• John Ternus, Apple's new CEO, has a background in hardware engineering.
• Oculus inventor Palmer Luckey unearthed a VR headset from Ternus's time at Virtual Research in the '90s.
• Ternus left the small VR company in 2001 before joining Apple the same year.

Apple's John Ternus is a 25-year veteran of the tech giant, but one of his first engineering gigs was at a lesser-known company building virtual reality headsets.

Defense startup founder and Oculus headset creator Palmer Luckey reminisced on X about a product that Ternus, who is set to become Apple's CEO in September, might've had a hand in during his early engineering days.

Luckey posted a photo of an old V8 head mount display from Virtual Research.

"From what I can tell, he was the lead mechanical engineer on the V8 I obtained when I was 16!," Luckey wrote, referring to Ternus.

"It was an incredible headset for the time," Luckey told Business Insider.

He described the headset as well-balanced and relatively lightweight, with a field of vision that was ahead of that of other consumer products at the time. It mainly sold to military flight simulators for around $50,000, Luckey said.

Ternus and Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A user guide for the V8 published online suggests the model was released in 1998, when Ternus would've been working at the company. He was an engineer at Virtual Research from 1997 to 2001, and joined Apple later that year, according to his LinkedIn profile.

A patent filed in 1995 and issued in 1998, during Ternus's time at Virtual Research, describes a similar-looking product, a virtual display apparatus for use in a virtual reality system. It supported the attachment of video displays.

Ternus is best known today as Apple's hardware boss, notably for working on AirPods and the iPad among other products, and as the incoming CEO.

His appointment marks the return to a product-minded chief like Steve Jobs. Current CEO Tim Cook's background is in operations.

The tech giant made its debut in the high-tech headset market in 2024 with the Vision Pro, which received a lukewarm response from the public. Its $3,500 price tag and lack of a killer app didn't wow consumers. At that point, Ternus had been in the senior vice president of hardware engineering role for three years.

Despite an underwhelming response to the Vision Pro, execs like Cook and Ternus remain optimistic about the product and the future of VR.

"Vision Pro is an extraordinary product," Ternus said in a Tom's Guide interview earlier this month. "It's like we reached into the future and pulled it into the present."

• Apple's outgoing CEO, Tim Cook, expanded the iPhone's size during his tenure, delighting some fans.
• The standard iPhone grew from 3.5 inches to over 6 inches, and Cook introduced larger-format models.
• Cofounder Steve Jobs initially dismissed the larger phones, calling them impractical.

Apple's outgoing CEO, Tim Cook, proved his predecessor, Steve Jobs, wrong: some people love a large iPhone.

Jobs, the cofounder and driving force behind the iPhone, once knocked smartphones larger than 4 inches. "You can't get your hand around it," he said in a 2010 press conference. "No one's going to buy that."

When Cook took the reins in 2011, he began expanding the iPhone's size. In 2012, the release of the iPhone 5 increased the phone's screen size from 3.5 inches to 4 inches. Later base models reached up to 5.8 inches before landing at around 6.3 inches in the latest iteration, the iPhone 17.

Cook also introduced larger-format iPhones, starting with the Plus series in 2014, which had a display size of 5.5 inches that year.

Cook deftly leaned into larger models as the world turned to video streaming and on-the-go viewing. Netflix, for example, shifted its business around 2011 to focus more on streaming, and YouTube was growing rapidly around that time.

In 2025, Apple introduced its largest iPhone model yet, the iPhone 17 Pro Max, which topped out at 6.9 inches.

The shift to larger sizes has been working out for Apple. Cook said in January that iPhone demand was "staggering" and "unprecedented" in the holiday quarter. Apple posted $85 billion in iPhone revenue for the period.

Early data also showed that demand for the 17 Pro Max was stronger in the first two weeks of availability than other models in the 17 lineup, according to market research firm Counterpoint Research.

Apple's larger-format phones are an example of how the tech giant prioritizes putting its own spin on technology rather than being first-to-market with an idea.

"We could have done a larger iPhone years ago," Cook told PBS News' Charlie Rose in 2014. "It's never been about just making a larger phone. It's been about making a better phone in every single way."

Thanks, Tim.

• Target is calling about 150 remote workers back to its Minneapolis headquarters.
• The relocation mandate impacts workers within its merchandising division.
• The retailer, which brought on a new CEO earlier this year, has been working to turn the business around.

Target is calling more remote workers back to its headquarters.

The retailer is requiring about 150 remote workers within two teams in its merchandising group to relocate to Minneapolis, a spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider. Bloomberg earlier reported the news.

The company is offering relocation assistance to those who decide to move and severance to those who choose not to.

A company spokesperson said in a statement that "increased in-person collaboration across a core part of our merchandising team will help us reinforce our merchandising authority, unlocking greater creativity and enabling us to move faster to deliver on our strategy."

The retailer, which brought on a new CEO earlier this year, is in the midst of a turnaround strategy to revive growth, and improving its merchandise is a pillar of that effort.

The relocation mandate comes as more companies, such as Amazon and AT&T, have been calling workers back into the office in recent years. Target last year ramped up in-office days for employees already based in Minneapolis.

Target does not have a companywide mandate and has left in-office requirements to team leaders.

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• Salesforce is skipping raises for director-level and above employees this year, according to an internal memo.
• The company said it is increasing stock and bonus pools for its "highest performing individuals."
• Employees will find out about their pay during reviews, which start at the end of this month.

Salesforce isn't offering raises this year to employees at the director level and above, according to an internal email viewed by Business Insider.

"We have decided to focus merit increases at the Senior Manager level (grade 8) and below," states the email, sent by the company's human-resources team.

Instead of giving raises, the company said it is increasing stock and bonus pools for its "highest performing individuals" among upper-level employees, calling it part of an "investment in performance and long-term growth."

Employees will learn about their compensation during performance reviews, which begin at the end of March.

Salesforce's decision could reflect a broader shift in how Big Tech is paying senior talent. Instead of increasing base pay, some companies are increasingly tying compensation to stock performance and equity, preserving cash while still incentivizing top leaders. Meta just announced this week that it created a lucrative incentive system for stock for a number of its C-suite executives.

Salesforce stock is down about 37% over the past year. CEO Marc Benioff recently downplayed fears about AI's threat to software-as-a-service companies. Those fears have prompted recent sell-offs of software stocks.

The email stated that 10% more directors and senior directors are getting stock grants, that the average stock grant increased, and that 80% of directors and senior directors who received "highly successful" or "exceptional" performance ratings received a 20% to 40% bigger grant.

The pool for bonuses "is funded at 103%," the email stated. Most eligible directors and senior directors received 100% or more of their bonus, and all of the directors and senior directors who received the top performance ratings got 115% to 140% of their bonuses.

Salesforce laid off some employees around the start of its fiscal year Feb. 1. Those cuts affected fewer than 1,000 employees, according to a person familiar with them. Around that time, the company also hired or promoted six new leaders, replacing five high-profile leaders who had recently announced departures from the company.

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• Business Insider gathered chief people officers and senior leaders for an on-the-record dinner in New York City.
• The event, Futureproofing Your Workforce in the Age of AI, highlighted the relentless change HR executives are navigating.
• Below are excerpts from the discussion, edited for clarity.

"Are we working for AI at this point or is AI working for us?" Maxine Carrington, the Chief People Officer of Northwell Health asked a group of HR and people executives who were gathered for dinner on a rainy night in New York City recently.

"How we can use those tools as enablers to help us achieve our goals, that's the mindset I need us to have, not chasing the tools."

Heads around the table nodded in agreement. The group, convened by Business Insider, spent ninety minutes in a conversation titled "Futureproofing Your Workforce in the Age of AI," presented by Indeed.

"I do think it's an organizational, transformational challenge and not a technological one," Gareth Lewis of Lewis People & Culture Advisory said at one point. "But right now the conversation's all around tools, efficiencies, headcount reductions, and not so much about how we actually are going to redesign our roles."

Redesigning roles is exactly what Agnes Garaba, Chief People Officer at UiPath, is striving to do, but it's not easy.

"So we basically asked every single one of the functional leaders to think about what the future would look like," she said. "If I could go out today and blow up my entire HR team and reimagine it from scratch, what would that look like? And it's a hard exercise. Often I find our imagination is the biggest barrier, so to say, to get there."

The tension between AI driving total transformation versus a focus on integrating AI tools was top-of-mind for the executives gathered together. But in the wide-ranging conversation, plenty of other topics were discussed too. Below are some highlights.

How to help employees become AI "power users"

Katie Burke, COO, Harvey: Part of what you have to start asking yourself is, is your organization experimenting and dipping your toe in the water or are you driving actual impact and transformation? And not surprisingly, there are patterns across every industry on what makes the difference between those.

Number one is senior leaders actually being in on the work. So not saying, "Here's the example that I can share." It's actually building the agents themselves, for example, or attending those hackathons.

And you cannot drive transformation, in my opinion, just with a stick. There has to be some level of carrot and reward and excitement, and I think people operate at their best when they are not operating out of fear.

Make partners prove the value of AI tools they're providing

Roz Harris, VP, Talent, Zillow: Put the pressure on your product partners, the vendors that you're using, to justify their roadmaps and why they're getting your dollar. Because your shareholders, your leaders are (asking), 'What's the big revolutionary bang that's going to unlock our teams? That's going to unlock the business, going to move things forward?'

I can promise you many of us aren't companies that are going to build that thing ourselves. But we do have product partners who should be enabling us to do those things. But are we articulating our needs to them? Are we articulating those well?

Company-wide hackathons allow employees to shine

Maggie Hulce, Chief Revenue Officer, Indeed: So we have a monthly contest that any employee can be a part of and they submit their ideas of agents or use cases. The sales teams are absolutely running away with it. And people don't think of the sales teams as the ones who are going to build the agents first. So this particular person who we thought of as a salesperson, maybe thought of as one-dimensional, now I see them as having five functional hats.

HR leaders play a key role in pushing companies to adopt AI

Dickie Steele, Partner, McKinsey & Company: How do we build a culture where we go after dramatic productivity improvement on the numerator? Somebody doing a thousand clinical trials, not one clinical trial? I feel as an HR community, we should be a lighthouse in terms of the deployment of (AI) agents. We should be pushing the business to start with a much more compelling value creation thesis than "Can we cook something up that makes our employees marginally more productive?"

Beware the hype around AI dramatically improving your bottom line

Liz Dente, Chief People Officer, Priceline: Dickie, just to push back a little bit is, you know, you're looking for this amazing thousand-times return. The notion of incremental, relentless forward progress every day is just fine with us. You know, it'd be great to be selling a thousand times more plane tickets, but I just don't think that's realistic. And I think there's a lot of hype in the marketplace that you're going to get these massive returns. I just don't think it's true.