts so far haven’t met the company’s high quality standards.

Write to Rolfe Winkler at Rolfe.Winkler@wsj.com