Can John Ternus find Apple’s next big thing?

Today, I’m talking with Mark Gurman, who is the world’s best-sourced Apple reporter — both as Bloomberg’s chief Apple correspondent and the host of the upcoming podcast Power On. Earlier this month, Apple hosted its annual iPhone hardware event, virtually every detail of which was reported ahead of time by Mark. But this event was special, for a number of reasons. It was new Apple CEO John Ternus’ first major product launch since he took over for former CEO Tim Cook less than two weeks prior. It was also the debut of the iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable smartphone. The timing of those two things was not at all coincidental, as you’ll hear Mark explain. Apple takes these hardware events — and the stories they tell — extremely seriously. This year’s story actually says a great deal about what’s happening at Apple, how Cook managed in wholesale leadership ranks over the past year, and how all of that might change Apple’s culture. Furthermore, what all that tells about Ternus’ plan to navigate Apple from what you might call the iPhone era into the AI era. Okay: Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman on the future of Apple. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Mark Gurman, you’re the chief Apple correspondent and the managing editor of consumer technology at Bloomberg. Welcome to Decoder. Good to be here finally. Thanks for having me. And it’s been a while, so it’s good to catch up on all things Apple. Yeah, I’m really excited to talk to you. Obviously, Apple just had its big event. They announced the iPhone Duo. It was John Ternus’s first event as CEO. This is a Decoder episode, so we’ve got a new CEO, and we’ve got a new org chart inside of Apple. There’s been a lot of shuffling. You’ve been chronicling them very, very deeply over the past few years. Let’s just start with the event. I have a very basic question for you. Sure. Do you ever get nostalgic for a time when you didn’t know what was going to happen at the iPhone event? Do I ever get nostalgic? Do you ever wish that you, Mark Gurman, were about to be surprised? Honestly, I never think about it that way. I’m just fixated on delivering the goods and delivering the news. And people love their Apple. People want to know everything that’s coming down to the last minute, so I’m here to provide it for them. The thing with me, and I don’t know if most people know this about me, but I hope people know this about me, is that I’m a huge Apple fan through and through, and I’ve always been. And I’m so lucky to be able to cover a company that I love, a company that I am obsessed with, and a company whose products I use. There are so many people who cover companies that they couldn’t care less about. That’s not me. So I do what I do because I love Apple and I love covering Apple. I love the community around it, and I love talking about it. And it’s always fun to get a peek at the future and help keep not only myself informed, but people informed around me. That actually leads me to a lot of things because I’ve known you forever. We’ve been working in and around the same spaces forever. You got your start as an Apple blogger at the Apple rumor sites. There’s a whole culture around Apple that has grown up and changed over the years, and you can trace it to different eras of hardware, to different CEOs, to different sizes of the company. This was the first event with John Ternus as CEO. Apple announced a big new product in the iPhone Duo. Do you sense that the community is changing? How do you think that community has changed over the years? And do you think Ternus is going to lead to a difference in what that community feels like? I have to say, this event really didn’t feel much different than a Tim Cook event. They felt pretty interchangeable. It could have been Tim up there introducing it. It could have been Ternus up there introducing it. The one thing I will say that did feel slightly different is that Ternus came out swinging with a point of view on AI. The first thing he came out with was about the intelligent personal hub. Now, here’s the big difference between Tim Cook and John Ternus in terms of their management style. You’re inside Apple, you’re an executive, you’ll come to him with an idea, you’ll come to him with a viewpoint, a decision, an opinion, and he’ll just pepper you with more questions. He won’t make a singular decision in many cases. It’s very much communal decision-making, collaborative decision-making. John Ternus, if you come to him and you want him to make a decision, he’ll make a decision. He’ll have an opinion. Now, you may hate his opinion; you may completely disagree with him, but he has a viewpoint. But that’s the big difference between talking to people about Ternus and Tim. Ternus comes out talking about his view on AI. I may disagree with it. A lot of people may disagree with it. They may think the OpenAI or Anthropic approach is superior, but at least he came out and had a viewpoint. Apple’s been at this AI game now for two years since they launched Apple Intelligence at WWDC in 2024, and it’s been a mishmash of things. They haven’t really come out with a very strong narrative and viewpoint, and they finally did. So, as I said, whether you agree with it or not, they did do that. And I thought that was a really interesting way to kick off the keynote. All right, we’re just going to get into the weeds of Apple nerds disagreeing about things. Okay, let’s do it. I sat through that event, and I appreciated the same thing that you saw, which is, “Oh, we’re telling a story.” John Ternus is on the stage, and the first thing he’s doing is telling a story about this product and how it fits into the universe of technology. And then I took a beat, and I was like, oh, but they’re also just making sure that he’s successful at his first event by playing Apple’s greatest hits. Because an “intelligent personal hub” is just a replay of Steve Jobs saying the iMac was the digital hub. At the very end of the event, Ternus said, “There’s one more thing, and it’s the iPhone Duo.” There was just a part of all of that that, to me, felt like Apple saying, “Look, our new CEO can put on the clothes of the old CEO. He can do this same dance that you’re expecting.” Underneath it, what I felt was, to your point, that I don’t buy the story about the intelligent hub. No, I don’t buy it either. Because any of the things we’re seeing AI do are happening in cloud services. It’s the same week that Meta launched Muse, right? Right. You can feel what you want about Meta launching Muse, but Mark Zuckerberg is giving everybody 8GB of storage and 8GB of RAM in the cloud, and Muse can go do a lot of things that AI on the iPhone absolutely cannot do at this point in time. I just felt like there was a part where they were playing it really safe with John by having him basically show up and be the new lead singer of Journey. You can’t get it wrong if you’re going to do “Lights.” If you’re going to show up on stage and do “Don’t Stop Believin’,” you’re going to be fine for a minute. And it’s all the stuff that comes after that’s going to really show his real personality. But it sounds like you thought that that’s his point of view. Well, it’s a couple of things. At a very high level, Apple’s going to tell a story around what they have. If Apple invented ChatGPT, they would’ve invented ChatGPT, and they would’ve told a good story around that. Apple has gone as far as it’s able to, at least for now, on AI. So it’s telling the story, the best version of that story that they can with what they have to work with, with the bird they have in hand. So that’s the one thing. I agree with you on the intelligent personal hub, and how that compares to the iMac back in ‘98. And it feels like they’re trying to sell this pivot from the Mac as the center of everything with the peripherals around it; then you got to iCloud in 2011, the center of everything with the peripherals around it. Now, it’s this Intelligence right at the center with everything around it. But what’s so fascinating is that Apple held a major product launch event in September of the year 2026 and did not introduce a single notable new AI feature. The first 15 minutes or so of the keynote was simply a replay, a re-narrativization of what they introduced over the past two years with Apple Intelligence. And so they tried to just tell that story in a more concrete way. The other thing is they don’t have any AI devices at the very core, and so they need to prop up the iPhone as their AI device because they don’t have an alternative. But of course they’re only going to do that until they have that killer device, and then they’re going to change that whole narrative. So it’s a very narrative PR and marketing-driven company. And I’m not saying that to be critical. I mean, if I ran the company, obviously I’m going to tout what I have. I’m not going to veer from that. But it is interesting how they’re playing this. And I agree, they did play it very safe. There’s nothing safer than John Ternus introducing a new iPhone. It’s like the safest thing you can do. No major new AI product, no smart home hub, nothing in the spatial space, just straight down the middle. Yeah, it seems like that next wave of smart home products, which we’re expecting later this year... I say, “We’re expecting.” I’m expecting it because that is something you have reported. [Laughs] I am expecting it, yes. Mark Gurman is expecting new products from Apple. That is the first cut at some truly AI-native devices. Because you have Siri AI and it is functional now in a way that it previously was not functional, you can try some new classes of devices. There are about a half dozen AI-native devices coming in the next year and a half or so. The first will be the smart home hub, which is basically an Amazon Echo Show but Apple-style. It will have a square screen and an entirely new operating system. The idea is: what would a Siri AI operating system look like? This is that: intercom, video conferencing, proactive intelligence. So you walk up to it, it recognizes who you are, and it will show content personal to you. It will know who is speaking. Obviously, the Amazon Echo can do that, but Apple’s doing it in its own Apple-y way with AI-based Face ID. They’re working on a home security system. They’re working on another version of the smart home hub that I just talked about that is attached to a robotic arm. So you put it on your desk, and it can move around. It’s actually a category that’s pretty popping in Asia and in China right now. Then you’ve got the wearables, the smart glasses. I still believe those are going to be introduced and shipped in 2027, so not too far from now. Trust me, you’ll be wearing them. Within 365 days, you will be wearing them and have video footage of you wearing them at the Steve Jobs Theater. And if that is not the case, either something went horribly wrong for you or something went horribly wrong for Apple. You’ll also have the AirPods with cameras. That’s an interesting thing that we should talk about, but they’ll have the AirPods with cameras and then a few other wearables that I won’t get into. So this is what I was talking about when I said there were eras at Apple and people’s relationship with the company really changed. The Steve Jobs era was defined by devices, and in particular, Steve Jobs himself getting up and doing a keynote and famously putting up pictures of all the existing smartphones and saying, “Well, these all suck. And here’s the reason they all suck, and here’s the iPhone and here’s why it’s better.” That created one kind of relationship between Apple’s enormous community of fans, its leader, and the products. I think that was very successful. I think the Tim Cook era has been meaningfully different. I think it’s largely a story about scale. To some extent, it’s a story about values. To a huge extent, it’s a story about privacy. Apple has marketed itself as the privacy company. It fought the FBI to keep the iPhone encrypted. There’s a lot there with Tim Cook’s version of the company, but it’s more corporate. Certainly, it’s just a vaster company. It’s safer. It’s not as rough around the edges as Jobs’ Apple, but it wasn’t as device-based. I don’t think the Vision Pro has the same kind of mainstream cultural impact as even the hockey puck mouse that Jobs put out. There was a thing that he could do with products that Tim Cook Apple could not quite do with products. And that just feels really different to me. I’m going to correct you on that because every time I put an article or a post out about the Vision Pro being on life support, I get what amounts to basically a notch or two below a death threat from dozens of people. So people are passionate about it. Dozens? Dozens? Well, honestly, I think what it is is that people have created businesses around spatial computing and apps, and they’re just pissed off that they’ve invested all this time and money in a category that’s probably going to die out. And then you have consumers who spent four grand on this product, and they’re like, “I saved up for this thing, I’m living with this thing, and I’m pissed off to hear the realities.” But if you have another hour, we can talk about the Vision Pro. No, the comparison there is good. People have invested in it. They care deeply about it. The comparison I’m making is that the relationship people have to Apple in the Cook era is as an institution. It’s just like this big thing that spans the globe on a massive scale. It’s IBM. Yeah, and in the Jobs era, it was all about really, really innovative new products that redefined categories over and over again. You’re describing a whole bunch of new products that came up in the Cook era that John Ternus is going to launch. How do you expect the culture of Apple to change around its products or its relationship to the culture to change as we go from one CEO to another? But think about what they did. You’ve got the coolest new iPhone and Apple product in maybe 10, 20 years introduced one week after Tim Cook steps down. And then for the next 12 to 18 months, you’ve got, I don’t know, six or seven new product categories. Maybe you have 25 pretty breakthrough things. So Tim Cook made a decision that, even though his tenure at a product company was pretty limited in major new things, the Apple Watch turned out to be a success, even though it started as a complete dud, as you remember. The AirPods are a unique beast in that they’re an accessory, but it’s not a platform on its own yet. It’s going to get there. And the Vision Pro is a failure. Tim Cook could have ended his tenure as CEO with the iPhone Duo. He could have just waited. Typical transitions at Apple happen mid-October or mid-April; they happen on January 1st. It was a specific decision that was made for John Ternus to be the one to introduce the iPhone Duo. It was a specific decision made for John Ternus to be