My Take on The New Apple

Summary

Marques Brownlee unpacks the “Apple turnover” — Tim Cook’s announced transition from CEO to Chairman of the Board, with John Ternus, formerly SVP of Hardware Engineering, taking the top job in September. Johny Srouji, the longtime chip-lab leader, moves up to head hardware. Brownlee credits Cook with stepping into “probably the single hardest job in tech” — following Steve Jobs — and using supply-chain and business expertise to take Apple from a trillion-dollar company to a four-trillion-dollar one across 15 years of wildly different economies. But this isn’t a one-person shuffle: it’s a coordinated wave of long-tenured, 65+ year-old C-suite executives retiring at the same time and handing the reins to a younger generation.

His core thesis is that Apple is moving from a business-CEO era back to a product-CEO era. Steve Jobs was a “product guy” in the nitty-gritty of every device. Tim Cook, by his own showing, wasn’t — Brownlee replays the infamous Magic Mouse exchange from his own Cook interview as evidence. Ternus, by contrast, has been visibly paraded around for camera-ready CEO training, hosted the MacBook Neo event in lieu of Cook, and went deep with Brownlee in a separate interview on iPhone materials and Apple’s nuanced repairability-vs-durability stance. The recent hardware track record under Ternus’s hardware org — Apple Silicon MacBook Pros that are thicker with more battery and ports, the $599 Mac Mini, the $600 MacBook Neo “putting the entire Windows laptop industry on notice” — is offered as the preview of what’s coming.

The worry: Apple “almost seems like they avoid the possibility of failure extra hard,” which makes them try fewer things. Where Samsung and Google are daily-uploader YouTubers willing to ship into the graveyard, Apple is the every-six-months uploader where every flop — Vision Pro, iPhone 16E, Apple Intelligence, AirPower — echoes for years. Brownlee wants Apple to take more swings: a real Apple camera, a smart-home display speaker, smart glasses, “a printer that doesn’t suck.” With Ternus reportedly spearheading the upcoming iPhone fold, the hardware future looks promising — but Brownlee closes by flagging that macOS Tahoe, Liquid Glass, Apple Intelligence and Siri all still need to close a serious software gap for the new era to land.

Highlights

”Apple turnover has made headlines for the last week straight”

“Apple turnover, or Apple’s turnover has made headlines for like the last week straight. You’ve probably already seen it on your feed. Tim Cook is officially stepping down as CEO of Apple this year to be replaced by John Ternus.” — Marques Brownlee, 0:11

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”Probably the single hardest job in tech”

“We gotta give props to Tim Cook where it’s due. I mean, love him or hate him, that man stepped into probably the single hardest job in tech, which is you’re gonna follow up Steve Jobs. And while he is no Steve Jobs, he did it in his own way.” — Marques Brownlee, 1:13

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”Coordinated oars all changing direction at the same time”

“My takeaway from all this is it feels like there’s a bunch of coordinated oars all changing direction at the same time in the same way that seems to actually be changing the direction of the boat.” — Marques Brownlee, 2:46

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”The Magic Mouse moment”

“I made the mistake of trying to talk about a lot of products in detail and that’s how you end up with this meme of me basically reminding him that the Magic Mouse exists and him having to come up with something to say about it on the spot.” — Marques Brownlee, 3:32

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”If Apple were a YouTuber, they would upload every six months”

“Every new product drop, especially new category from Apple, it feels like a… has to be this massive revolutionary huge thing, which it like holds them back from trying a lot of interesting stuff. Like if if Apple were a YouTuber, they would be the YouTuber that uploads every six months, right?” — Marques Brownlee, 9:00

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”Whenever Apple flops at something, you remember it”

“Apple, whenever they talk about something new and it flops, it gets talked about so it echoes. It’s talked about so much. Vision Pro, right? iPhone 16E to an extent, Apple Intelligence, obviously, AirPower. Like whenever Apple flops at something, you remember it basically.” — Marques Brownlee, 9:33

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Key Points

• Apple turnover dominating the news (0:11) - Tim Cook stepping down as CEO this year, replaced by John Ternus
• Ternus from SVP Hardware Engineering (0:39) - Starts in September; Johny Srouji moves up to head hardware
• Cook moves to chairman of the board (0:39) - “The classic retirement move,” not leaving Apple
• Following Steve Jobs was the hardest job in tech (1:13) - Cook took Apple to a 4-trillion-dollar valuation
• Massive boat with thousands of paddles (1:34) - Why one or two execs usually doesn’t change direction
• Coordinated 65+ executive retirements (1:54) - Younger generation taking over across the C-suite
• Snazzy Quinn’s video aged well (2:46) - Recommended companion piece on the turnover
• Steve Jobs as the product CEO archetype (3:00) - In the nitty gritty of every product
• Tim Cook is not a product guy (3:20) - Successful CEO but not in product details
• The Magic Mouse interview meme (3:32) - Cook caught on the spot in Brownlee’s interview
• Ternus deeply in product details (4:20) - Brownlee’s separate interview covered iPhone materials, repairability vs. durability
• Apple Silicon MacBook Pros vs. Jony Ive era (5:02) - Thicker, more battery, more ports, no overheating keyboards
• $599 Mac Mini and $600 MacBook Neo (5:30) - Recent hardware wins putting Windows laptop industry on notice
• Pre-recorded Apple events since COVID (5:46) - The pre-stream “good morning” three-minute intro by the CEO
• Ternus hosted the MacBook Neo event (6:00) - Pre-CEO public training
• iPhone fold spearheaded by Ternus (6:39) - Expected to host the September iPhone unveiling
• AirPods most popular headphones on Earth (7:34) - Cook’s most successful product launch
• Apple as services company (7:34) - iCloud, TV+, Music, Fitness for recurring revenue
• Apple avoids the possibility of failure extra hard (8:14) - Camera, smart speaker with display, smart glasses, “a printer that doesn’t suck”
• Apple flops echo (9:33) - Vision Pro, iPhone 16E, Apple Intelligence, AirPower
• Parts-bin formulaic products (9:54) - Recent Apple feels like variations of each other
• Software still has a gap to close (10:38) - macOS Tahoe, Liquid Glass, Apple Intelligence, Siri

Mentions

Companies

• Apple (0:00) - Subject of the entire video; leadership transition and product strategy
• Samsung (9:13) - Cited as a “daily uploader” willing to try new products constantly
• Google (9:13) - “Graveyard of dozens and dozens” of killed products as the counter-model

Products & Technologies

• MacBook Pro (Apple Silicon) (5:02) - Thicker, more battery, more ports vs. Jony Ive era
• Mac Mini ($599) (5:30) - “One of the best deals in all of tech”
• MacBook Neo ($600) (5:30) - Most disruptive recent example; the original transcript briefly says MacBook Air at this price
• Apple Silicon (5:02) - The vertical-integration foundation of the new Mac era
• iPhone fold (6:39) - Expected this year, reportedly spearheaded by Ternus
• Apple Watch (7:34) - Solid product that came out under Cook
• AirTags (7:34) - Solid product under Cook
• Vision Pro (7:34) - “A big swing” but cited later as a flop that echoed
• AirPods (7:34) - “Literally the most popular headphones on planet Earth”
• iCloud / Apple TV / Apple Music / Apple Fitness (7:34) - Services revenue from the iPhone install base
• HomePod (8:14) - Brownlee wishes for a smart home speaker with a display instead
• iPhone 16E (9:33) - Cited as a flop that echoed
• Apple Intelligence (9:33) - Cited as a flop; software gap still to close
• AirPower (9:33) - Cited as a flop that’s still talked about
• Magic Mouse (3:47) - Subject of the meme moment from Brownlee’s Cook interview
• macOS Tahoe / Liquid Glass / Siri (10:38) - The software gap Apple still has to close
• WWDC (6:19) - Pre-recorded movie-screening event format at Apple Park

People

• Tim Cook (0:11) - Stepping down as CEO, moving to chairman of the board
• John Ternus (0:11) - New CEO of Apple Inc. starting in September; previously SVP Hardware Engineering
• Johny Srouji (0:39) - Moving from SVP Hardware Technologies to head of hardware; the Apple Silicon chip-lab guy
• Steve Jobs (1:13) - The product-CEO archetype Cook had to follow
• Jony Ive (5:02) - The “too thin” MacBook Pros era is now over
• Snazzy Quinn (2:46) - Linked YouTuber whose Apple turnover video “aged incredibly well”

Surprising Quotes

“Tim Cook is officially stepping down as CEO of Apple this year to be replaced by John Ternus.” — Marques Brownlee, 0:11

“Even Tim Cook, who is 65 years old, was essentially the last big domino in a large, likely orchestrated series of exactly that.” — Marques Brownlee, 2:46

“Apple also has this character about them which is like they almost seem like they avoid the possibility of failure extra hard, which makes them try less things, if that makes sense.” — Marques Brownlee, 8:14

“If if Apple were a YouTuber, they would be the YouTuber that uploads every six months, right? Like like Samsung and Google, they are the daily uploader grinding away, trying new stuff all the time.” — Marques Brownlee, 9:00

“Bookmark this video and come back to it in five to ten years to see how well it aged. Or or if you are watching this in 2031 and I turned out to be super wrong, send this to someone to show them how dumb I am.” — Marques Brownlee, 11:00

Transcript

Marques Brownlee: 0:00 Apple is one of the biggest and most interesting companies in the world right now, not for any new products, but for what’s going on behind the scenes because it is now the scenes.

Marques Brownlee: 0:11 So Apple turnover, or Apple’s turnover has made headlines for like the last week straight. You’ve probably already seen it on your feed. Tim Cook is officially stepping down as CEO of Apple this year to be replaced by John Ternus.

Marques Brownlee: 0:24 And I normally don’t cover CEO changes at companies, but a lot of you have been asking me about it, and I do think this one’s really interesting in the context of the types of products we may be about to get as a result.

Marques Brownlee: 0:39 So the full story is John Ternus, starting in September, will be the new CEO of Apple Inc. He was previously the senior vice president of hardware engineering. So the new chief of hardware when he moves up will be Johny Srouji, who was working as senior VP of hardware technologies. He’s the guy who’s always in the chip lab down in all those Apple keynotes leading all the Apple silicon stuff. And Tim Cook won’t be leaving Apple, he’ll just do the classic retirement move to chairman of the board of directors.

Marques Brownlee: 1:13 So first of all, we gotta give props to Tim Cook where it’s due. I mean, love him or hate him, that man stepped into probably the single hardest job in tech, which is you’re gonna follow up Steve Jobs. And while he is no Steve Jobs, he did it in his own way. He brought all of his supply chain optimization and business expertise to take Apple to ridiculous heights to be a trillion dollar, then two, three, four trillion dollar company.

Marques Brownlee: 1:34 Through 15 years of wildly different economies and political climates, investors love him. That was what he was always good at. But the number one question a lot of people have been asking me for the past week straight is like, all right, now, what do you think? What is going to possibly change about Apple now that Tim Cook is stepping down? And it’s funny normally, you know, with these, with one or two people shuffling around, it typically doesn’t actually make much of a difference.

Marques Brownlee: 1:54 Like with these huge companies, they’re like a massive boat and thousands of people have a paddle. So no one person is going to dramatically change the direction of the whole company. But if you’ve paid attention for the past couple months around Apple, it’s actually more than just the guy at the top. It’s more than one or two people. There have been a lot of really high-level executives and important people and leaders in the company stepping down, leaving, and mostly retiring. There were maybe one or two surprises in there, but it was mostly a bunch of fairly long-tenured, predictable, 65-plus-year-old C-suite executives just retiring around the same time and then handing over the reins to a bunch of the younger generation inside Apple.

Marques Brownlee: 2:46 So even Tim Cook, who is 65 years old, was essentially the last big domino in a large, likely orchestrated series of exactly that. If you want a lot more insight on this, you should watch Snazzy Quinn’s video on it. It’s a few months old, but it has aged incredibly well on all of this. So my takeaway from all this is it feels like there’s a bunch of coordinated oars all changing direction at the same time in the same way that seems to actually be changing the direction of the boat.

Marques Brownlee: 3:00 I think I really like where it looks like it’s all going. See, Steve Jobs is what I would call a product guy, right? He was the CEO and he did a lot with marketing and strategy and the rest of that, he was the visionary, but the head of the company was this guy who really dived into the nitty gritty of the products and what they were capable of and what made them great.

Marques Brownlee: 3:20 So then, Tim Cook, not a product guy. And that’s fine, that’s still totally fine, still was incredibly successful as the CEO, investors love him, but whenever he talks about Apple it’s pretty clear he’s not in the nitty gritty of the products.

Marques Brownlee: 3:32 Like, you can even go back and watch my interview with him from two years ago. I made the mistake of trying to talk about a lot of products in detail and that’s how you end up with this meme of me basically reminding him that the Magic Mouse exists and him having to come up with something to say about it on the spot.

Marques Brownlee: 3:47 The magic mouse. Uh, it was also an incredible moment. The getting the ergonomics well done and uh was key. With magic mouse. Yeah.

Marques Brownlee: 4:06 You could tell that’s the first time he’s thought about that product in a long time. So anyway, John Ternus, new CEO. Just came from being the VP of hardware engineering. This is a product guy again.

Marques Brownlee: 4:20 And I’m not just saying that. You can go watch interviews of him from the last year or so of Apple parading him around, essentially getting him on camera and ready for the CEO spotlight. I also interviewed him about two years ago and we went back and forth in depth about the iPhone and its materials and shed some light on Apple’s specific stance on repairability versus durability, and it was quite nuanced.

Marques Brownlee: 4:45 Now whether we agree with it or not, that’s another story, but the point is this guy is clearly in the nitty gritty of the products all the time. And so now this guy is obviously in a much more elevated position in the company. So, what does this mean?

Marques Brownlee: 5:02 Well, I think we can look at the past couple years of Apple’s hardware engineering, which have gone really well, to get an idea. So the last of the Jony Ive designed MacBook Pros that were too thin and had keyboard issues and overheated are out and the Apple Silicon-powered MacBook Pros that are actually thicker and have more battery and more ports are in.

Marques Brownlee: 5:30 The five hundred and ninety-nine dollar Mac Mini snuck up as one of the best deals in all of tech. And then the latest most disruptive example, MacBook Air coming along at six hundred bucks and putting the entire Windows laptop industry on notice.

Marques Brownlee: 5:46 So a little inside baseball real quick, but I think this’ll just be helpful. So since COVID, Apple events instead of being live on-stage presentations are now these pre-recorded productions, these really, really polished productions. I actually really like ‘em a lot.

Marques Brownlee: 6:00 thing that you see getting livestreamed. But what you might not know is if this is a 10:00 AM event and a 10:00 AM livestream, right around like 9:57, Tim Cook will come out onto a stage in front of the screen and give a big patented good morning and give us like a three-minute intro to the event and what to expect. Nothing crazy, just CEO talk. Oh, thanks for joining us today here at Apple, we’re really proud of what we’ve made, we have something really exciting to show y’all, so enjoy. We think you’re going to love it. And then it starts, you know, at 10:00 o’clock y’all tune in, the livestream goes. For the MacBook Neo event, that was John Ternus. And that’s obviously before he’s announced as CEO, it’s a couple weeks ago. So clearly they’re getting him ready to do more of these,

Marques Brownlee: 6:07 But anyway, now that they’re pre-recorded that means that whenever there’s a new Apple event and they invite us all to go to Apple Park, they’re essentially inviting us all to go watch this pre-recorded production that they’ve made.

Marques Brownlee: 6:19 So when everybody goes to WWDC this summer, we’re all going to go to one place and just essentially watch a screening of the movie that they made together. It’s the same…

Marques Brownlee: 6:39 but also it’s, it’s symbolic of him like heading the development of the Neo and kind of owning that project and presenting it to the world. I don’t think I saw Tim Cook there at all. Word on the street is they were already planning to do this again anyway in September, but now it’s even more likely since he is the CEO, but Ternus will probably be the guy mainly hosting the entire iPhone unveiling event the way Tim Cook has in the past. This year that we are expecting to get an iPhone fold, which seems like he has also been spearheading the development of. So I hope that that guy who’s been given elevated leadership in the company and has a bunch of people with him on board now for that type of stuff and has been spearheading development of interesting stuff like MacBook Pros and then MacBook Neo and a folding iPhone,

Marques Brownlee: 7:14 I hope that that guy can continue taking really big swings at interesting, thoughtful hardware products.

Marques Brownlee: 7:34 Like don’t get me wrong, a lot of really solid interesting products did come out under Tim Cook, like Apple Watch and AirTags and Vision Pro was a big swing. I think AirPods though are probably the most successful example, they’re literally the most popular headphones on planet Earth. But they’ve also clearly shifted into focusing especially recently on building out all of these services, like we hear about them becoming a services company now with like iCloud and Apple TV, Apple Music, Apple Fitness, all this stuff just to get that that sweet sweet recurring revenue out of the massive iPhone install base.

Marques Brownlee: 8:14 Like I said, investors loved it, but I want the interesting products to start coming back again. Now, here’s the only thing that makes me nervous, okay. Apple also has this character about them which is like they almost seem like they avoid the possibility of failure extra hard, which makes them try less things, if that makes sense. Like there is a ton of stuff that I would like Apple to make, like I say this on my podcast all the time, that they just don’t. Like a camera, I think that could be awesome if Apple made a dedicated camera, but they don’t. A smart home speaker with a display instead of just HomePods, that could be cool. Smart glasses, they could jump into that. They’re apparently going to jump into folding phones, but other stuff like a printer that doesn’t suck. Hey, maybe with their billions of dollars they could figure that one out too. But every new product drop, especially new category from Apple, it feels like a

Marques Brownlee: 9:00 has to be this massive revolutionary huge thing, which it like holds them back from trying a lot of interesting stuff. Like if if Apple were a YouTuber, they would be the YouTuber that uploads every six months, right?

Marques Brownlee: 9:13 Like like Samsung and Google, they are the daily uploader grinding away, trying new stuff all the time. New video, it worked? Great. New video flopped? Whatever. I’m going to try something next day. Like they’re just constantly pushing stuff out and so there’s a graveyard, there’s literally a graveyard of dozens and dozens of Google products that you’ve probably mostly never heard of that just didn’t work and they killed it. Whatever.

Marques Brownlee: 9:33 But Apple, whenever they talk about something new and it flops, it gets talked about so it echoes. It’s talked about so much. Vision Pro, right? iPhone 16E to an extent, Apple Intelligence, obviously, AirPower. Like whenever Apple flops at something, you remember it basically. That’s the point.

Marques Brownlee: 9:54 And I think that’s made them play things ridiculously safe under Tim Cook for the past many many years to the point where things feel like almost formulaic. Like we get a new Apple product, but it’s it’s a parts bin variation of a different Apple product. They all are kind of variations of each other.

Marques Brownlee: 10:21 Maybe MacBook Neo’s like a positive version of that because that’s technically a parts bin product too, but most of them it would start to feel very stale. I don’t know if that’s ever going to completely stop, but it does feel like with the new leadership, the new CEO, all of this Apple turnover, it feels like we may be ready to get a bunch of interesting hardware products again, which is what I think a lot of people have been asking about and I think a lot of people are ready for.

Marques Brownlee: 10:38 Now we just need them to step up their software game to match because between macOS Tahoe and Liquid Glass and Apple Intelligence and Siri, all of that, there’s a lot of work to be done to close that gap. But hey, if they nail both, that that could be special, that could be fun.

Marques Brownlee: 11:00 Bookmark this video and come back to it in five to ten years to see how well it aged. Or or if you are watching this in 2031 and I turned out to be super wrong, send this to someone to show them how dumb I am. Thanks for watching. Get you guys in the next one. Peace.