Apple's Next CEO Says Vision Pro's Best Days Are Still Ahead.

When John Ternus takes over as Apple's chief executive on September 1, he will inherit one of the trickiest products in the company's modern history: the Vision Pro. And in a recent sit-down with Tom's Guide alongside marketing chief Greg Joswiak, the incoming CEO made clear he isn't ready to back away from it.

"I think we're still very much in the early innings of spatial computing," Ternus said, calling the headset "an extraordinary product" that reached into the future and pulled it into the present. He pointed to enterprise and medical use cases as areas of growing momentum, framing the Vision Pro not as a misstep but as the opening chapter of a much longer story.

It is, in many ways, the same message Tim Cook has been delivering for two years. The question is whether Ternus will keep telling it once the title on his door changes.

The Inheritance

Apple announced on April 20 that Ternus, the senior vice president of hardware engineering, would succeed Cook as the company's eighth CEO. Cook, 65, will move into the role of executive chairman. The handoff is the first at Apple since Cook himself took over from Steve Jobs in 2011, and Ternus is stepping in at almost exactly the same age Cook was at the time, 51.

Ternus is, by background, a hardware guy. He joined Apple in 2001, took over hardware engineering in 2021, and has been the on-stage face of marquee launches like the iPhone Air and the iPhone 17 line. Insiders had viewed him as the leading internal candidate for some time, particularly after former chief operating officer Jeff Williams stepped back from operational duties last year. Johny Srouji, Apple's silicon chief, will take over an expanded role as chief hardware officer when the transition is complete.

That hardware pedigree matters here, because of every product Ternus inherits, the Vision Pro is the one that asks the hardest hardware questions: how to get the weight down, the price down, and the appeal up.

A Product Stuck in Place

By almost any measure, the Vision Pro has not lived up to the cultural moment Apple staged for it in early 2024. First-year sales are widely estimated at roughly 500,000 units, well short of the million-per-year ceiling some analysts had once projected and consistent with what Apple's own supply chain reportedly anticipated. The headset still starts at $3,499, climbing closer to $4,000 once corrective lens inserts are added.

In October 2025, Apple released a quiet refresh: same industrial design, same price, but with an M5 chip, 120Hz refresh rate, and a new Dual Knit Band aimed at one of the headset's most consistent complaints, comfort. It was, as John Gruber put it on Daring Fireball, "the definition of low key," a signal that Apple was still in the game rather than an attempt to reset the trajectory.

Then came the harder rumors. In late April, MacRumors reported that Apple had effectively given up on the current Vision Pro hardware after the M5 refresh failed to move the needle, with members of the team being redistributed to other projects, including Siri. Apple has not discontinued the headset and continues to sell it. But the prospect of a true second-generation Vision Pro, lighter, cheaper, more accessible, appears to have receded rather than approached. A previously rumored "Vision Air" project was reportedly shelved last year.

The current consensus among Apple watchers: there is no meaningful new headset coming in 2026, and the company's near-term wearables ambition is shifting toward smart glasses in the vein of Meta's Ray-Ban collaboration, with a first version expected to ship without an integrated display.

Reading the Quotes

Against that backdrop, Ternus and Joswiak's Tom's Guide interview reads less like a confident product update and more like careful brand maintenance.

The two executives leaned hard on the word "inevitability." Joswiak said he could not give a timeline for when spatial computing breaks through but insisted "you know it's an inevitability." Ternus echoed the framing, calling the merging of digital and physical worlds something Apple is excited to keep building toward. Neither would comment directly on smart glasses, though Joswiak acknowledged the company is "working on some pretty cool stuff."

What is striking is what was not said. Ternus did not defend Vision Pro sales. He did not promise a follow-up. He talked about the category, not the product. That is consistent with how Apple executives signal a strategic pivot without admitting one: keep the platform's reputation intact while moving the resources elsewhere.

Gruber's read is worth holding onto here. He noted that Apple executives are practiced at giving "non-answer answer[s] to a question they don't want to answer honestly," and pointed to Cook publicly squashing retirement rumors a month before announcing his own succession. The enthusiasm Ternus and Joswiak showed for spatial computing is real. The enthusiasm for the current Vision Pro hardware, specifically, is harder to locate in the transcript.

What This Means for Ternus's Apple

The Vision Pro will not be the defining product of Ternus's CEO tenure. But how he handles it will tell us a lot about what kind of CEO he intends to be.

Cook's instinct, consistently, was to defend Vision Pro publicly while letting the roadmap quietly stretch. He called it an "early adopter product," said he used it daily, and held the price line through a refresh cycle. That bought Apple time without forcing a hard call.

Ternus inherits the same dilemma but with less runway. The Meta Ray-Ban Display category is gathering real momentum at price points between $599 and $799. Apple's own glasses project, internally seen as the more promising long-term wearables bet, is reportedly the priority now. And the technology Vision Pro pioneered, dense micro-OLED displays, passthrough video, eye and hand tracking, has so far proven too power-hungry to translate into something glasses-sized.

So the genuinely interesting question is not whether Ternus believes in spatial computing. He clearly does, and he is right that the long arc points that direction. The question is whether the Vision Pro itself, as a product line, survives the transition or quietly becomes a research platform whose ideas show up in something else entirely.

For now, Ternus is saying the right things. "It's fun, we're at the beginning of the journey," he told Tom's Guide. The next 12 months will reveal which journey he meant.