\n
<\/p>\n
When Tim Cook\u2019s tenure as CEO of Apple was still young, tech-industry pundits obsessed over one aspect of his new gig above all others. After returning to the company he cofounded, Jobs presided over an incredible run of epoch-shifting products: the iMac, iPod, iTunes Music Store, iPhone, iPhone App Store, and iPad. If Cook didn\u2019t extend that streak, conventional wisdom went<\/a>, Apple\u2019s glory days would be over.<\/p>\n That was always a silly way to look at the situation. In 2013, two years into the Cook era, I wrote that even the Jobs years were marked as much by relentless incremental progress<\/a> as by sudden breakthroughs. Cook was a logistics wizard, not a product mastermind like Jobs, so it wasn\u2019t shocking that his era turned out to be even more defined by ongoing refinement rather than great leaps forward. It\u2019s been enough to make him one of the most accomplished CEOs of his era, and Apple most definitely remains Apple.<\/p>\n With Monday\u2019s long-anticipated news that Cook will turn his job over to senior VP of engineering John Ternus in September\u2014he\u2019ll remain at Apple as executive chairman\u2014it\u2019s time to wonder once again what the future holds for Apple under a new CEO. This transition is freighted with far less drama<\/a>, and I expect fewer grand pronouncements about what Ternus must do to keep Apple successful. Given how unproductive the conversation was last time, that\u2019s a good thing.<\/p>\n Still, I\u2019m obsessed with an area of tremendous opportunity in which Ternus can not only match Cook\u2019s performance but also improve on it: the software side of Apple\u2019s business.<\/p>\n Ternus joined Apple in 2001 to work on displays. Though his profile has steadily increased in recent years\u2014I spoke with him in 2024 about the iPad Pro<\/a>\u2014he is not yet all that familiar a character outside the company. Mostly, we know that he\u2019s an accomplished hardware guy.<\/p>\n His reputation rests on the quality of Apple\u2019s devices, which in recent years have shown a remarkable streak of the year-by-year improvement it does so well. Products such as the Macs the company has released since shifting to its own CPUs\u2014from the 2020 MacBook Air to this year\u2019s MacBook Neo\u2014have exuded competence and confidence.<\/p>\n But Apple software during the nearly 15 years that Cook has run the company has shown no similar trajectory of excellence building upon excellence. I\u2019m not saying there have been no highlights: The first one I think of happens to be the Vision Pro\u2019s visionOS, a tour de force I hope someday runs on a more affordable headset. It\u2019s just that it\u2019s much easier to come up with a timeline of Apple\u2019s software mishaps, including ones still in the process of playing out.<\/p>\n The first one was a doozy. In September 2012, Apple replaced the iPhone\u2019s onboard version of Google Maps with the first version of Apple Maps. It was instantly apparent that it was terrible at the one task any mapping app must ace: reliably getting you from point A to point B. Somehow, Apple had failed to identify this problem before shipping the software\u2014assuming it hadn’t known and shipped it anyway.<\/p>\n Weeks later, while Apple Maps\u2019 awfulness was still a major news story, the company\u2019s software chief, Scott Forstall\u2014a key Jobs associate\u2014stepped down. According to scuttlebutt<\/a>, he was pushed out for being insufficiently collaborative, and maybe for refusing to sign a public letter of apology over the Maps incident. Whatever the circumstances, his departure did not usher in a golden age of Apple software.<\/p>\n Cook\u2019s subsequent executive reshuffling put Apple\u2019s senior VP of industrial design, Jony Ive, in charge of design across Apple\u2019s products. Then, at the height of his influence at the company, Ive made his most obvious contribution to its software with 2013\u2019s iOS 7, which ditched lickable skeuomorphism for a more spare look that felt like the digital equivalent of his stately hardware. It was a medium-size whoop at best, relating more to aesthetics than functionality.<\/p>\n When Ive left Apple in 2019, one of his lieutenants, Alan Dye, became VP of human interface design, a job he held until leaving for Meta last December. The fit and finish of Apple software noticeably slipped<\/a> with him in the job. His greatest legacy might be last year\u2019s Liquid Glass interface, which\u2014love<\/a> it or hate<\/a> it\u2014is, like iOS 7, a visual refresh.<\/p>\n I have gotten this far into this article without mentioning Apple\u2019s biggest recent software stumble: AI. In 2018, Cook hired<\/a> Google\u2019s John Giannandrea to head up AI and machine learning. It seemed like a coup at the time, and I expected it to quickly benefit Siri. Instead, at WWDC after WWDC, Apple\u2019s AI assistant continued to feel like an afterthought.<\/p>\n In late 2022, the arrival of ChatGPT and generative AI in general forced the issue. At June 2024\u2019s WWDC keynote, Apple introduced Apple Intelligence<\/a>, a portfolio of features spanning its hardware platforms. Onstage, the company touted “a new era” in which \u201ca more personalized Siri\u201d could understand and fulfill requests such as \u201cAdd this photo to the email I drafted to Madiha and Josh,\u201d \u201cShow me my hotel reservation for my Boston trip,\u201d and \u201cBring up the article about cicadas from my Reading List.\u201d<\/p>\n Eight months later, with these capabilities still no-shows, Apple said it was postponing them<\/a> until an unspecified date in \u201cthe coming year.\u201d They still aren\u2019t here. Last January\u2019s announcement<\/a> that Apple will leverage Google\u2019s Gemini LLM to power the more personalized Siri suggests that the stuff it showed in June 2024 was even more vaporous than we knew last year.<\/p>\n All of which brings us to Ternus\u2019s to-do list when he starts his new job in September. I find reason for guarded optimism that better times are ahead for Apple software. Or at least that they could be if Ternus makes that a priority.<\/p>\n For one thing, he might not have to clean house\u2014in recent months, the house kind of cleaned itself. Dye is gone, replaced as head of human interface design by Steve Lemay<\/a>, an Apple employee since the 1990s with a strong reputation. December also brought Giannandrea\u2019s retirement and the hiring of Amar Subramanya<\/a>, a Microsoft and Google veteran, as VP of AI. And as my colleague Mark Wilson has written, Apple\u2019s deal to use Gemini gets it some of the world\u2019s best AI without the need to burn through untold billions in the process.<\/p>\n The fact that Ternus\u2019s background is in hardware rather than software could also be a plus. At its best, Apple has always been better at eliminating the seams between those two elements than anyone else; even as a hardware guy, he has surely thought deeply about that topic. It\u2019s certainly far closer to his areas of expertise than it was to Cook\u2019s. Now the responsibility for making that seamlessness real will be all his.<\/p>\n Even if the Cook-to-Ternus handoff is short on spectacle, this year\u2019s WWDC keynote, on June 8, will be particularly resonant\u2014Cook\u2019s last as CEO and Ternus\u2019s last before taking charge. After WWDC 2024 laid out a future for Siri that remains unfulfilled, there\u2019s every reason to wait until Apple delivers on its keynote promises before taking them too seriously. But WWDC is still Apple\u2019s clearest annual statement about where its platforms are going\u2014and I, for one, will be particularly attuned to what it says about software in the age of Ternus.<\/p>\n