Tim Cook announced this week that he will step down as Apple CEO in September. His successor is John Ternus, currently SVP of hardware engineering and a 25-year Apple veteran. Wired’s Steven Levy published a profile of Ternus that frames the leadership transition as leaving one item unresolved from Cook’s tenure: Apple has not yet produced a defining AI product.
Note: The Wired source is paywalled and could not be verified at time of publication. Claims attributed to Levy, Ternus, and Joswiak below are drawn from the article’s publicly visible portions only; specific quotes could not be confirmed verbatim.
Cook’s tenure and the AI gap
Levy, according to the publicly visible portions of the Wired piece, acknowledges Cook’s operational record — taking the company to trillion-dollar valuations and building a services and subscription business through the App Store, iCloud, and Apple Pay — while noting the absence of a product that positions Apple in the AI era. Apple Intelligence, rolled out in 2024, was described as underwhelming by multiple observers. The company has relationships with OpenAI and Google for AI integrations on iPhone, but has not produced a first-party AI product with comparable cultural reach to the iPhone in mobile.
Ternus on the transition
Ternus, as described in the Wired piece, is a hardware engineering product person who has spent most of his career outside the public eye. Levy’s framing is that Ternus has deep product instincts but will need to demonstrate that those instincts extend to the AI era. According to Levy, Ternus placed Apple’s approach to AI within a pattern of technological transitions the company has navigated before — framing it as shipping products and experiences rather than shipping underlying technology.
Filling Ternus’s former role as SVP of hardware engineering is Johny Srouji, who led Apple’s shift to custom silicon. Levy reads this appointment as putting chip design closer to the center of Apple’s strategy going forward.
Apple’s AI platform bet
The structural comparison Levy draws is to search. Apple never built a search engine, but Google pays Apple to be the default search engine on iPhone. Apple’s approach to AI — building relationships with OpenAI, Google, and potentially others — follows the same logic: serve as the platform others pay to reach, rather than competing as a model builder. Apple’s devices already carry custom neural engines. According to Levy, Apple reportedly has a deal with Broadcom for AI chips, though the publicly available summary does not elaborate further on those terms.
Both Ternus and global marketing head Greg Joswiak, as described in Levy’s account, declined to comment on competitive device development and indicated the iPhone could remain the primary computing platform for another 50 years. Levy raises the question of what happens if AI agents displace app-based interactions on iPhone — a shift that, if it occurs, would affect the App Store revenue model Apple built under Cook.