John Ternus’s first big problem is AI

Does Tim Cook’s newly announced successor have what it takes to regain the company’s lost ground in the AI race?

Does Tim Cook’s newly announced successor have what it takes to regain the company’s lost ground in the AI race?

Less than a year ago, Apple made headlines for a lack of AI announcements at its annual WWDC event. Ten months later, the company has announced that hardware executive John Ternus will succeed longtime CEO Tim Cook as chief executive — and the official release doesn’t mention AI once.

Ternus, currently Apple’s SVP of hardware engineering, will take over as CEO on September 1st, after Cook’s decade and a half in the role. Ternus is a 25-year veteran of the company and the first Apple CEO in about 30 years to come from the hardware sector. According to Apple, he’s led hardware engineering work for every model of iPad, as well as the most recent iPhone family and AirPods. Yesterday’s announcement highlighted Ternus’s work adding better noise cancellation and hearing health upgrades for AirPods, overseeing the MacBook Neo’s debut, and upping Apple products’ durability and repairability. Not once did the company mention his plans or relevant experience for advancing AI.

And with all eyes on Apple’s C-suite after more than a year of failed promises about the company’s AI assistant offerings, that’s sure to be noticed.

In recent years, Apple has taken on a reputation for trailing competitors in the AI race. Its AI assistant Siri lacks the capabilities of competing products from Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, and it relies on other companies for the underlying models. Microsoft and Google have both gone all in on incorporating agentic AI features into their operating systems in ways that Apple simply hasn’t — and sometimes when it’s tried, like via Apple Intelligence’s notification summaries, it’s gotten made fun of for missing the mark.

That’s not to say that stuffing AI into a system is a sign of success. Microsoft, for instance, has been widely criticized for going too far with its AI integration for Windows 11 and introducing Copilot into every corner of the operating system, even in its Notepad and Snipping Tool. It led to user backlash, the rise of the term “Microslop,” and a decision to walk back some of the changes (or at least appear to do so via a rebrand, amid user fears that Windows 12 would further embrace AI in everything). Some Microsoft users reportedly switched to the MacBook Neo, which offered a lower price point to compete with Microsoft devices and, ironically, less AI-ification. So if Ternus can use his decades at Apple, and his time working under Steve Jobs, to advance Apple’s AI systems right — in the thoughtful, well-designed, and simplistic way that Apple is known for — then he may be able to catch the company up in some ways.

But besides integration plans, there’s still the basic problem of the actual AI assistant features that Apple has fallen behind on. Other AI labs have spent the past couple of years dramatically advancing agentic AI systems, which aim to perform complex and multistep tasks on users’ behalf, though there’s still room for improvement. Apple has a long-standing reputation for showing up late to a product category with a winning entry, but here, it’s simply made promises and failed to deliver.

Last June at WWDC, executives referenced Apple Intelligence and highlighted live translation features, but personalization features for Siri — first mentioned at WWDC 2024 — were delayed, with executives saying the rollout would happen “over the course of the next year.” Ads ran in 2024 showing Siri with capabilities that still haven’t arrived nearly two years later. Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of software engineering, said at the time that the updates to Siri “needed more time to reach our high quality bar, and we look forward to sharing more about it in the coming year.” Fast-forward 10 months, and there’s no official word on when the new Siri will arrive, even as WWDC 2026 quickly approaches.

Last year, the company’s strategy seemed to be leaning on OpenAI’s ChatGPT to fill in a few of Siri’s gaps, like integrating ChatGPT into Apple’s Image Playground and adding visual intelligence features. Executives have repeatedly said in the past they hope Apple users will be able to choose other competitors’ models to use as well, and as of January, Apple finally inked its deal with Google to tap Gemini for help fueling Apple’s future foundation models, potentially costing Apple $1 billion per year. But even that deal was potentially late — last April, during Google’s search monopoly trial, CEO Sundar Pichai said the agreement with Apple would hopefully be signed within months, resulting in a rollout by the end of 2025.

Now, the question is whether the all-new, Gemini-powered Siri will roll out by WWDC 2026, or whether the debut will happen later, once Ternus is officially at the helm. On Alphabet’s February earnings call, executives largely ignored a question about the company’s AI partnerships, including with Apple, though Pichai said he was looking forward to Google powering “the next generation of Apple foundation models based on Gemini technology.”

Ternus, who reportedly has a reputation for maintaining Apple products rather than innovating new ones, will be tasked with a tall order in leading the world’s first trillion-dollar company into its new AI era — not only playing catch-up, but trying to get ahead of its competitors, which are already moving at breakneck speed.

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