Apple said on Monday that Tim Cook, its chief executive for the last 15 years, will hand the reins to John Ternus, its head of hardware engineering, in September. The transition, which will happen around the launch of the next iPhone, will end an era of financial highs and a few product lows.
Mr. Cook played the difficult role of carrying the company after the death of Steve Jobs, a founder known for his mercurial leadership, sharp vision and delivery of products that people aspire to own. Although Apple became a multitrillion-dollar company under his leadership, Mr. Cook never shook the perception that he was not a “product guy” like Mr. Jobs.
Many of the best-selling products unveiled during Mr. Cook’s tenure — namely iPhones, Macs and iPads — were iterations of past Apple hardware. At the same time, most of Apple’s new products, such as the HomePod smart speaker and Vision Pro headset, were reactions to similar gadgets from rivals and either too flawed or too late to make a dent in the tech universe.
I found Mr. Cook to be eloquent, charismatic and in command of the details of his company when I interviewed him, but it has been a long time since Apple has had a new, mainstream product hit.
In the end, the next big thing that eventually arrived — artificial intelligence — came not from Apple but from research labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. And because Apple dropped the ball many years ago on its voice assistant, Siri, which could have been a contender in the A.I. race, its chief rival, Google, will be providing the A.I. technology for a future version of Siri.
There’s a lot to reflect on and hope for. As a tech writer who has reported on the company for two decades, I offer my wish list for what Mr. Ternus will do with Apple.
Apple should dare to be weird again.
When Apple was a much smaller company, it experimented with edgier ideas. For one, it introduced all sorts of iPod music players with novel designs, including a tiny iPod with a touch screen, released in 2010. That iPod, which was the size of a belt buckle, initially looked strange to me, but lots of customers quickly realized it could be attached to a strap and worn around a wrist. This inspired Apple’s designers to make the Apple Watch, which was one of the bright spots during Mr. Cook’s term.
Apple should take risks and embrace weirdness again. Give us a robot helper. A chic electric vehicle of some sort. (If not a car, then perhaps a great bike?) Something cool that solves a real problem for consumers rather than for the Wall Street investors hungering for more growth. Some new ideas may fall flat but eventually lead to great products.
Apple could make A.I. less cringe.
One of Apple’s strengths has been making quirky ideas more tasteful and appealing to normal people, not just the techie suburbanites of Silicon Valley. (Exhibit A: Look at the white stubs dangling out of everyone’s ears now.) On that note, A.I. technology could use Apple’s special touch. Chatbots and various A.I. tools are known as much for their abuses as for their benefits — generating so-called deepfakes, cheating in school and infringing copyrights, to name a few.
On the upside, Apple’s A.I. technology, Apple Intelligence, is so limited that it can’t easily be used for nefarious purposes. Now the company has an opportunity to focus on delivering A.I. tools and apps that families can enjoy in positive and constructive ways.
An obvious example is Apple’s A.I. image editor, a “Clean Up” button for automatically erasing photo bombers and distracting objects. It’s a feature that lots of people would find useful, but it currently does a sloppy job at removing objects.
Apple’s latest AirPods, which can automatically translate foreign languages inside your ears, are another practical example of how A.I. can be used in empowering ways. Apple should focus on doing more like this. (An idea off the top of my head: A nicely designed iPad app that uses A.I. to automatically create a study guide or flashcards from lecture notes would be a boon for students.)
Apple should make fewer products better.
Apple now sells so many different models of iPhones, iPads and Macs with slight variations that it’s difficult to keep track of which product does what without a spreadsheet. It’s hard to imagine why some of these products need to exist. (For $1,000, you could get an iPad Pro, which has a faster chip than a normal $350 iPad — or for $600, you could get an iPad Air, which also has a faster chip than a normal iPad.)
While having so many models for lots of different customers sounds nice in theory, consumers trying to buy an Apple product may find the lineup confusing.
There’s another downside to maintaining all those products: Over the last few years, the company has shed lots of talented engineers, and a common complaint is burnout from trying to do too much with too little time.
Apple should repair its relationship with app developers.
In the past, there was a gulf between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android, which was mostly created by the quantity of apps available for each platform. Apple, which was first to introduce an App Store in 2008, started out with thousands more apps than Google’s app store. Nowadays, Google’s app store, Play, has millions more than Apple’s. And if you were to choose an iPhone or an Android phone, the experience would be mostly uniform because many developers create the same apps for both operating systems.
The differences used to be more distinct. Apps made exclusively for iPhones were more polished and functional than similar apps on Android devices. More polished iOS apps still exist but are outliers, in part because many app developers grew frustrated with Apple’s strict policies. Playing nicer with independent developers would help restore what once made it feel special to be an iPhone user.
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