Ternus, a 25-year-old Apple veteran and the company’s hardware chief, who will be taking over the top boss’ role, inherits a business with enormous financial strength, a global installed base of more than 2.5 billion active devices, and an annual revenue of more than USD 416 billion, but one that has struggled to match the AI innovation pace set by rivals such as Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

After completing his 15-year record-breaking tenure as CEO, during which he led Apple to unprecedented heights, Cook will assume the role of executive chairman, allowing him to remain engaged in policymaking.

The choice of Ternus is significant. Unlike Cook, who built his reputation on operations and supply-chain management, Ternus is an engineer and product executive. He joined Apple’s product design team in 2001, became vice-president of hardware engineering in 2013, and joined the executive team in 2021.

He has overseen hardware developments across the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and AirPods. His work on Apple silicon strengthened the Mac business by giving Apple greater control over processors and improving performance.

Apple’s effort to build “Apple Intelligence” has faced significant delays, especially regarding a more advanced version of Siri. As it strives to deliver AI capabilities across its devices, the company has sought outside technology, including partnerships with OpenAI and Google.

That strategy gives Apple access to powerful models but also raises questions about whether the company can develop enough proprietary AI technology to compete over the long term.

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Many expected Cook to be a caretaker, a steward of Jobs’ legacy. What happened instead was something more interesting: Cook didn’t try to be Jobs. He became himself – and in doing so, transformed Apple from a products company into an ecosystem empire.

The numbers are stark and revealing. Apple’s market capitalisation has surged from 280 billion pound to more than 3.2 trillion pound, a tenfold increase. Total annual revenue has quadrupled from 72 billion pound to 333 billion pound.

But those figures, impressive as they are, obscure a more consequential shift in how Apple creates value. Under Cook, the company didn’t just grow larger; it became fundamentally different.

The market cap milestone
Apple became the first publicly listed company to cross the 800 billion valuation pound in August 2018. It hit 1.6 trillion pound in 2020, crossed 2.4 trillion pound in January 2022, and briefly touched 4 trillion pound in July 2026 – a moment that seemed nearly impossible when Cook took office.

To put this in perspective, Apple’s current valuation roughly equals the size of the entire British economy, the fifth largest in the world.

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The development has defied the overall Nasdaq trends, in which the shares of Apple’s industry peers like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon have remained in the green zone.

Apple’s stock downfall came after the iPhone maker issued a disappointing forecast that showed the company struggling to secure enough components as the AI-driven data center boom strains global supply chains.

The drop, if it continues, may end up marking the stock’s worst time since the pandemic-driven selloff in March ‌2020. It would even erase nearly USD 500 billion from Apple’s market capitalization and return the crown of the world’s most valuable company to Nvidia. Apple reclaimed the title in the final week of July.

By July 27, Apple’s valuation stood near USD 4.9 trillion, while for Nvidia, the ratio was around USD 4.77 to USD 4.9 trillion. However, it was the highest among the AI chip makers. Google parent Alphabet came third with over USD 4.3 trillion, holding a major share in tech and search.

At least four brokerages cut their targets for the company’s stock price, while three raised them. That moved the median view to USD 330, which is USD 3 lower than the last closing price, according to LSEG data. The stock is witnessing the correction after rising 22.7% in 2026.

Talking about Apple’s latest earnings data, the iPhone maker, in its Q2, saw record-breaking numbers, as strong iPhone demand and revenue from its services were enough to address the global memory chip supply constraints to some extent.

Revenues stood at USD 109.4 billion—up 16% compared to 2025. Net profits, on the other hand, came in at USD 29.8 billion, which is a 27% lift from Q3, 2025.

On iPhones’ demand front, revenues reached USD 54.2 billion for the three-month period ending on June 27, 2026. The figure represents a 21% rise compared to the same time in 2025.

The services division, which covers Apple’s R&D activities on fronts like digital content, cloud, financial, and advertising, among others, continued its rise and hit the USD 30.7 billion mark. The tech giant also revealed having 1.5 billion paid subscriptions across its platforms.

Mac revenues saw a healthy 29% jump to USD 10.3 billion, while iPad sales were slightly down to USD 6.2 billion. The wearables, home, and accessories division saw a slight 7% bump up to USD 7.9 billion.

However, despite record-breaking numbers, component shortages, especially on the chip, are now weighing big time on the tech giant’s stock performance on the Nasdaq.

Outgoing CEO Tim Cook, often considered in the tech circle as a supply-chain genius, called the shortages “very significant.” His next prediction was grimmer, as he stated that Apple had limited options to address the issue. All eyes will be on John Ternus, who takes over the leadership reigns in September.

The primary reason behind the chip shortage is the Big Tech’s bid to scoop up advanced semiconductor-making capacity to power its AI data centers, sparking shortages and price increases that are expected to shrink both the personal computer and smartphone markets in 2026.

While Apple had cushioned some of the blow from surging memory costs by falling back on its stockpiled inventory, Cook said that the buffer was fading and shortages of processors were keeping it from meeting strong demand.

While Wall Street was estimating 12% revenue growth for Apple in Q3, the company now sees the ratio to stay between 9% and 11%, falling short of the analysts’ estimates.

The weakness in Apple’s services division has further worried investors, as it came during a stretch of strong iPhone sales, which typically feed the business that takes a cut of App Store purchases and includes everything from Apple Music to Apple TV.

Analysts see the slowdown deepening further if iPhone sales take a hit from a price increase that may arrive along with the launch of its new lineup in September.

“Apple’s ⁠leverage over the supply chain appears to be in question, and it’s not clear that AI is serving as any measurable tailwind to products or services, with its future monetization impact still uncertain. In fact, one could argue App Store softness might even be ⁠a result of AI re-prioritizing customer time,” Morgan Stanley analysts said.

Still, a section of the analysts has backed Apple to overcome the crisis. In the past, iPhones have weathered price hikes before without denting demand significantly. Also, they pointed out the recent US leasing deal with fintech Klarna to offer monthly plans for Apple’s devices, which could soften the ⁠blow to some extent.

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The entry-level MacBook Neo rose from USD 599 to USD 699, while the MacBook Air with 512GB storage climbed from USD 1,099 to USD 1,299. The MacBook Pro with 1TB storage jumped USD 300, from USD 1,699 to USD 1,999.

On the iPad side, the 128GB iPad Air rose from USD 599 to USD 749, and the 256GB Wi-Fi iPad Pro increased from USD 999 to USD 1,199. Apple also raised prices on its HomePod and Apple TV. iPhone and AirPods prices remained unchanged.

Apple’s online store briefly went offline early Thursday (25th June) before returning with the updated prices.

“We have never seen a component price increase this much, this quickly. We have reached a point where we need to begin raising prices on a number of products,” the company said in a statement.

Cook had flagged the move a week earlier, telling the Wall Street Journal that price rises were “unavoidable” while describing the situation as “a hundred-year flood” unlike anything he had witnessed in more than 40 years in the industry.

The price rises stem from a global memory shortage, dubbed “RAMageddon,” as AI data center construction diverts chip supplies away from consumer electronics. Memory and storage prices have quadrupled over the past three quarters, according to Counterpoint Research, while DRAM prices rose as much as 98% in Q1 2026 alone, according to TrendForce, with a further 58%-63% increase expected this quarter.

In April this year, Apple informed its investors that the tech giant’s existing inventories had helped it keep its gross margins above Wall Street expectations but that rising memory costs would start to catch up in the coming months, with profitability expected to fall slightly.

“We expect significantly higher memory costs. Where we don’t give color beyond June, I can tell you that beyond ‌the June ⁠quarter, we believe memory costs will drive an increasing impact on our business,” Cook remarked back then.

Microsoft too has taken a similar action by announcing the hike in the price of the 512 GB and 1 TB models of its Xbox gaming console by USD 100 and USD 150, respectively.

“We hoped another price increase would not be necessary, and we have spent the last several months working with suppliers on options. Unfortunately, console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x, and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027. The entire consumer electronics industry is struggling with the current components crisis, but the effects are particularly hard on consoles,” Microsoft said in a statement.

Trevor Long, a consumer tech analyst and commentator, while interacting with Al Jazeera, warned that the price increases may end up affecting Apple’s overall product sales.

“Some products, like their newest product, the MacBook Neo, while excellent as products, were also outstanding because of price. This hits that hard. They are still a decent deal but push closer to other competitive product prices as well. The key thing will be the next iPhone and how close they can price it to the last one. I’d expect a $50-150 price rise across the range, depending on models,” Long remarked, while predicting the coming years to be the “tough ones” for the tech players due to the chip price rise.

Chipmaker Micron has been a major beneficiary, recently reporting quadrupled revenue and a gross margin surge to 84.9%, surpassing Nvidia and Meta. The firm has already secured USD 22 billion in long-term supply commitments.

Analysts expect the squeeze to dent device sales broadly, with IDC projecting an 11.3% decline in PC sales and a near 14% drop in smartphone shipments in 2026.

“The iPhone isn’t spared; its hike is coming. It was incredibly strategic for Apple to make the price hike announcements prior to the iPhone fall launch, ⁠so the headlines at launch are not the price hikes but the value the new phones bring,” said Nabila Popal, a senior research director at IDC.

Counterpoint’s Tarun Pathak estimates the higher component costs could add roughly USD 200 to the cost of an iPhone, with further Apple price rises of USD 150-USD 200 likely across its range.

As per the IDC, the fallouts of the chip price rise will weigh heavily on the smartphone market, as the latter will see its biggest-ever annual decline of nearly 14% in 2026, while the ⁠PC market is estimated to fall by 11.3%.

While Apple’s March launch of the MacBook Neo helped the tech giant’s strong sales forecast for the June quarter, the advantage has been nullified with the product’s increased price. It has now lost a USD 100 advantage over the USD 699 XPS 13 laptop that Dell unveiled in May, especially to take on the Neo. MacBook Neo will also become more expensive than some Chromebooks from Lenovo and Asus.

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Over that period, he grew Apple from a USD 350 billion company to one worth over USD 3 trillion. But the company he hands over faces a pointed question: did Apple wait too long to get serious about artificial intelligence?

WWDC 2026 was Apple’s answer. And it was a comprehensive one.

A New Siri, Built from Scratch
The centrepiece of the entire event was a completely rebuilt version of Siri, rebranded as Siri AI. The old Siri, the one that often struggled to understand requests, forgot context mid-conversation, and regularly handed users off to a web search, is gone.

In its place is a conversational assistant that can hold a thread across multiple exchanges, remember what was said earlier, and take action across apps without being told to start from scratch each time.

The visual change is immediately obvious. Rather than the familiar-coloured glow around the edges of the screen, invoking Siri AI brings up a dark-themed overlay from the “Dynamic Island,” the pill-shaped cutout at the top of recent iPhones. There is now a dedicated app that stores the full conversation history, synced across iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro through iCloud.

Live demonstrations at the keynote showed what this actually looks like in practice. A user asked Siri AI to check the rules for a concert ticket lottery, set reminders around the relevant dates, pull together a watch-party menu based on what their friends had been discussing in Messages, and draft an email about it, all in one flowing conversation. That kind of chained task was simply not possible before.

Two capabilities make this work. The first is personal context understanding. Siri AI reads across a user’s messages, emails, and photos to surface relevant information without needing everything spelled out.

The second is onscreen awareness, which means the assistant can see what is currently on the screen and act on it. If a user is looking at a recipe, Siri AI knows that. If they are reading an email thread, it knows that too.

Writing Help and a Smarter Camera
Siri AI has also become a system-wide writing assistant through a feature called “Writing Tools.” It can generate a draft from scratch across any app, a message, an email, a note, and will adjust its tone depending on who the user is writing to. If someone typically messages their manager in short bullet points, the system will pick that up and mirror it automatically.

On the camera side, a capability called Visual Intelligence has been significantly expanded. On iPhone, it is now built into the Camera app. Point the phone at a dish in a restaurant and it will return nutritional information; hold it over a dinner bill and it can split the cost through Apple Cash. This feature is now available on iPad and Mac as well.

On iPad, it is accessible through the screenshot tool. On Mac, users can hold a keyboard shortcut, draw a box around any part of the screen, and ask Siri AI a question about it. On Apple Vision Pro, the spatial computing headset, Visual Intelligence works in the physical world, and users can look at a real-world object and query the assistant about it.

How the System Actually Works
The engineering underneath all of this is worth understanding, because it is central to Apple’s argument that it can compete with the big cloud AI players while protecting user privacy.

Apple uses what it calls a system orchestrator, essentially a traffic controller that sits in the background, watching what a user is doing and deciding where each query should go. Simple tasks are handled directly on the device itself by Apple’s own in-house model, called the “Apple Foundation Model Core.”

More demanding local tasks, fast dictation and expressive voice synthesis, go to a more powerful version of the same model. If a query is too complex for the device to handle locally, it gets routed to Apple’s cloud infrastructure, called Private Cloud Compute.

The key privacy claim is that any data processed through Private Cloud Compute is never stored, and Apple itself cannot access it. That is a meaningful distinction from how most cloud AI services work.

The Google Partnership
To power its most capable cloud-based features, Apple has partnered with Google and is using a custom version of Google’s Gemini AI model, specifically tuned to work within Apple’s system. This is not a simple API arrangement where Apple just plugs into Google’s chatbot. Apple’s own engineering team trained its models using techniques refined in part by Gemini’s outputs. The licence reportedly costs Apple around USD 1 billion a year.

This is a notable development. Apple and Google are fierce competitors in the smartphone market, yet on AI, they have found a significant point of collaboration. For Apple, it means access to world-class large language model capability without having to build everything from scratch. For Google, it means its Gemini technology is embedded at the system level of the world’s most profitable consumer hardware ecosystem.

Where This Leaves the Chatbot Market
The broader AI landscape has been shifting rapidly. OpenAI, which dominated the chatbot market through 2024 and most of 2025, has seen its share fall from around 87% to somewhere between 64% and 68%. Google’s Gemini has grown significantly, capturing between 18% and 21% of the market. The field is no longer winner-takes-all.

Siri AI enters this landscape differently from ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. It is not trying to win on raw intelligence or breadth of knowledge. It is built to be deeply embedded in a person’s digital life, their specific files, their specific habits, their specific apps.

ChatGPT and Claude, for instance, have no access to a user’s personal data unless it is manually shared. Siri AI, by design, already knows it. That is a different kind of usefulness.

A New Mac Operating System
Apple also launched macOS Golden Gate, the 27th version of its desktop operating system, carrying significant technical changes beneath a refined visual surface.

Most consequentially, it drops support for older Intel-based Mac computers entirely, completing a transition to Apple’s own silicon chips that began in 2020. “Rosetta 2,” the translation layer that allowed older Intel software to run on newer Apple chips, is included for the last time. To run Siri AI on-device, a Mac must have an Apple M3 chip or newer, and at least 12GB of RAM.

The visual changes are more subtle. A global slider to adjust how transparent the interface appears, slightly tighter window corners, and coloured icons in the sidebar. Boot Camp, which allowed Macs to run Windows, has been removed. Support for older AirPort Time Capsule routers used as backup drives has also been dropped.

Elsewhere, Apple Watch gains multi-turn Siri AI support and a redesigned Smart Stack. Apple TV gets up to 30% faster app launch times. And across all platforms, improved child safety tools allow parents to set up dedicated child accounts with content filtering and automatic blocking of violent material.

What Comes Next
Cook’s legacy is a company with unmatched hardware-software integration and a privacy reputation that competitors cannot easily replicate. The challenge he has handed Ternus is to make that integration feel as intelligent as it is seamless.

WWDC 2026 was the clearest signal yet that Apple is not conceding the AI era to cloud-first competitors. It is instead betting that the most valuable AI is the one that already knows you, running quietly on hardware that fits in your pocket and is not sending your information to anyone else.

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As per a report from Bloomberg, the new Siri will become the centrepiece of Apple’s next-generation iPhone, iPad and Mac software updates.

Analysts are terming the latest Siri launch to be a pivotal moment for Apple’s AI strategy, coinciding with the leadership change at the Silicon Valley giant, in which John Ternus, the current senior vice president of Apple’s hardware engineering, will take over the CEO’s role in September 2026.

“Apple first previewed some of the technology in 2024, only to suffer a series of delays that put it further behind competitors and hurt its reputation. The company has spent the past year rebuilding parts of the assistant while rethinking its broader approach to AI,” reported Bloomberg.

The Siri revamp, touted to be the biggest in the AI assistant’s nearly 15-year history, will be released to consumers as early as September. The event will also likely be Tim Cook’s final major product launch as the CEO before Ternus takes over the proceedings. The immediate test of the revamped Siri will come in the upcoming autumn, during which Apple will be launching its iPhone 18 Pro lineup, along with the company’s first foldable iPhone.

“The new Siri will include the delayed features announced in 2024, such as the ability to understand personal data and analyse on-screen content. But those capabilities are just one part of a broader wave of upgrades: a rebuilt model that uses Google Gemini technology, AI-powered web search and a completely redesigned interface. There’s also a dedicated Siri app designed to compete more directly with ChatGPT and other AI assistants,” Bloomberg reported further.

Apple has redesigned Siri for modern iPhone hardware, making it live inside the Dynamic Island (an interactive, shape-shifting pill-shaped area at the top of the iPhone screen that replaced the traditional notch) as an always-on agent that helps users get things done across the operating system and within apps. The system can draw on web data, personal information and what’s on a user’s screen to complete tasks.

Apple is also testing ways to open up iOS 27 to third-party AI agents installed through the App Store. The tech giant, which already has a partnership with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, recently tested integrations for Siri and other AI features with Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude, with the goal of routing queries directly to outside AI services from the “Search or Ask” interface.

As per the reports, the revamped Siri will resemble Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT. While the home screen will include a history of previous conversations, to help users return to prior chats, the conversational interface will further offer a voice mode, text field, and attachment picker for uploading documents and photos for context and analysis.

“When users ask for information, Siri presents rich text cards and results for topics such as people, places and news headlines. Similar cards also appear for weather forecasts and sports scores, as well as results pulled from a user’s own data, including notes, text messages, emails, contacts, calendar appointments and reminders. Siri will be smarter, too. In the interface planned by Apple, you can ask it for times you are available for appointments before scheduling something and for overlapping events. You can also ask the assistant to write emails, notes or text messages using information from the web and device content. That could include asking for a note to be created about how to fix a car engine or an email including your calendar availability,” Bloomberg noted.

Apple will also be integrating Siri into the Camera app as a dedicated mode alongside existing options like photo and video. The feature would let users take photos and have them analysed by a third-party AI agent or put into a Google reverse image search. This will help users to get used to visual AI ahead of future products like smart glasses and camera-equipped AirPods.

Apple is also bringing more “Apple Intelligence” features to the Photos app, including new tools called Reframe and Extend. Reframe can change the perspective of a photo, while Extend will be using AI to generate additional portions of an image. However, rival platforms from Google and others have offered similar capabilities for years.

The tech giant is also testing natural language prompt-based editing of photos that will enable users to ask via voice or text for specific edits, like cropping or changing colours.

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He built a supply chain so efficient it was studied like scripture at business schools. He quietly expanded Apple’s services division, think App Store fees, Apple Music, iCloud subscriptions, until it was generating over $100 billion every year. By the time Cook announced on April 20, 2026, that he would step down as CEO and shift to an Executive Chairman role from September 1, most observers agreed that his mission has been accomplished.

His chosen successor is John Ternus, a 50-year-old engineer who has spent the last 25 years as the quiet force behind virtually every piece of hardware Apple has released. The appointment signals something deliberate. Apple is not turning to a finance wizard or a marketing genius. It is turning to someone who has spent his career thinking about how things are built.

The man behind the machines

Ternus graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics. He was a competitive swimmer at university, winning events in the 50-metre freestyle and 200-metre individual medley. His final undergraduate project was a mechanical feeding arm controlled by head movements, designed for people with quadriplegia, an early sign of someone drawn to engineering with purpose rather than just performance.

Before Apple, Ternus spent four years at a startup called Virtual Research Systems, designing early virtual reality headsets. That experience, building hardware meant to sit on someone’s face and convincingly alter their perception of the world, planted seeds that would prove relevant decades later.

He joined Apple in 2001 at 26. One early story captures his character well. During production of the Apple Cinema Display, a factory mistakenly milled 35 grooves into the back panel instead of the specified 25. To most eyes, the two versions looked identical. Ternus insisted on correcting the manufacturing process anyway. That is not the instinct of someone who accepts good enough.

Over the years, Ternus rose steadily. He became Vice-President of Hardware Engineering in 2013 and Senior Vice- President in 2021. Along the way, he oversaw every generation of the iPad, engineered the miniaturisation of AirPods, and took control of iPhone and Apple Watch hardware.

His most significant achievement, however, was leading the Mac’s transition away from Intel processors to Apple’s own custom-designed chips, the M-series. This was not a minor tweak. It was the equivalent of replacing the engine in a car while the car was still driving. The result was a line of laptops and desktops that outperformed competitors at a fraction of the power consumption, and it gave Apple total control over one of the most critical components in its products.

His most recent hardware statement, before being elevated to CEO, was the March 2026 launch of the MacBook Neo. Priced at $599, this was Apple doing something it almost never does, which is competing on price. The device made deliberate compromises. It capped memory at 8GB, offered only two USB ports, and dropped certain display refinements. But it kept the aluminum build, the crisp Liquid Retina screen, and Apple’s powerful A18 Pro chip.

The result was the best Mac launch week for first-time buyers in the company’s history. Ternus understood that there was an enormous market of students and budget-conscious consumers who wanted the Apple experience but could not justify paying premium prices.

To ensure the hardware pipeline does not suffer in Ternus’s absence from that role, Apple elevated Johny Srouji, the architect of Apple Silicon, to a new position of Chief Hardware Officer, overseeing hardware engineering, chip design, and platform architecture.

The gap that cannot be hidden

Here is the uncomfortable truth about Apple in 2026. The hardware is extraordinary. The software intelligence is not.

While Apple was refining aluminum finishes and perfecting chip architecture, the rest of the technology world was pouring money into artificial intelligence (AI) at a scale that is difficult to fully absorb. In a single quarter of 2025, companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon collectively committed an estimated $120 billion to AI infrastructure, covering data centres, custom processors, and the enormous computational power required to train and run large AI models. On an annual basis, their combined projection exceeds $660 billion. Google alone invests between $91 billion and $93 billion per year into this infrastructure.

Apple spent approximately $14 billion on AI-specific investment over the same period.

That is not a small gap. The companies spending more are building AI systems that can reason through complex problems, understand images and audio in real time, execute multi-step tasks across multiple applications, and improve themselves continuously through interaction with hundreds of millions of users.

Meanwhile, Siri, Apple’s voice assistant, which was genuinely pioneering when it launched in 2011, remained stuck in an architecture built around matching voice commands to pre-programmed responses. Ask Siri to set a timer or call a contact, and it performs reliably. Ask it to do anything that requires genuine reasoning or contextual understanding, and the gap between Apple and its competitors becomes embarrassingly apparent.

Apple’s internal culture also worked against it. Hardware engineering is a world of certainties. A product either functions within its specifications, or it does not. There is no acceptable rate of random failure. Artificial intelligence is the opposite of that.

Large language models, the kind powering Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, are probabilistic. They do not compute a single correct answer. They generate the most statistically likely response based on patterns learned from vast amounts of training data. They make mistakes. They occasionally produce confident nonsense. Crucially, they improve not through laboratory refinement but through deployment to real users at massive scale.

Apple, under Cook, was simply not culturally equipped to release something that might occasionally embarrass the company. So, features announced at Apple’s developer conferences in 2024 and 2025 were delayed, scaled back, or launched in such a limited form that even loyal Apple users struggled to understand what the fuss was about.

The honest acknowledgement of this situation led to a significant and somewhat humbling strategic decision. In early 2026, Apple finalised a multi-year deal with Google, estimated at $1 billion annually, to embed Google’s Gemini AI architecture directly into the iOS ecosystem.

As things stand today, Apple does not need to win the AI race. It just needs to ensure that whatever AI the world uses, Apple gets a cut of the subscription fee.

Through its App Store commission structure, 30% in the first year and 15% thereafter, Apple collected nearly $900 million from generative AI applications in 2025 alone, primarily from ChatGPT, with contributions from Claude and Grok.

In 2026, that figure is projected to exceed $1 billion. Google, Meta, and Microsoft are spending hundreds of billions of dollars building AI capabilities, while Apple passively monetises their distribution. It is, from a purely financial perspective, an almost elegant arrangement.

This dynamic gives John Ternus something invaluable as he assumes the CEO role. Namely, time. Apple’s core financial machinery is not at risk. The services division is robust. The installed base of 2.5 billion active devices is loyal and deep.

The App Store is a toll booth on the most lucrative stretch of the digital economy. Wall Street largely concurred. When the Cook-to-Ternus transition was announced, Apple’s stock barely moved, settling after a minor fluctuation of between 1% and 2.5%.

Morgan Stanley described the transition as “‘evolutionary rather than transformational’.” Wedbush Securities maintained an Outperform rating with a $350 price target.

What Ternus must do

The Google partnership solves an immediate problem but creates a long-term one. Apple’s core identity is inseparable from its control over every layer of the user experience. Ceding the reasoning engine of its products to a competitor is a compromise that may be necessary today but cannot be permanent.

Apple has an internal initiative, codenamed Project Ajax, aimed at building its own frontier-scale AI model. Rumours of custom M5-based AI server chips for 2026 and 2027 deployment suggest this project is advancing. By the end of the decade, Apple needs to own its cognitive infrastructure the way it owns its silicon.

Culturally, Ternus must help Apple’s engineering teams become comfortable with imperfection in a specific, bounded way. The hardware can and should remain flawless. But AI features must be allowed to ship, iterate, and improve through real-world use rather than retreating into development cycles that last years. These are two different disciplines, and Apple must learn to hold both simultaneously.

The wearables and smart home roadmaps cannot slip further. Smart glasses represent the most significant new hardware category since the smartphone, and Apple cannot afford to be two or three years behind Meta when it launches. The HomePad needs to reach consumers before Google Nest and Amazon Alexa become so embedded in households that switching feels impossible.

Apple Watch needs to evolve from an excellent data collector into an intelligent health companion.

Finally, the developer ecosystem requires urgent attention. Apple’s Foundation Models framework, the tools it provides to outside developers for building AI-powered apps, is currently seen by many in the industry as too restrictive. The local models are too small. The safety guardrails block too many legitimate uses. The rate limits prevent the kind of intensive querying that makes agentic applications possible. If developers cannot build the next generation of AI-native software for iPhone, they will build it for Android, and the users will follow.

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Under Cook’s leadership, Apple transitioned itself from a hardware-focused company into a services and ecosystem giant, apart from increasing its market value close to USD 4 trillion. The company has also become a dominant name in the wearables category (Apple Watch, AirPods).

Cook’s stint also witnessed Apple acing its supply chain diversification game, by engaging contract manufacturers in China, followed by rising investments in Vietnam and India under the “China Plus One” model.

The business move proved to be game-changer, by keeping expensive factory operations and product inventories largely off Apple’s books while maximizing profits.

Despite pumping hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in its American supply chain partners, Apple still performs a massive chunk of its production and subsystem sourcing activities in Asia.

Cook, as Executive Chairman, will assist with Apple’s certain operational aspects, including engaging with policymakers around the world. Johny Srouji, who oversaw Apple’s custom chip and sensor designs, will now be the chief hardware officer. He will now lead two divisions: custom chip and sensor designs and hardware engineering that Ternus once led.

“Arthur Levinson, who has been Apple’s non-executive chairman for the past 15 years, will become its lead independent director on September 1, 2026. Ternus will join the board of directors, also effective September 1, 2026,” the tech giant announced.

The promotion of John Ternus as the new Apple CEO comes at a crucial juncture, with the tech giant falling behind in artificial intelligence (AI). It has lost its position as the most valued tech company to AI chipmaker Nvidia, as investors have fretted over its lack of innovation in the AI domain.

Ternus, whom Cook described as “without question the right person to lead the company,” will face an immediate challenge as CEO: Integrating AI into the iPhone.

In January 2026, Apple struck a deal with Alphabet’s Google, to use the latter’s Gemini to improve its Siri virtual assistant. Despite introducing a form of AI in 2011 with Siri, Apple has not yet scored a hardware or software product hit based on Generative AI. Siri is not an “agent,” term that AI firms use for systems that carry out complex tasks like a human assistant.

John Ternus: An Apple Veteran

John Ternus graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in mechanical engineering. During his college days, he worked on an assistive engineering project to design a mechanical feeding device for people with paralysis.

Ternus worked as a mechanical engineer at Virtual Research Systems, a company specializing in early virtual reality hardware, before joining Apple’s product design team in 2001, where he helped design the hardware for the Apple Cinema Display. He eventually became more involved in the core product engineering of major Apple devices over multiple generations.

Ternus was behind the reinvention of products like the Mac, which has grown market share against PCs, apart from being quietly influential in the development of iPads and AirPods.

From 2013 until 2021, when he was elevated to Senior Vice President, Ternus had been Vice President of Hardware Engineering for Apple, overseeing the research and development of key product lines like the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and AirPods.

“Ternus’ work on Mac has helped the category become more powerful and more popular globally than at any time in its 40-year history. That includes the recent introduction of MacBook Neo, an all-new laptop that makes the Mac experience even more accessible to more people around the world. This past fall, his team’s efforts were on full display with the introduction of a redefined iPhone lineup, including the incredibly powerful iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, the radically thin and durable iPhone Air, and the iPhone 17, which has been an incredible upgrade for users. Under his leadership, his team also drove advancements in AirPods to make them the world’s best in-ear headphones, with unprecedented active noise cancellation, as well as the capability to become an all-in-one hearing health system that can serve as over-the-counter hearing aids,” Apple said.

“Ternus also led much of the company’s focus in areas like reliability and durability, introducing new techniques that have made Apple products remarkably resilient. He has also driven much of Apple’s innovation in materials and hardware design that have reduced the carbon footprint of its products, including the creation of a new, recycled aluminium compound that has been introduced across multiple product lines, the use of 3-D printed titanium in Apple Watch Ultra 3, and innovations in repairability that have increased the lifespans of several Apple products,” it remarked further.

Ternus also has a low-key management style and a strong product development detail focus. He is known as a “hands-on” executive, who often works directly with engineering teams to connect design vision with technical execution.

Ternus will be the CEO at 50, the exact age Cook took over leadership duties from Steve Jobs. Apple gave a glimpse of Ternus’ possible elevation in September 2025, as he spoke with the media regarding Apple’s products, apart from unveiling the iPhone Air.

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Luca Maestri, who held the position for almost 11 years, has been replaced by Kevan Parekh. Another significant milestone in his incredible career will be reached when he takes on his new position, where he will receive an annual salary of USD 1 million.

Since joining the company in June 2013, Kevan Parekh has been instrumental in its success. The University of Michigan awarded him a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering, and the University of Chicago awarded him an MBA. Market research, investor relations, and financial planning are just a few of the important duties Kevan Parekh has assumed over the years at Apple.

Kevan Parekh has experience in marketing, sales, and retail, so his knowledge extends beyond finance. He collaborated closely with the engineering and product marketing teams.

According to Bloomberg, Kevan Parekh is a logical choice to succeed departing CFO Luca Maestri because Maestri has been preparing him for this position. Despite not being well-known, he is highly respected at Apple and frequently provides CEO Tim Cook with important financial updates.

Kevan Parekh was instrumental in forming Apple’s operations and strategies in several departments before becoming its CFO.

He held senior leadership positions at General Motors and Thomson Reuters before joining Apple. Kevan Parekh’s keen intellect, good judgement, and in-depth knowledge of Apple have been commended by CEO Tim Cook.

Kevan Parekh’s appointment also comes just before the tech giant’s scheduled release of its Q1 2025 earnings report on January 30. The report, apart from covering iPhone 16 and Apple Watch Series 10 sales extensively, will also make public the venture’s market performance during the recent holiday season.

In Q4 2024 (July to September), Apple reported USD 94.93 billion in revenue, up 6% year-on-year. The company recorded growth in most of its categories, except for Wearables, Home, and Accessories – which includes Apple Watch, AirPods, and HomePod.

Since new products such as the iPhone 16 and Apple Watch Series 10 were launched in mid-September, the Q4 2024 report only included data on the first two weeks of sales for these products.

Apple is also reportedly working on a new technology that could allow the iPhone maker to introduce a smartphone with a larger battery, without drastically increasing the thickness of the handset. While the project looks similar to the one undertaken by Samsung, the technology is not entirely new, given the fact that Chinese firms have already begun to introduce smartphones that are equipped with 7,000mAh batteries, using silicon carbon technology.

Apple Intelligence AI Feature Under Fire

Meanwhile, according to 9To5Mac, Apple’s new AI-powered notification summary feature, which was first included in iOS 18.1, is coming under increased scrutiny after several mistakes were brought to light by the BBC.

According to the publication, the feature, which summarises notifications into summaries, was intended to improve user experience, but recent errors indicate it might require more work.

Notably, the feature, which is currently in beta testing, aims to give users a concise synopsis of notifications rather than the complete content.

The report claims that Apple has admitted the possibility of mistakes and asked users to report any inaccuracies so that the system can be made better.

The BBC has swiftly identified the feature’s flaws, though, which have resulted in some notifications that are inaccurate and misleading.

In one particularly striking instance from December 2024, an AI-generated summary falsely stated that Luigi Mangione (American man who was identified as the suspect in the killing of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare) had shot himself, which was completely untrue, according to the report.

According to BBC, one of the most recent instances was a notification that claimed darts player Luke Littler had won the PDC World Championship even though he hadn’t yet participated in the final.

Furthermore, some users of the BBC Sport app were misled by another notification that falsely stated that tennis legend Rafael Nadal had come out as gay. These mistakes show how difficult it is to use AI to summarise news in real-time, especially when breaking news is involved.

Even though AI can summarise information rapidly, there is a significant chance of misunderstandings or errors, particularly in the fast-paced fields of sports and current events.

Apple may eventually disable AI-generated summaries for news apps by default, at least until the technology advances, according to growing rumours in light of these persistent problems.

Image Credits: Apple

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Following the company’s quarterly earnings release, Tim Cook emphasised that Apple will soon be able to discuss specifics regarding its AI plans.

In an interview with Reuters, Tim Cook stated, “We continue to feel extremely confident about our opportunity in generative AI and we’re making large investments,” adding that the business has invested USD 100 billion in R&D over the previous five years.

During the same period, Apple’s Big Tech competitors have invested as much, if not more, in R&D, but they have also been aggressively investing in the construction of data centres that would house artificial intelligence services.

In the last quarter, Microsoft spent USD 14 billion on capital expenditures (capex), with Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet, following closely at USD 12 billion. In April 2024, Meta Platforms advised investors to anticipate capital expenditures of up to USD 40 billion this year.

Apple has a distinct way of thinking. For the entire year 2023, it invested slightly more than USD 10 billion in capital.

With its shares down 10% due to investor concerns that the business was lagging in the artificial intelligence race, Apple—which generates the majority of its revenue from the sale of consumer electronics—has paid a premium for that position for most of this year.

Although investors have baulked at the exorbitant costs of data centres and specialised processors needed to train AI models, shares of Meta, Google, and Microsoft, all of which generate revenue from software and advertising services, have all surged to all-time highs as the companies compete to dominate the emerging artificial intelligence landscape.

Apple signalled that it would not adopt the same strategy. Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri stated that although Apple is anticipated to introduce new AI capabilities at its annual software conference and revamp its product lines with chips that are suitable for artificial intelligence, investors shouldn’t anticipate a significant shift in the way the company manages capital expenditures.

In response to a query from an analyst, Maestri cited Apple’s established policy of dividing the cost of tool production with its suppliers, which has allowed the company to maintain low costs and strong cash flow for more than ten years.

Maestri remarked, “On the data centre side, we do something similar. We use third-party capacity in addition to our data centre capacity. We intend to stick to this paradigm moving forward because it has historically worked effectively for us.”

That may be just as well for Apple, as it’s still uncertain if AI features like chatbots that operate directly on a device will encourage consumers to purchase new laptops, tablets, or phones—which continue to be Apple’s main sources of income.

Better processors might be a “line in the sand” for some customers who want AI technologies for professional use; although Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies noted that these characteristics might not spark a sales boom.

It won’t be a super cycle, but it will assist increase sales, according to Ben Bajarin.

“You must exercise caution in lowering your standards,” he concluded.

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