John Ternus has been Apple's CEO for less than two months, and he's already settled on the line that will define his tenure. Asked about Apple and AI in a new interview with Wired's Steven Levy, Ternus said: "We're absolutely going to leverage AI to do that. We don't want to ship AI for AI's sake."
It's the most explicit articulation yet of the Ternus doctrine — and it's aimed squarely at the industry's current religion. While rivals race to out-spend each other on frontier models, Apple under Ternus is betting that the winner won't be whoever has the biggest model, but whoever makes AI disappear into products people love. "When we're doing it right," he said, "people won't have to think about whether it was AI that made this happen or more traditional software. What matters is, did we build something that they really love?"
The engineering bench is publicly behind him. Marketing chief Greg Joswiak told Wired that Ternus "innately has a great sense for great products, and that's what Apple is. You can't teach that." Johny Srouji, the hardware chief now reporting directly to Ternus after the engineering consolidation, was more direct: "John is going to be a great CEO. He's a product guy at heart, but Apple's secret weapon is the DNA, the culture, which is not going to change."
There's an irony worth noting: for all the product talk, the one place Ternus sounded like a career politician was on AI regulation. Asked whether governments should pass AI rules, he dodged entirely, pivoting back to Apple's cybersecurity posture. Tim Cook spent a decade mastering the Washington dance; Ternus, the engineer, isn't fluent yet.
The other tell from the interview: Ternus wants to ship more products, more often — and he's already doing it. Apple has released more than 25 new products in the past two months, from the iPhone Duo to the touchscreen MacBook Pro to this week's M6 machines. The question hanging over the whole doctrine is whether "product first" survives the balance sheet: Apple is simultaneously writing some of the largest checks in tech history for AI infrastructure. Saying AI is just a means to better products is easy. Proving it, quarter after quarter, is the actual job.
— via AppleInsider