Posts Tagged → apple

A Product Guy at the Top

Apple announced this week that Tim Cook is stepping down as CEO. John Ternus takes over September 1. I want to tell you why I’m happy about it, and why I’m trying to keep my expectations honest.

A few weeks ago I wrote a newsletter called “The Paint at 7 AM.” The point was that companies look like the people running them. When Walt Disney showed up at Disneyland on Saturdays to drive the trains, Disneyland got the attention it deserved. When Steve Jobs read his team the riot act over MobileMe, Apple learned what online services were supposed to feel like. The CEO is either a person who loves the product or a person who loves the business, and you can usually tell which one within five minutes of any keynote.

Tim Cook loved the business. That isn’t a slight. He built the supply chain that made the iPhone possible at the scale it reached. He brought us AirPods, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro. He grew Services into a real business and ran the company with a steady hand for fifteen years. Apple is in better shape because he ran it.

But Cook was also sometimes invisible on stage. You could tell which products lit him up and which ones he was reading off the cue card. The HomePod got the cue-card treatment for years. Big chunks of the iPad lineup got it too. The product half of the keynote always felt like it belonged to somebody else.

John Ternus is somebody else. He has been at Apple since 2001, running hardware engineering for the iPad and the Mac through the entire Apple silicon transition. When he steps on stage and talks about how an enclosure comes together, he sounds like a person who made the thing. He probably had a hand in it. Naming Johny Srouji as Chief Hardware Officer at the same time tells you the rest. This is a hardware-first transition from a hardware-first company.

That’s the part I’m happy about. My interest in Apple has always been as a customer, not a shareholder. I buy the things and use them. That’s my stake in all of this. A CEO who thinks about products the way I think about products seems like good news for people like me.

The cautious part is that Apple is too big to turn quickly. Ternus is going to spend his first year learning levers Cook has had his hands on for decades. Services is now a big part of Apple’s profit.

A hardware engineer running a hundred-billion-dollar services business is going to be tested in ways nobody can predict. The Siri saga is a reminder that Apple has problems that won’t get solved by a CEO who happens to like making iPads.

Even so, the things I’ll be watching are product things. Which Macs get greenlit and which ones quietly get killed. Whether the keynotes start sounding like the early years again, where you got the sense the people on stage actually used the things they were holding.

My bet is that the keynotes get more product-forward. The quiet pruning of half-committed products picks up speed. And a few years in, we find out whether a hardware engineer can also run a services business.

I could be completely wrong about this. Tim Cook had skeptics in 2011 too, and he ran circles around all of them. But the CEO who actually cares about what the company makes is the CEO who builds great products. Ternus feels like that pick.

John Ternus at the Helm

Apple named John Ternus as its next CEO this morning. Tim Cook moves to executive chairman, and Ternus takes over September 1. Johny Srouji picks up an expanded Chief Hardware Officer role, combining Ternus’s hardware engineering job with his own hardware technologies work.

I have been on the Ternus bandwagon for a while. Back in November I wrote about why he felt like the obvious pick. The first time I saw him walk out on an Apple keynote stage, my initial thought was that “this guy looks like a CEO.”

In my years as a business attorney, I sat in on a lot of CEO transitions. Nearly every time that the transition happened in an ongoing, successful company, they landed on whoever was running their most successful division. If you want to predict a successor, look for the person responsible for the part of the business that is working. Ternus has been running Apple’s hardware engineering. Hardware is the business. The iPhone, the Mac, the iPad, and the Watch are the engine. You hand the company to the person running the engine.

So this choice is consistent. It is the least surprising CEO announcement Apple could have made.

What happens next is the harder question. Apple is too big to change direction quickly. New CEOs at companies this size do not reshape the company in their first year. They learn where the levers are. They keep the trains running. The real signal of Ternus’s hand on the tiller will come later, probably well into 2027 or beyond. What products get greenlit. What gets killed. How the company talks about itself.

I am eager to see this new chapter. Tim Cook was very successful in the short term. Time will tell what his impact was over the long term. Handing the job to an engineer who has been in the product trenches since 2001 feels right. Now we get to watch what he does with it.

The Studio Display XDR’s Quiet $400 Haircut

Apple just dropped the price of the VESA-mount Studio Display XDR by $400. The standless version is now $2,899, down from $3,299. The stand version stays at $3,299.

That’s a big correction for a product that’s only been on the market for a few weeks. And it makes me curious about the internal conversations that led to it. Did the original pricing miss the mark? Were pre-order numbers lower than expected? Did someone at Apple realize that charging the same price for a monitor without a stand as one with a stand didn’t make a lot of sense?

Either way, if you are looking at the new monitor sans stand, it just got a bit more affordable.

A Birthday, Not a Victory Lap

Apple turned 50 today. If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a fun animated history running on Apple’s homepage that sketches its way through five decades of products. It’s clever but not too clever. If you’ve been around through Apple’s triumphs and failures, it’s a good watch.

I’m glad Apple is marking the occasion. Fifty years is a real milestone, and the company has earned a moment to look back. The Apple II. The Mac. The near-death experience. The iPod, the iPhone, and everything that followed. That’s a story worth reflecting on.

But I hope they don’t overdo it.

The reason I became an Apple customer wasn’t nostalgia. It was the opposite. Apple’s thing has always been an unrelenting focus on what’s next. What’s the best product we can make right now? What problem can we solve tomorrow? That restlessness is what made them interesting and what kept me buying their stuff year after year.

A 50th birthday celebration is great. A 50th birthday year where every keynote opens with a sepia-toned montage? Less great. Apple is at its best when it’s building the future, not curating the past.

So happy birthday, Apple. Now get back to work.

David Pogue’s Book on Apple’s First 50 Years

David Pogue has a new book out called Apple: The First 50 Years. We interviewed David about it on Mac Power Users, and I got an early copy.

I’ve read the whole thing, and I really enjoyed it.

There are a lot of Apple books that focus on the personalities. The backstabbing, the drama, the Steve Jobs mythology.

Those books have their place, but Pogue took a different angle. This one focuses on the products. The Apple II, the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, and everything in between. It traces the full arc of the company through the things it actually made.

That framing works. It gives you a nice, clean overview of Apple’s entire run without getting lost in boardroom politics. You come away with a better understanding of why certain products mattered and how they connected to what came next.

The photography is beautiful too. It’s a big, full-color book with images that do justice to the hardware. If you’ve ever been the kind of person who appreciated the design of an Apple product (and if you’re reading this blog, you probably are), you’ll enjoy just flipping through it.

Apple Should Buy Anthropic (But Likely Won’t)

MG Siegler recently wrote a piece arguing that Apple should acquire Anthropic (paywall). It’s a fun thought experiment, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

The more time I spend working with AI tools like Claude, the more I’m convinced the future isn’t about applications. It’s going to be an AI agent sitting on top of all your data, managing the tedium while you focus on the work that matters.

Apple is in the perfect position to do this right. They control the hardware, the operating system, and the privacy infrastructure. What they don’t have is a world-class model.

Apple has been struggling with AI for years now. The Google Gemini deal brings hope, but it still isn’t their technology, and it seems like they are bleeding AI talent. Meanwhile, Apple just posted a $42 billion profit last quarter. They have the resources. The question is whether they have the will.

Acquiring Anthropic would change the game overnight. It would take Apple from playing catch-up to leading the conversation. Imagine Claude’s capabilities woven into every Apple device with the kind of deep integration only Apple can pull off. We’d be talking about something way beyond a better Siri.

There’s also an ideological alignment. Anthropic has taken a principled stance on AI safety and responsible development. Apple has always positioned itself as the company that cares about how technology affects people. Those values aren’t identical, but they rhyme.

But stepping back into reality, this is certainly a pipe dream. Anthropic’s current valuation sits around $380 billion. Apple just doesn’t make moves like this. But if there was ever a time to start …

Apple Drops 512GB RAM Option on M3 Ultra Mac Studio

Zac Hall at 9to5Mac spotted that Apple quietly removed the 512GB unified memory option from the M3 Ultra Mac Studio. When the machine launched a year ago, Apple made a big deal about that configuration. It could run large language models with over 600 billion parameters entirely in memory. Now the top option is 256GB, and Apple didn’t say a word about the change.

The 256GB model is still available, and for most people that’s more than enough. But the 512GB configuration was a statement. It said Apple was serious about local AI on the desktop. Pulling it quietly suggests memory supply constraints from AI server demand are hitting even Apple’s premium hardware.

I suspect we won’t see 512GB come back until the M4 Ultra ships. And even then, maybe. This also makes me wonder if the M5 Mac Studio will be where Apple starts raising memory prices. I say this as an interested party.

M5 MacBook Pros: Fine Computers With an Asterisk

Apple announced the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros today, and they look like fine computers. The new chips bring an 18-core CPU with six “super cores”, GPU-level neural accelerators, and memory bandwidth topping out at 614 GB/s on the M5 Max. If you’ve been waiting for a Mac that can handle local AI models without breaking a sweat, this is it. I’m looking forward to the benchmarks rolling in over the next week.

That said, there’s an asterisk here. The M6 MacBook Pro is expected before the end of this year, and it’s rumored to be a substantial redesign with OLED displays, a touchscreen, the notch replaced by a Dynamic Island, and chips built on TSMC’s 2nm process. If even half of those rumors pan out, it will be the biggest MacBook Pro refresh in years. If you’re thinking about buying an M5, go into it with open eyes.

The biggest story for me, though, isn’t the chips. It’s the memory pricing.

DRAM prices have gone haywire. Memory manufacturers have pivoted their production capacity toward HBM chips for AI data centers. The result is a global shortage that has driven DRAM prices up 80 to 90 percent in recent months. PCs are going up in price as a result.

So I wondered if Apple would also bump their memory upgrade pricing on these new Macs. They didn’t. The upgrade from 48 GB to 64 GB is still $200. The jump to 128 GB is still $1,000. Those are the same numbers as last generation.

I have to eat some crow here. For years, I lampooned Apple for their inflated memory prices. The component costs have gone up substantially, and Apple has held the line. Maybe they locked in long-term contracts with their suppliers at lower rates. Maybe they just don’t want to raise prices.

I don’t think this lasts forever. If memory prices keep climbing at this rate, something has to give. But right now, Apple deserves credit for keeping their pricing reasonable when they had every excuse not to.

If you need a pro laptop today, the M5 MacBook Pro is a solid choice, especially for local AI work. Just know that a much bigger update is likely around the corner.

The Apple March 4 Experience

Apple just announced a “special Apple Experience” on March 4 in New York, London, and Shanghai. Not an “event.” An “experience.”

The rumor mill has up to nine new products in play: MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and Max, MacBook Air with M5, iPhone 17e, two new iPads, a budget MacBook with an A18 chip, a refreshed Studio Display, a new Apple TV, and a HomePod mini 2. That’s a lot of hardware, and I doubt we’ll see all (or perhaps any?) of it on March 4.

Part of me wants this to be the big HomePod moment. A proper smart speaker with a proper Siri. But we still haven’t seen a successful Siri brain transplant, so I suspect that’s still a ways off.

If I had to bet a nickel, I’d say the headliner is the M5 MacBook Pro and new Studio Displays. If you’ve been following my posts on M5 AI performance, you know I think this chip is a big deal. March 4 might be the day we get real specs and a ship date.