John Ternus takes over from Tim Cook at Apple. Finally, we have a CEO who understands cameras, probably!

Apple announced that John Ternus, Apple's existing senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, will be taking over from Tim Cook as CEO on September 1, putting an end to months of rumor and discussion.

The official Apple statement is out. Now we can look back at some of Tim Cook's successes and most notable missteps (cough Apple Vision Pro, anyone?). He has been at the helm of the company since the single-camera iPhone 4 was the company's leading product, but had only just started to have an impact on compact camera sales.

Tim Cook has overseen Apple's release of the iPhone 7 Plus in 2016 – the first with multiple rear cameras – and taken the stage to announce every subsequent iPhone, but during his tenure, John Ternus has been rising the ranks and overseeing the development of some of those devices.

Apple fans, and perhaps investors, will no doubt be reassured to know that Ternus is a longtimer at Apple – explaining why in his own statement, the quote: "Having spent almost my entire career at Apple, I have been lucky to have worked under Steve Jobs, and to have had Tim Cook as my mentor" appears.

The legacy of Steve Jobs is strong at Apple amongst fans, while Tim Cook's success in steering the company through a value of $1bn right up to $4bn has pleased investors. Jobs was something of a risk-taker, Cook the steady-as-she-goes.

Perhaps some might see them as the personalities of Kirk and Spock?

Things are different now, however, with Cook being seen by many as having failed to anticipate the significance of AI, there is pressure on the former 'hardware guy' to solve Apple's apparent delays there out of the gate.

What will his personality be? Scotty the engineer? That is the roots many used to feel Apple should listen to. Given Ternus' recent experience developing hardware, he might be well placed to pull the realities together. One such example is computational photography – the processing behind getting phones to emulate shallow depth of field, for example, or take maximum advantage of their multiple cameras.

In the space of cameras, it's worth remembering that Ternus is very familiar with the cameras, but members of his team have long been all about mixing hardware and software. "We apply deep learning models for demosaicing, which constructs the image from the raw output" said Patrick Carroll, manager of iPhone camera architecture, of the "Photonic Engine" – and this may be increasingly true with devices like the iPhone Air which has fewer physical cameras.

Apple's press release notes that before joining Apple in 2001 Ternus worked at Virtual Research Systems, though the phrasing of Apple's release is careful only to link the Vision Pro to Tim Cook, even though it was one of the things he oversaw at Apple. That's as close as it'll come to Apple admitting the Vision Pro was not a success.

It does connect Ternus to a lot of Apple hardware, including the Apple Watch and AirPods. The text also links him to the aforementioned iPhone Air – which might yet prove to be the underpinning of a rumored folding phone – and explicitly highlights Ternus's involvement in reliability and durability.

That, then, will be the basis of Apple's play for the future. The company seems keen to explain how it will continue to grow now Cook has helped it reach $416 billion yearly revenue, and a sensible play will be trust – Ternus, Mr reliability & durability, won't be the end of that.

Ternus is one of Apple's more publicly friendly figures. He is seen above presenting the new cheaper MacBook Neo, and was outside the London Regent Street Apple Store, greeting customers, at the launch of the iPhone 17.

That suggests, I suspect, a tenure more like Cook than Jobs is coming up, but we won't know until September.