John Ternus is overhauling Apple to ship products more often

Apple's new chief executive John Ternus is planning to overhaul the company so it can run faster and leaner, according to a Bloomberg report by Mark Gurman published on September 29.

The plan includes releasing more products, becoming more experimental and cutting the layers of management that separate engineers from senior executives. According to 9to5Mac's summary of the report, Apple has dismissed a number of engineering program managers, or EPMs, in its hardware engineering division over the past two weeks.

A different release calendar

One proposal is to shake up Apple's product release calendar. Instead of relying mainly on the long-standing spring and fall cadence, the company would put out more new products throughout the year, the report says.

Fewer people, more demanded of them

Bloomberg reports that Ternus, 51, has advocated for a leaner organization for years. While leading hardware engineering he told employees at an all-hands meeting that Apple should hire fewer people, ask more of the engineers it already has and reduce organizational bloat. In one presentation he showed a slide charting annual headcount growth and argued the company should accomplish more with fewer employees.

The cuts have been sharp. The report says several program managers were affected, including roughly half a dozen directors, one of the company's most senior employee levels, and those employees were given only weeks to find other roles inside Apple. EPMs had been central to Apple's product development for decades, managing timelines and coordinating work across teams.

The report also says Apple scrapped a plan over the summer to lay off 5,000 AppleCare employees, believing AI-powered agents could handle those responsibilities.

Services revenue in focus

Alongside services chief Eddy Cue and CFO Kevan Parekh, Ternus wants to grow revenue from Apple's services division. The three have discussed launching new services and extracting more revenue from existing products and offerings, according to Bloomberg.

The reorganization points to how Apple intends to compete: fewer management layers, a stronger engineering focus and a steadier stream of releases instead of two big launch seasons a year.