{"id":49660,"date":"2026-04-27T18:01:23","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T18:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/palmer-luckey-dug-up-an-old-tech-relic-with-ties-to-apples-new-ceo\/"},"modified":"2026-04-27T18:01:23","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T18:01:23","slug":"palmer-luckey-dug-up-an-old-tech-relic-with-ties-to-apples-new-ceo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/palmer-luckey-dug-up-an-old-tech-relic-with-ties-to-apples-new-ceo\/","title":{"rendered":"Palmer Luckey dug up an old tech relic with ties to Apple&#8217;s new CEO"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/69ef752fa98bc8fdc096f428?format=jpeg\" alt=\"John Ternus\"\/><figcaption>John Ternus was the senior vice president of hardware engineering before being named CEO.<\/p>\n<p>Bloomberg\/Bloomberg via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>John Ternus, Apple&#039;s new CEO, has a background in hardware engineering.<\/li>\n<li>Oculus inventor Palmer Luckey unearthed a VR headset from Ternus&#039;s time at Virtual Research in the &#039;90s.<\/li>\n<li>Ternus left the small VR company in 2001 before joining Apple the same year.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Apple&#039;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.<\/p>\n<p>Defense startup founder and Oculus headset creator Palmer Luckey reminisced on X about a product that Ternus, who is set to become Apple&#039;s CEO in September, might&#039;ve had a hand in during his early engineering days.<\/p>\n<p>Luckey posted a photo of an old V8 head mount display from Virtual Research.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;From what I can tell, he was the lead mechanical engineer on the V8 I obtained when I was 16!,&quot; Luckey wrote, referring to Ternus.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>John Ternus, the new CEO of Apple, has been with the company for 25 years. His only non-Apple job was four years in the late 90s at Virtual Research, a tiny Virtual Reality HMD outfit.From what I can tell, he was the lead mechanical engineer on the V8 I obtained when I was 16! pic.twitter.com\/qfc8Uxg9ux<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Palmer Luckey (@PalmerLuckey) April 26, 2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&quot;It was an incredible headset for the time,&quot; Luckey told Business Insider.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Ternus and Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n<p>A user guide for the V8 published online suggests the model was released in 1998, when Ternus would&#039;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.<\/p>\n<p>A patent filed in 1995 and issued in 1998, during Ternus&#039;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.<\/p>\n<p>Ternus is best known today as Apple&#039;s hardware boss, notably for working on AirPods and the iPad among other products, and as the incoming CEO.<\/p>\n<p>His appointment marks the return to a product-minded chief like Steve Jobs. Current CEO Tim Cook&#039;s background is in operations.<\/p>\n<p>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&#039;t wow consumers. At that point, Ternus had been in the senior vice president of hardware engineering role for three years.<\/p>\n<p>Despite an underwhelming response to the Vision Pro, execs like Cook and Ternus remain optimistic about the product and the future of VR.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Vision Pro is an extraordinary product,&quot; Ternus said in a Tom&#039;s Guide interview earlier this month. &quot;It&#039;s like we reached into the future and pulled it into the present.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Ternus was the senior vice president of hardware engineering before being named CEO. Bloomberg\/Bloomberg via Getty Images John Ternus, Apple&#039;s new CEO, has a background in hardware engineering. Oculus inventor Palmer Luckey unearthed a VR headset from Ternus&#039;s time at Virtual Research in the &#039;90s. Ternus left the small VR company in 2001 before [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49661,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-49660","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49660\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}