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Cook seems to be dragged for some of his decisions ( like China ), but he was the right CEO for the time. Ternus in turn seems to be the right CEO for this phas

• steveBK123 5mo ago
  Maybe Ternus is the kind of leader who could bring 0->1 innovation back to Apple in some form. Maybe an Alphabet "other bets" type setup? Or simply just taking more chances on completely new product lines that may or may not pay off in 5-10 years (like VisionPro). I mean when was the last big new bet previous to VisionPro? Wearables, with the Apple Watch in 2015 is probably it, a decade prior. (AirPods are huge but feel more evolutionary from their wired EarPods + Beats roll-up) They could & should make new segment bets with genuinely new product lines more than once a decade. They have the capacity.
  • ricardobayes 5mo ago
    Yes, let's hope. And also let's hope that innovation will be more "iPhone" and less "Apple Vision Pro".
    • ZiiS 5mo ago
      It isn't innovation if you don't get 99 Vision Pro's per iPhone.
      • trimbo 5mo ago
        You can choose not to ship the 99.
        • steveBK123 5mo ago
          Shipping is part of the process. Stated preferences vs revealed preferences. Polling / focus groups vs sales. You never really know what works until it works.
        • pdpi 5mo ago
          You choose not to ship maybe 90 of those 99, because it's obvious before shipping that they won't work. The rest you have to ship before it becomes obvious they're not that last blessed one.
      • steveBK123 5mo ago
        Exactly - Apple needs to be making MORE bets, not LESS. Apple VisionPro may turn out to be an iPod HiFi, iTunes Ping, eMate, Pippin, Newton, Macintosh Portable, Lisa.. etc. Or it may turn out in 5-10 years to be a contributor like AppleTV, Watches, etc. I don't even care which it turns out to be, I want to see them taking bets like this every year or two, not once per decade. The fact that the list of "Failed Apple Products" returns a lot more stuff from 80s/90s/00s and very little from 10s/20s tells you how little they make bets anymore. Most of the post-2010 "failures" are accessories/parts/iterations rather than completely new product categories.
        • esafak 5mo ago
          I don't. That's how you get Google's graveyard. I want them to make a bet and nurture it, like they already do.
        • ricardobayes 5mo ago
          The current mature tech company scene doesn't nurture this. If you're worried about performance reviews, layoffs and a 5k mortgage bill each month, that doesn't exactly put you in an innovative mood. To get that 90s, early 2000's innovation, Apple needs to somehow think like a small company (this is near impossible) or actually be multiple smaller companies. If the new CEO is smart, he could start in-house startups with Apple funding and infrastructure.
          • steveBK123 5mo ago
            Having worked at companies with 200 to 100,000 employees.. I agree some of it must be organizational big-co thinking/kpis/perf/politics. Creating some sort of internal incubator that encourages experimentation enough to innovate but with enough accountability to not be a purely academic R&D lab is difficult I'm sure. This is why I mentioned elsewhere in thread - Maybe an Alphabet "other bets" type setup? Not sure if people with closer experience has an opinion on if that model actually works our not. I suppose we have gotten some real world output from it right?
  • heroicmailman 5mo ago
    I'm honestly shocked they haven't done more with HomeKit and in-home devices. Give me a low-power, always-on, iPad-mini style display on my nightstand, on my fridge, on my kitchen countertop, as a desk companion... there are so many things they could do with that form factor. They could even just offer me a dock or a mount as an accessory in most cases and it'd probably juice iPad sales, but they don't even do that. I'm surprised they haven't made more inroads into being a more serious Nest competitor because Apple could do it with relative ease.
    • redsocksfan45 5mo ago
      [dead]
    • steveBK123 5mo ago
      I'd personally be a buyer for some home stuff, but the average normie consumer just doesn't care very much about home automation. IoT turned out to be sort of a nothing. I say this as an early adopter and continued user.. it just never broke into mainstream and it's been 15+ years. You make a good point re: Nest. I am kind of a doomer on home automation market in that I have been an early adopter and it's been around 15 years, but most people just don't care about the space. The home automation stuff people are interested in and Apple could attack is the doorbell/camera/alarm systems because what is out there is still genuinely a minefield of awful products. An Apple it-just-works premium offering would sell. And they have the physical store footprint to demo them.
      • alistairSH 5mo ago
        I don't know, the majority of people I know (mostly upper-middle class white collar) have at least a HomePod/Alexa/Google smart speaker. And many have a smart thermostat and/or smart doorbell/camera. Part of the problem with IoT/home automation is a lack of consistency across devices - they all want their own apps. HomeKit is so close to making that easy - you shouldn't have to spin up HomeAssistant with a bunch of plug-ins to make this stuff easy for the end-user, but that's where we are (and that's decades after the first gen stuff rolled out). I'd think it was an easy sell to have lights, doorbell, security cameras, and smart speakers all connected easily. Anyway, feels like Apple could throw some weight into this market, with Apple-branded devices, and "win" the market. At least for households that are already heavily invested in iDevices. Right now, I have to poke around and find a smattering of off-brand stuff and only about half of it is natively HomeKit, so I have to run HomeAssistant with a HomeKit bridge, etc.
  • raw_anon_1111 5mo ago
    I would hope that Apple doesn’t follow Google’s lead. Google has the attention span of a crack addled flea and struggles to make great products
    • mring33621 5mo ago
      Gemini is a great product
      • raw_anon_1111 5mo ago
        I have used Gemini, I have a personal subscription to ChatGPT and a corporate $5000/month allowance to Claude. How is it better than either? How is it doing as a revenue making product?
      • kristofferR 5mo ago
        Eh, depends on what aspect of it. It's a very bad harness and is comically bad at tool calling, but as a Siri alternative and Youtube summarizer it's pretty good. As a chatbot it's unusable due to its broken web interface.
      • butlike 5mo ago
        I don't like the name. Makes it sound two faced. Yes, I get it's a marrying of DeepMind and Google Brain teams or whatever. Still think it sounds duplicitous.
  • pjc50 5mo ago
    For a while people were talking about the "Apple car". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project ; seemingly they gave up on it because they realized that FSD wasn't quite going to work. I'm not sure why they wouldn't just pivot back to making a regular EV, it would still be guaranteed to sell millions of units at a premium price point by being a Tesla without (a) That Guy (b) build quality issues like panel gaps and (c) software promises that weren't delivered. Perhaps the sticking point was where to make it. Another entirely missing Apple product line: rackmount servers, with all the proper stuff like ILO management.
    • steveBK123 5mo ago
      The car always made the least sense to me in that its the polar opposite of what Apple had evolved to. High-capex in-house manufacturing onshore in a highly regulated space vs capital-light outsourced contract manufacturing offshore of discretionary purchase consumer goods. There are no successful car makers that outsource production, and even foreign car makers generally make cars onshore in US for tariff/political/regulatory reasons.
      • greedo 5mo ago
        The way Apple funded hardware purchases for their "OEM" manufacturers makes it hard to really say they were "capital-light."
      • twoodfin 5mo ago
        If Apple had gotten to the point of making a real product with “Titan”, all the signs were they would be engaging with a manufacturing partner in the US. Hyundai, most likely. As for why they did it: Apple makes computers. If what you’re interacting with benefits from being a general purpose computer (under the covers or otherwise) Apple thinks they can deliver a superior experience and the margins that come with it. I think they realized that the only computer in the car they cared about was the smartphone.
        • 121789 5mo ago
  • momojo 5mo ago
    I'm all aboard the "Apple is simply waiting for the models to get dense enough to run on their hardware" hype train. They're poised to consume the market for the "I want AI, but I don't want to sell my soul" demographic that is ever growing. Sure, the AI gluttony continues, and the vibes tell me people are only more and more willing to shovel their lives into the maw, but my thesis is people only value fire insurance after they've bought the house. Put my down as bullish. Apple hardware is currently the worst it'll ever be, and gemma4 and qwen3.6 are the least intelligence-dense they'll ever be. Buy up taalas or spin up your own hardware. I'm confident Ive only scratched the surface of Ternus' 5-year plan.
• monkeydust 5mo ago
  What big hardware bets are people expecting him to take?
  • steveBK123 5mo ago
    It doesn't even have to be hardware. Maybe the guy from hardware who created and maintained excellence under his org can bring that level to where Apple has fallen - software. Maybe the next innovation will be a software/service we haven't contemplated.
    • throw0101d 5mo ago
      > It doesn't even have to be hardware. Maybe the guy from hardware who created and maintained excellence under his org can bring that level to where Apple has fallen - software. There was already a change in software with Alan Dye's departure and Stephen Lemay taking over: * https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/04/john-gruber-on-alan-dye/ https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/04/john-gruber-on-alan-dye... AIUI, lots of folks internal to Apple were not happy with Dye, and are happy with Lemay. Some consider it a failing of the executive that Dye wasn't pushed out sooner (rather than choosing to jump himself).
    • davedx 5mo ago
      - go head to head against google workspace - apple public cloud Lets go!
  • kilroy123 5mo ago
    AR glasses that eventually replace the iPhone.
    • JustExAWS 5mo ago
      From a usability standpoint. Do you expect everyone to wear glasses? Are people going to all be out in public talking and doing hand gestures as input to their glasses? You don’t need to cater to different people who need different prescriptions for their fingers and for me, I have prescription glasses with two separate prescriptions and transition lenses.
• HarHarVeryFunny 5mo ago
  I don't know anything about Ternus other than WikiPedia saying he was VP of hardware engineering. Jobs of course (in addition to being an asshole) really was a product guy - he wanted to build seamless appliances that just worked, blending hardware, software and design into a beautiful thing that just did what you wanted (or what Jobs thought you wanted, which he was well attuned to). I think Apple took some missteps with the iPhone in later models, maybe too much influenced by Jony Ive and form over function. It certainly wouldn't be a bad thing to put more focus back on functionality if that ends up to be the case. I do think the challenge for Apple going forwards (but also for Android) is going to be how to best take advantage of AI. Maybe Ternus has a vision for that, but in any case the CEO can't be a one-man marketing dept - he just needs to know what he wants and hire the right people to get it accomplished.
  • ryandrake 5mo ago
    > I do think the challenge for Apple going forwards (but also for Android) is going to be how to best take advantage of AI. IMO one of their great advantages so far is that they have not blindly bought into the AI hysteria and wasted $billions on it. They've shown you can still have a great company without chanting the "AI is the future" mantra day in and day out. It would be pretty disappointing for a new CEO to drag them into the cargo cult and declare "We, too, must find something that we can do with AI."
    • samsolomon 5mo ago
      Honestly, I'm pretty bullish on Apple and AI. I think there move is in local, open source models. These are getting better and better for generic ChatGPT—type tasks. I'm kind of waiting for Apple to ship their own Ollama. And it's going to be a huge win for both them and consumers.
      • ryandrake 5mo ago
        I just think the concept of an LLM is counter to how Apple treats content on their products. See [1] for more of my thoughts here. I think the only chance Apple embraces AI is if they manage to research a 1. local model that 2. is purely deterministic, whose output can be reliably constrained and controlled by Apple. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47849737 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47849737
• ValentineC 5mo ago
  > Cook seems to be dragged for some of his decisions ( like China ) Scaling up in China is probably why many countries in the world can get the iPhone at launch these days. I still remember the early iPhone days where the iPhone would launch first in a few major markets, and there would be massive queues outside Apple Stores by people from neighbouring countries hoping to buy and resell in their own countries for a huge profit. (This still happens every iPhone launch, but I think the scale is much less rampant.)
• pstuart 5mo ago
  Apparently Apple invested ~ $50B to advance China's manufacturing capabilities. As robotics is the future of manufacturing (Apple was all in on that in the early days of manufacturing the Mac in Fremont), it seems that it would have been worth while to try to make manufacturing affordable in the states via robotics. Considering that Apple spent ~ $10B on the EV project and ~ $30B on Vision Pro, and meanwhile sits on a mountain of cash, I find their disinterest in investing in domestic production less than inspiring.
• jmyeet 5mo ago
  I think Tim Apple [sic] has made 3 major errors, 2 of which got corrected: 1. The mid-to-late 2010s Cult of Thinness as the last gasp of Johnny Ive was terrible for the Macbook range. Butterly keyboard, 12" Macbook, no Macbook Air, Touch bar... ugh. I personally believe Johnny Ive got gently shown the door over all that so was corrected; 2. The Apple Watch didn't know what it was at launch. Remember the $10,000 Apple Watch Edition that was like gold? Part of the problem here was a mis-hire, Angela Ahrendts in charge of Apple retail. So the Apple Watch was originally launched as a luxury product and that just never made sense for an electronic product. This isn't a Rolex. It quickly pivoted to something way more compelling: health and fitness. So this too was corrected; and 3. Ai. This is Tim Apple's big fumble IMHO. Remember how well-regarded Siri was a decade ago? AFAICT Siri has pretty much stagnated ever since. I mean there are marginal improvements but this tech has massively improved elsewhere. One of Steve Jobs's most underrated moves was the 2008 purchase of PA Semi. This was pretty directly responsible for the competitive advantage of iPhone chips and ultimately the M-series in Macs now ever since Apple ditched Intel. But Apple is nowhere on the AI front. And that's a failure.
  • tacker2000 5mo ago
    Agree with you, but when was Siri ever “well-regarded”? Its been trash since day 1.
    • divbzero 5mo ago
      Siri was the first of its kind on Day 1. Alexa wasn’t announced for another three years.
  • ezst 5mo ago
    3. Is what I call a smart move. Sometimes the game is won by not playing, and it's increasingly obvious that the LLM race leads to nowhere (there is no moat, there is nothing unique or clever that Apple can build out of it that can't be mimicked by others, made better, with Apple looking bad as a result, the tech is flawed, with clear diminishing returns, ...). If anything worth of the Apple logo comes out of this, it will be bought for scraps after the unsustainable race has run its course.
• heathrow83829 5mo ago
  >> the next era looks bright. but what could they possibly build that hasn't been done on iphone and ipad yet? these devices seem finished to me. all the latest features on these devices are getting increasingly useless, to be honest. are you imaging them creating whole new devices?
  • Shorel 5mo ago
    They could bring the wired headphone jack back.
    • abdusco 5mo ago
      That would require a lot of courage
      • Shorel 5mo ago
        That would require them to accept it was the wrong decision. I am doing the only thing I can: to vote with my wallet. My current phone is a Sony Xperia and it has the headphone jack. I am listening to Hi-Fi music from Tidal right now, using the jack, and wired Crinacle earbuds.
  • poncho_romero 5mo ago
    They could make the software good again.
• michelb 5mo ago
  Yeah I think so too. I'm just wondering if the people on software are still the right people. Mac OS has quite a few regressions, and seems to just chug along instead of really using the power of the chips, or massively improving file i/o. Apple still has a chance to do some cool stuff with AI integrations, but they have had interesting local models 3 years ago and apparently nowhere, or no vision, to use it. We're all clapping for Craig Federighi's jokes but I have no idea if he is a great manager or a great presenter. I think Liquid Glass is an abomination and usability nightmare, but they're doubling down on it now, so that's that I guess.
  • happyopossum 5mo ago
    > but they're doubling down on it now Nahh, they're backing off liquid glass as fast as they can without just rolling back to macOS 15... Tons of people inside apple hate it, and have been very critical of the design leadership. Alan Dye was the design king behind liquid glass, and he was pushed out (or just left, stories vary). His replacement, Stephen Lemay, is widely praised by the folks who hate liquid glass. iOS 27 and macOS 27 in June will probably have Liquid glass turned back down to 6 or 7, and will at least remove some of the most glaring usability issues.
    • YmiYugy 5mo ago
      I think it's fair to say there are plenty of people in Apple's leadership that would have had the authority to tell Alan Dye "no". They didn't. I think it's fair to say that the company leadership likes liquid glass. The reaction to it was about as divided when they presented it as it is now. If they thought the backlash warranted a change in direction they could have pulled it before it ever made it to users in the fall, like they did with numerous attempts at shipping AI features. A major reversal in the next version would make a lot of people look really really bad.
• jarjoura 5mo ago
  I always understood, going to China, as what the industry was already doing, and Apple was in the middle of coming out of bankruptcy, so pressured to get their costs down. Tim Cook, the process guy, would have been given the task to do just that in an industry that was already consolidating in China. I don't remember the details, but I'm pretty sure Tony Fadell's startup was already in China building what would become the iPod. Tim Cook should be remembered, not for moving production to China, but for restructuring Apple's production lines to be built-on-demand, while also shipping those from China. It wasn't always perfect, and I bet the other people in similar roles and positions would have taken the easy path. Let's see if Aaron Sokrin can make this compelling.
  • macintux 5mo ago
    Technically Apple was never bankrupt. It certainly came within a few months, but never reached that point.
• divbzero 5mo ago
  I know what you mean by stronger product focus, but phrasing it as “more like Jobs” makes it sound daunting.
• changyou 5mo ago
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