John Ternus on Clique: Duo design, Siri AI ‘not your friend,’ CEO surprise

Apple CEO John Ternus sat down with Canal+ talk show Clique after Apple’s September event, covering iPhone Duo design and engineering, Siri AI, how he was asked to become CEO, and Vision Pro. MacRumors (Juli Clover) summarized the wide-ranging interview; 9to5Mac focused on Ternus’s Vision Pro defense. Quotes below are as reported by those outlets from the Clique conversation — not new Apple statements outside the interview.

This is a different reader job from our earlier Tom Marieb Duo crease / nano-texture piece: here Ternus speaks as CEO on design rationale, engineering hard problems, AI tone, succession, and Vision Pro’s place in a long journey.

Duo: iPad-like canvas, not “two phones stuck together”

On why Duo opens to an iPad-like shape, Ternus told Clique (via MacRumors):

I think it's something new and unique, right? But I think we didn't want to just do what we'd seen other people do, which is sort of take two phone shapes and stick them together and then you get this weird square thing. We came at it from we want to build a large screen experience that feels right to us. And obviously we've been doing that for a long time with iPad. And so we knew kind of the shape, you know, we came up with this new aspect ratio.

He said developing Duo meant “so many problems” to solve — but also a chance for Apple teams to “be really clever” and “come up with entirely new things.” Hardware challenges he called out included the hinge and the display, and making both reliable.

Asked for his favorite Duo trick, Ternus pointed to the opening animation: “I mean, this is really fun, you know, the animation that you get as you open it across from one side to the other. It's just sort of whimsical and fun. And it brings a smile to your face.”

Siri AI: “not designed to be your friend”

Ternus reiterated Apple’s companion stance: Siri AI is “not designed to be your friend” — language MacRumors notes earlier from Craig Federighi. Apple, he said, does not want to replace human relationships. “They're how we learn, they're how we grow, they're how we find joy and happiness,” he said (via MacRumors).

CEO offer: Cook, the board, and a sitting-down surprise

Then-CEO Tim Cook and Apple’s board asked Ternus if he wanted the role. He did not say when he was approached, but described the question as a surprise:

When Tim asked me if it was something I would consider, I would say the good news is I was sitting down, because I never in a million years would have imagined that happening.

As CEO, he rejected the idea of a radical reset — including framing his tenure as simply “going back to engineering roots”:

I don't think anything's really changed. Sure, I'm new in this job, but the focus on innovation, the focus on products, the focus most importantly on our customers, that has never changed. That's been here from the beginning.

I am super passionate about products. I love building things. That's why I've been here so long. That's why I love what I do. And so I'm excited to continue doing that. But I don't think of it as some radical change.

Saying “one more thing” on the September stage was “amazing,” he told Clique: “I've seen Steve say it, and I've seen Tim say it… And so having the opportunity for me to say it was pretty magical. Kind of goosebumps.”

Vision Pro: “early days of a long journey”

On Clique, host Mouloud Achour asked whether Vision Pro was “a test, a flop, or the first step to the future of what’s going to be… a computer?” Ternus’s answer, as quoted by 9to5Mac:

Vision Pro to me is an amazing device. It’s an absolutely amazing device. But I think of it as like the early days of computers. It is the early days of a long journey. That’s how I feel about Vision Pro. What you see, if you think about the early days, people found different reasons where the computer allowed them, the Mac allowed them to do something never before possible. Like desktop publishing, and it became a big thing in that industry.

What you’re seeing with Vision Pro now is, certainly there’s early adopters who love it and they’re using it and they’re enjoying it, but you also—surgeons are starting to use it in surgery because it’s just a fundamentally better tool for them than a monitor that’s kind of sitting over here. And so it’s growing in that area. In film production people are using it for set development and things like that. So we’re going to continue to grow and find more and more compelling use cases. And I think there’s a very bright future.

MacRumors notes the full Clique interview also touches Tim Cook, the AI race, environmental goals, iOS 27 parental controls, and more — those threads are not fully transcribed in the secondary write-ups used here.

Bottom line: In his post-event Clique sit-down, Ternus defended Duo’s iPad-derived aspect ratio, named hinge/display reliability as core engineering fights, kept Siri AI firmly tool-not-companion, framed the CEO ask as a shock, promised continuity over radical change, and cast Vision Pro as early-computing — not a finished category. Claims are interview remarks as reported by MacRumors and 9to5Mac on September 21, 2026.

Sources: MacRumors — Juli Clover (Monday, September 21, 2026, 4:12 p.m. PDT); 9to5Mac — Ryan Christoffel (September 21, 2026, 8:41 a.m. PT), both covering Ternus’s Canal+ / Clique TV interview.