TIME has revealed its annual Best Inventions, featuring “300 extraordinary innovations changing our lives.”
The 2026 Best Inventions cover features Apple CEO John Ternus and the iPhone Duo, one of this year’s TIME Best Inventions. Ternus spoke with TIME’s Andrew Chow for an exclusive interview about his transition to the role, the development of the iPhone Duo, and his vision for Apple’s next 50 years.
TIME’s Andrew Chow writes: “His predecessor, Tim Cook, gained stature on the world stage as a power broker deftly navigating global politics, markets, and supply chains. Cook’s predecessor, Steve Jobs, was a rock-star visionary who sold the world on the deeply personal and even spiritual nature of tech creations. Ternus is different from both: a private, detail-oriented engineer, little known outside the company until he became a senior hardware executive in 2021…Rather than try to replicate his forerunners’ styles of success, Ternus has so far played to his own strengths—which are also those of Apple, a company that first and foremost builds beautiful products that spark productivity, creativity, and joy.”
Chow continues: “To some critics…the scene might read as a legacy company aura-farming to sell expensive gizmos instead of building the actual technological future, which is artificial intelligence…While Apple trains its own models, it is nowhere near the technology’s frontier, leaving the company vulnerable to being left behind if super-smart AI transforms industry and society in the coming years.”
HIGHLIGHTS FROM TIME’S INTERVIEW WITH APPLE CEO JOHN TERNUS:
On where he sees Apple’s devices stacking up in an AI-driven world, Apple CEO John Ternus tells TIME: “People want physical things…They want to talk, to see images of loved ones, to take pictures. So I don’t see a scenario where all of a sudden, our devices disappear and we don’t have a need for an iPhone.”
On criticism Apple has received after turning to Google’s Gemini to build the next generation of its AI foundation models: “There’s not really a goal that we have to make every single thing in a product…We make the things where we can really bring differentiation.”
On Apple’s new Siri: “Everything in your life is on your phone…With Siri AI, you can leverage all that information to do things, learn things, and figure out things in a way that nobody else can do.”
On not being able to sleep the night before unveiling the Duo, Apple’s new foldable phone: “I was on such a moment of adrenaline and caffeine and excitement for the day.”
On the bipartisan group of senators who wrote to Apple arguing against the testing of memory chips made by a Chinese company as a way to increase supply: “The constraints in memory are absolutely a crisis…So our fundamental belief is that all options should be on the table.”
On the goal of Apple’s Screen Time experience that it redesigned in September to give parents greater control over their children’s app access: “[The company’s new updates stem from a desire] to build tools that make that really easy for parents—and I think we’ve done just that.”
On former Apple CEO Tim Cook’s relationship with the company today: “He has great relationships and loves Apple…So wherever he can help, he is happy to help.”
On his introduction to Apple at the age of eight, when his father bought an Apple II: “I started playing games on it and fell in love with Apple.”
On Apple’s growing competition in the hardware space, including from OpenAI, which is building an AI-first device, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing Greg Joswiak says: “We don’t feel threatened.”
On how Siri stacks up against other ultra-smart AI agents on the market, AI product leader Lillian Rincon says: “We’ve purposely designed it not to be a companion, and we don’t want to replace human connection.”
On the role Ternus has played at the company behind the scenes driving innovation, Apple’s VP of product design Richard Dinh says: “John was really at the center of driving the spirit of collaboration across the company to make sure that end-to-end these products give you that delightful experience—and the technology kind of disappears as you’re using it.”
You can explore the complete list of the 2026 Best Inventions: here. And you can read the exclusive cover story on John Ternus here.
