For a CEO who built his career on aluminum, glass, and silicon, John Ternus picked a very specific topic for his first big internal address. Hint: it wasn't iPhones.
The hardware engineer just blessed the services machine
Ternus held his first town hall as incoming CEO this past week, and according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman in his latest Power On newsletter, the speech wasn't about chips or foldables. He spent his time praising Apple's services empire, the $100 billion division currently run by Eddy Cue.
Ternus told employees he's "in awe" of what the services team has built, and confirmed he plans to expand the division rather than slow it down. He even walked through his own daily routine, naming Apple Music, podcasts in the car, Apple Pay, iCloud, and ending the night with Apple TV.
Apple Pay got the gold star
John Ternus crowned Apple Pay as his favorite Apple service. | Image by Apple
The single product Ternus singled out as a personal favorite was Apple Pay. He told the room it has "changed the way that commerce works and how people buy things," calling it the perfect combination of Apple's hardware, software, and services stack.
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That's a pointed endorsement from a hardware engineer, and it lands at a time when Apple Pay is closing in on its second decade. The platform has been gaining serious ground since Apple Pay celebrated its 10-year anniversary and started rolling out installment loans, rewards, and expanded checkout features.
Which Apple service do you actually rely on the most day-to-day?
Apple Pay, my wallet hasn't seen daylight in years.
40%
iCloud, it's the glue that holds my whole setup together.
23.33%
Apple Music or TV, my entertainment lives there.
16.67%
Honestly, I'd drop them all for a cheaper iPhone.
20%
30 Votes
Why this matters more than it sounds
Cook, Cue, and former CFO Luca Maestri spent the better part of seven years pivoting Apple toward services as iPhone sales plateaued. The worry among investors was always that a hardware-first CEO might quietly let services drift while pouring resources back into devices.
Ternus just shut that conversation down on day one. By naming services as a priority and citing five specific products he uses daily, he's signaling that the recurring-revenue strategy survives the leadership change.
A smarter pivot than it looks on paper
Honestly, this is the move Apple needed. Ternus could have leaned hard into hardware nostalgia in his first town hall, the way a lot of incoming engineers would, and instead he openly tipped his hat to a division he had nothing to do with building.
The Apple Pay shoutout is the part that sticks with me. It's a service most people forget is even a product anymore, though it generates roughly $4 billion a year on a 0.15% cut of every transaction. Ternus calling it his favorite is him quietly telling investors that the services flywheel keeps spinning, regardless of who's holding the wheel.
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Johanna Romero is a Senior News Writer at PhoneArena, covering mobile technology news across Android, iOS, wearables, and the Google ecosystem she knows best. Drawing on 15 years in IT and tech support from 2007 to 2022, she brings a user-friendly eye for the practical features and lesser-known tricks readers care about. Google named her an official #TeamPixel member in 2022, and she also reviews the latest devices on her YouTube channel, JoJo the Techie.
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