John Ternus’s next big thing might be the iPhone

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By almost any imaginable measure, Tim Cook’s tenure as Apple’s CEO was mind-bogglingly successful. Even so, nobody can run a gigantic company for 15 years without their share of stumbles. Some of Cook’s most epic ones came when Apple tried its hardest to invent the next revolutionary product beyond the smartphone.

For example, more than three years after the Apple Vision Pro’s announcement, it remains an intriguing experiment stuck in a high-priced niche. At least it still has a shot at leading somewhere more mainstream. By contrast, the company’s car project lasted a decade, cost billions, and never came close to shipping anything.

When Cook took over from Steve Jobs in 2011, countless pundits were confident that he would be judged by his ability to pop out epoch-shifting blockbusters on a reliable schedule. He didn’t, yet Apple thrived. And so, as John Ternus succeeds Cook as CEO, I am reluctant to argue that Ternus must boldly go where no tech CEO has gone before. I’m even more reluctant to predict the opportunities and obstacles ahead. (If he is fortunate enough to serve for as long as Cook did, he’ll lead the company into the 2040s, a decade that still sounds like sci-fi to me.)

It would be weird, though, to remain incurious about what Ternus might accomplish besides keeping Apple profitably humming along. His résumé, with 25 years at the company as a technology and product guy, is a sharp departure from Cook’s background in operations. Of course, it will be fascinating to see how he applies it to his new gig. In that sense, expectations may be higher for him than for Cook when he took over from Steve Jobs.

Cook-era Apple is hardly the only company that has struggled to come up with anything that might be at least as big as the iPhone. Meta’s investments in VR, the metaverse, and smart glasses have yet to result in anything poised to replace the smartphone. (At the moment, it’s trying to convince consumers that its glasses aren’t skeevy.) Then there’s Humane’s AI Pin, which went from would-be smartphone slayer to dead meat in record time.

These gambits and others rest on the theory that smartphones have plateaued. They’re also allegedly a distracting nuisance, and maybe even an outright threat to our well-being. But the newcomers’ failure to ignite imaginations at anything resembling the same scale may be a sign that people don’t actually hate their phones after all. That would be good news for Apple, which could be in trouble if iPhone users actually were itching to move on to something newer and more daring.

Now there is a slam-dunk candidate for the most significant tech product to debut since the iPhone. That would be ChatGPT, which changed the world the moment it arrived and is now nearing a billion users. Presently, we access it and its rivals on the same types of devices we use for other types of software—desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and phones, be they from Apple or someone else.

The unanswered question is whether AI will change how we use technology so profoundly that we need a new kind of device optimized for it. OpenAI and Apple design god Jony Ive are working on a voice-first, screenless portable gizmo that, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, resembles a hockey puck and is designed to sell for $300 to $400. Thinking of it as a smart speaker à la an Amazon Echo may lead to unhelpful assumptions, especially given that it reportedly involves moving parts of some sort. With OpenAI apparently hoping to announce its device by the end of 2026, we may soon be able to form informed impressions of it.

For now, it’s not clear that going all-in on AI requires devices that depart radically from smartphones as we’ve known them. In the 19 years since the iPhone’s debut, phones have gained broadband-class internet connections, serious cameras, a bevy of sensors, and potent processors, all of which can make AI-centric experiences better. They also sport high-resolution screens, which will remain a killer feature as long as humans care about photos, videos, maps, and other inherently visual items.

In the iPhone, then, Apple already has a top-tier piece of AI hardware. It also has a device with plenty of room left for further evolution—as it’s expected to prove next week by announcing the first foldable iPhone. Yes, it’s late to the folding-phone party. But the Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad were far from the first products in their respective categories, and managed to do pretty well regardless.

What would an iPhone reimagined for AI look like? I’m not sure, but there may be precedent in how Apple tackled digital photography when it became clear that smartphones were the new point-and-shoot cameras. The original iPhone took terrible pictures and couldn’t do video at all. Now iPhones have up to four outstanding cameras and a touch-sensitive button that provides instant access to the camera app. There is plenty of room for the company to lavish comparable attention on AI without losing what makes an iPhone an iPhone.

The fact that Ternus deserves a meaningful share of the credit for the stellar state of Apple hardware presumably helps explain his promotion. As CEO, he will also be responsible for solving the company’s biggest AI problem, which is that it’s still emerging from the strange period in which it seemed completely flummoxed by the challenge of integrating the technology into its operating systems. Now that a much-improved version of Siri is finally about to ship, after a two-year delay, Apple can finally move forward.

If the AI race is all about which company controls the most advanced frontier model, Apple has chosen not to compete. But it has boundless potential to create AI features that quickly make people’s lives slightly better many billions of times a day, on existing devices it defines from the chip all the way up to the application level. No other tech giant can say the same.

Which is not to say that Apple isn’t working on devices unlike any it’s made. The rumor mill has revealed some of them, including a tabletop robot, smart glasses, and AirPods that can see. It will be fun to see where they go. But if Ternus takes full advantage of the iPhone in its current, familiar form, the whole matter of what lies past it may feel less pressing.

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