Does he need an iPhone for the AI era?

• Steve Jobs made the iPhone. His successor, Tim Cook, established the system that enables this. Apple We’ve sold billions of iPhones.

• Cook’s tenure is a lesson for his successor John Ternus: You don’t to have Inventing world-changing technology to be a good CEO.

• In other news: What happens if the AI ​​era makes the iPhone obsolete?

Apple’s new CEO John TernusNot Steve Jobs.

This may very well be the case. Tim Cook is the current CEO of AppleIt’s also not Steve Jobs. Although some people still nostalgic for the Jobs era, the Tim Cook era worked out very well for Apple and its shareholders: Nearly 3 billion iPhones were sold and its market value jumped from $300 billion to $4 trillion in 15 years.

Maybe Ternus period It will work similarly. Like Cook, the 50-year-old isn’t known for inventing a signature Apple product, but he does the behind-the-scenes work that makes it possible for you to buy and use Apple’s signature products.

For Cook, this meant creating a global supply chain. A country heavily dependent on China This allows Apple to produce iPhones and other high-priced, high-margin electronics at scale. For ternusThis meant hands-on engineering to make sure the hardware Cook sold actually worked.

This isn’t meant to be a romantic biography — “Ternus distinguished himself by spearheading the development of AirPods and the company’s first 5G phones, in addition to overseeing the expansion of the iPad lineup with new models.” Bloomberg It was dutifully noted last few weeks ago amid growing speculation that Ternus would take over when Cook left; but someone at Apple definitely needs these skills. Why not CEO?

The question, of course, is whether being really good at this kind of blocking and tackling qualifies you to be Apple’s CEO, or whether you need some other quality. Cook answered that question with record sales and stock prices over the years. The fact that he never made The Next iPhone, a world-changing consumer technology product, is also not a problem; because no one else had made the Next iPhone.

However, we are now in the age of artificial intelligence, and it is very likely that artificial intelligence will rearrange our world as Apple did with the iPhone. And if that’s the case, it may not matter which CEO was running Apple at the time. What matters may be the AI ​​strategy Cook has adopted over the last few years.

It is quite common to claim that Apple is far behind in artificial intelligence because it has not invested heavily in technology such as Google, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic. The counter argument is this: Ultimately, Apple achieved its winning strategy: It lets everyone crush each other to produce the best AI products, and then will sit back and collect rent (of sorts) when those competitors need to reach billions of iPhone users.

Now, more than ever, I hear from bemused ditherers who believe that new AI software will eventually be so powerful that it will create a new technology. to do replace iPhone; They don’t know what will happen yet.

It’s still possible for Ternus and Apple to do just fine in that theoretical age because people will still need it. some It’s a phone-like device, and they’ll trust Apple to deliver it instead of someone else. But if we fall into a world where computing is once again available, Apple may want to have a leader who wants to make big, ambitious moves rather than optimizing, and who doesn’t give up on the AI ​​wave.

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