Steve Jobs and Tim Cook solved Apple’s biggest problems of their respective eras — building new products people loved and then manufacturing them at global, margin-fattening scale. John Ternus, who takes over as CEO today, will now have to confront Apple’s AI era.
Among his first tasks: Defending the powerful App Store that for decades operated like a walled garden and locked users into Apple’s smartphones. Those walls are coming down, thanks to a wave of vibe coding enabled by OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Cowork. Apple can’t ban those apps or control what happens outside Apple’s ecosystem — and they’re clearly the future.
Apple’s best bet now may be to turn its attention to the hardware it’s really good at building. The field is wide open for a device that can be for the AI era what the iPhone was for the mobile era. But the competition will be greater — Apple’s longtime hardware guru, Jony Ive, is now building a contender at OpenAI — and profit margins, as Cook knows better than anyone else, will likely be smaller.