Someday within the subsequent yr or two, Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus, will step onto a stage and inform the world that his firm has a revolutionary product. This product, he’ll say, will put the complete and superior energy of AI into everybody’s arms. It most likely received’t symbolize a breakthrough in AI analysis, and it may not let folks automate work or carry out duties any higher than a variety of technically minded individuals are doing right now. It might or could not contain a brand new machine, although if it doesn’t, one must be in improvement. But when all of it works out, that keynote will mark the second when Apple did to AI what it has finished for desktop computer systems, the web, cellular know-how, wearables, and music distribution. That’s, it’ll supply an answer to a difficult know-how that’s so pleasant and proper that it appears apparent looking back.
This isn’t non-compulsory for Ternus. Whereas AI is clearly the long run and tens of millions of individuals use it, much more are suspicious of it. Highly effective new AI agent applied sciences akin to Claude Code and OpenClaw are nonetheless too dangerous or technical for most individuals to undertake. If Apple doesn’t decode this for the lots, another person will. Present CEO Tim Prepare dinner, who announced this week that he’ll vacate his function in September and turn into the corporate board’s government chairman, has finished a superlative job guiding the company after Steve Jobs, however he left this necessary field unchecked. Apple Intelligence, rolled out with a lot fanfare in 2024, was underwhelming and uncompleted.
Can Ternus shepherd such a product? It’s arduous to say, as a result of the present SVP of {hardware} engineering has spent a lot of his profession out of the general public eye. He solely not too long ago began doing extra press interviews when it grew to become obvious that he was the highest candidate to imagine Prepare dinner’s job. Individuals see him as a methodical operator like Prepare dinner versus a visionary like Jobs, however that is perhaps due to an analogous low-key demeanor. Possibly as soon as he’s within the high job, he’ll be liberated to succeed in for the skies.
My very own interactions with him have been sparse. A decade in the past I spent a day at Apple’s Input Design Lab with him and his workforce. “I began in 2001 and have had the great fortune of engaged on a lot of our merchandise all through the years,” he instructed me by the use of introduction. That day he obtained deep into the weeds on topics like quantum dots, the environmental affect of cadmium, and the truth that “not all white mild is created equal.” It was clear that he was likable; there was a variety of enjoyable banter between him and his workforce.
Rather more not too long ago, I quizzed Ternus and international advertising and marketing head Greg Joswiak about Apple’s future, particularly its plans to get forward of the AI transformation. Ternus acknowledged that AI is “an immense type of inflection level,” however couched it as one in all many leaps that Apple has navigated. Every hit product—the Apple II, the Mac, iTunes, the iPod, the iPhone, iPad—piggybacked on a earlier product. “We by no means take into consideration transport a know-how,” he mentioned. “We wish to ship superb merchandise, options, and experiences, and we don’t need our clients to consider what [underlying] know-how makes it attainable. That’s the best way we take into consideration AI.”
That’s high-quality, however I look again to the mid-2000s when all people was ready for Apple to come back out with a telephone. When Jobs lastly delivered in January 2007, the product outlined the cellular period. It’s an enormous ask for Ternus to do one thing related for the AI age—however it’s a chance that have to be seized. AI threatens to disrupt all the iPhone ecosystem. By the top of this decade, it’s unlikely that folks will swipe on their telephones to faucet on Uber or Lyft. They may simply inform their always-on AI agent to get them house. Or that agent may have already discovered the place they should go, and the automobile shall be ready with out the friction of a request. “There’s an app for that,” could also be changed by “Let the agent try this.”
