John Ternus confronts Apple’s AI era

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 tech giant faces fierce competition. 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.