Is this a reward for a job well-done? Because apple hardware for the last 5-years has been amazing. The software though has sucked - will it be more years of amazing hardware and shit software? In other words focusing on developers, especially of llm software? I'm fine with that. Maybe we'll get rack-mountable apple ai servers (joking - apple servers were great and lasted a decade+ but went nowhere)

Yeah, what's going on? I'm confused by this choice - I would have expected a marketer. Maybe they really are doubling down on hardware for the ai age?

I've been critical of Cook at times because I feel his vision was a business vision more than the kind of futurism I felt from Jobs. Cook was the ultimate bean counter, hyper-optimizing Apple from a financial and operational perspective. I felt like he took less risks and was mostly squeezing every single advantage that Apple had to its limit.

But I cannot argue with the results the man achieved. Especially the transition to A-series and then M-series chips has been an incredible success. Perhaps the biggest flop was the Apple Vision Pro, but it is hard to really call him out on that since it wasn't that Apple lost a battle, it was that the product category just hasn't caught on (yet). Siri is another place where Apple has lagged but they could very easily catch up with the massive interest in local AI on the mac minis.

I think it will be difficult to look back on his legacy without giving him a large share of credit for Apple's continued success.

I hope Ternus can turn this ship. Apple wasted the last 5 years without any significant innovation/revolution or even without significant evolution. No groundbreaking change from iphone 12 pro in current iphone 17 pro.

Before we had many groundbreaking features that redefined how you use smarphone:

- gps

- flashlight (yes everybody with flashlight in the pocket!)

- front selfie camera + video calls

- compass + accelerometer + gyroscope

- good wide and ultrawide (video) camera

- nfc + apple pay

- fingerprint / faceid

- esim

- magsafe

Now you can have iphone 12 pro and don't miss much from iphone 17 pro.

So much of what Apple has lost over the last 10 years is a lower bar for what counts as good enough.

You see this most obviously in software and marketing - the kinds of decisions where only a few people sign off at the end, and where "good enough" is whatever those few people decide it is. You see it less in hardware and procurement where there's a powerful review cycle and scrutiny at every level of the stack. Work there is more immediately measurable: benchmarks for performance, dollars for cost.

The "vibe" of software, or of a PDF [^1], is much harder to catch that way. There's no benchmark that flags it and most conventional executives aren't drilling down in that level of detail to see it either.

You want distributed decision-making, of course. But that only works well if it's distributed to people who've cultivated their own taste and who will make good calls under pressure. I'm not sure how much of that gets fixed by leadership change at the top. Taste isn't really something a CEO can decree into a 60,000 person org. But I've only heard good things about Ternus, so I'm optimistic. Fingers crossed for a bright new chapter.

[^1]: https://www.apple.com/promo/pdf/US_FY26_Earth_Day_Promo_Tand...

Cook is known to be monk-like, so the relative quiet of this announcement is no surprise. Hopefully Ternus takes some risks and revisits some things from scratch (the OS layer)[0] rather than continuing down the path of more service add-ons that Cook seemed to be excitedly geared up for. Personally, it's worth noting that Ternus did -not- directly oversee the Vision Pro, which is encouraging.

[0] As Steve Jobs said in 2005: "OS X is the most advanced operating system on the planet and it has set Apple up for the next 20 years."

How incredibly prophetic that 21 years later, MacOS is suddenly showing its age.

Off topic, but it’s amusing to see that 3/8 Apple CEOs were Mike, 2/8 were John, and the rest are Steve, Tim, and Gil.

John Ternus really did turn the Mac around. The last 5 or so years of the Intel era were a disaster. Hopefully he will be able to turn things around with software too.

Thank you Tim Cook, as I am writing this on an iPhone.

Is this a golden opportunity to take on the software side of Apple, native apps like photos and messages, notes app? So much good data we give to Apple apps sit their idling, there is a play here to turn them into an independent playable artifacts and shared digital human network company. My friend emma has her snack Game on! I would like to get a snack list derived from her snack data. Yes, texting works but there is no programmatic way of accessing each other’s data. I believe this data needs be freed from Apple.

Apple’s privacy approach is stellar, that quest though is a prison where our data goes and does a slow death.

Any chance of a future where hardware can be customized at the design stage, like 3D printing but taken to an even higher level, even for 1-off builds? So prompt-driven manufacturing? For example, a watch with a USB-C port?

One day that watch could be your only PC. And then some type of eyeglass for a screen. Can also do "terrain overlays" Terminator style. I suppose battery power is the bottleneck so maybe long-distance wireless power delivery is the key (as what Tesla originally created.) So no battery at all.

Prediction: Sundar will step aside and Demis will replace him.

(actually I doubt this- Demis does not want to run a big company whose main business is Ads)