Under Tim Cook, Apple attained $4.6 trillion market capitalisation, built an efficient supply chain network that sold over three billion iPhones, and effectively stewarded Steve Jobs’ legacy. While Mr. Cook’s era will be remembered for scale and operational efficiency, those twin markers of growth could not have been accomplished without an underlying solid product line-up. That is precisely where hardware engineering comes in — the unit headed by John Ternus.
The company had just launched the iPod and was basking in its glory. Mr. His first project at Apple was the Cinema Display monitor. But consumers were shifting to cellular devices as the world was coming online. their functionality was limited While these devices were solid. Yet they filled the gap by increasing storage space that could be used by buyers to store files that included music. This was eating into the music player market.
Ternus joined Apple’s cinema display team in 2001 after a stint designing VR headsets at a small firm called Virtual Research Systems. Apple needed a product to capture the trend as Finnish handset maker Nokia’s 3310 mobile phones — shipped with small, green-lit display screens — were selling like hot cakes.
He joined Apple in 2008 and helped develop the A4, the company’s first custom chip, and has since led the build-out of an entire in-house silicon operation. There is a lot of chatter online that Apple could unveil their first foldable phone at Cupertino on September 9. We won’t know for sure until its official.
With the help of French computer scientist Jean-Marie Hullot, who wrote programmes for the original Macintosh and operating system for a smartphone, Apple built the iPhone, a device that redefined mobile telephony by ditching physical keypad — a design change that elbowed BlackBerry aside in the high-end mobile market, showcasing Apple’s display hardware prowess. That meant a new A19 Pro chip, Apple’s N1 wireless chip, and — most notably — the C1X modem, Apple’s second-generation in-house cellular modem, which matters enormously for a phone with a thinner, smaller battery. The iPhone Air shows how Mr. Ternus’s hardware engineering teams and Mr. Srouji’s chip teams work in lockstep from the earliest stages of a product’s design. The modem, the processor, and the physical chassis were engineered together rather than in sequence. Mr. In effect, the chip design and physical product engineering functions — long closely coupled but organisationally separate — now sit under one executive, reporting to the CEO. Such a deeply integrated hardware division is likely to deliver a solid line up of premium products. But the rumour mill has been churning this out for at least a month now. Apart from a foldable phone, under Mr. Ternus, the company would likely build a new product line-up in the smart-glasses segment, and also expand capabilities of Vision Pro.
Srouji is central to understanding how Apple builds devices today. Today, the A-series chips powers the iPhone and iPad, the M-series chips run every Mac, iPad Pro, and Vision Pro, and the C-series powers the cellular modems and the N1 networking chip handles Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Thread.
