My Take on The New Apple

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. 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 Turnis. 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. So, the full story is John Turnis 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 Johnny Suji, 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. So, first of all, uh we got to 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 going to 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 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. 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 highlevel 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 longtenured predictable 65 plus year old seuite executives just retiring around the same time and then handing over the reigns to a bunch of the younger generation inside Apple. So then 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 ores all changing direction at the same time in the same way that seems to actually be changing the direction of the boat. And 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. So then Tim Cook, not a product guy, and that's fine. That's still totally fine. Still was incredibly successful as a CEO. Investors love him. But whenever he talks about Apple, it's pretty clear he's not in the nitty-gritty of the products. 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. The magic mouse, uh, it was also an incredible moment. the getting the ergonomics well done and uh was key with Magic Mouse. Yeah, you could tell that's the first time he's thought about that product in a long time. So anyway, John Turnis, new CEO, just came from being the VP of hardware engineering. This is a product guy again. 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 2 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. 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? Well, I 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 Johnny I've 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. Uh the $599 Mac Mini snuck up as one of the best deals in all of tech. And then the latest most disruptive example, MacBook Neo coming along at 600 bucks and putting the entire Windows laptop industry on notice. So a little inside baseball real quick, but I think this will be helpful. So since co Apple events instead of being live onstage presentations are now these pre-recorded productions, these really really polished productions. I actually really like them a lot. 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. 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 thing that you see getting live streamed. But what you might not know is if this is a 10:00 a.m. event and a 10 a.m. live stream 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 3minut 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. You all tune in. The live stream goes for the MacBook Neo event. That was John Turnis. And that's obviously before he was announced as CEO. It's a couple weeks ago, so clearly they're getting him ready to do more of these. 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 Turnis 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. I hope that that guy can continue taking really big swings at interesting, thoughtful hardware products. Like don't get me wrong, a lot of really solid interesting products did come out under Tim Cook like Apple Watch and Air Tags and Vision Pro was a big swing. I think AirPods though are probably the most successful example. They are literally the most popular headphones on planet Earth. But they've also clearly shifted into focusing especially recently on building out all 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. 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 HomePod. 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 a new category from Apple, it feels like it 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? 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. But Apple, whenever they talk about something new and it flops, it gets talked about. It echoes. It's talked about so much. Vision Pro, right? iPhone 16e to an extent. Apple Intelligence, obviously. Air Power, like when Apple flops at something, you remember it basically. That's the point. 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 spin variation of a different Apple product. They all are kind of variations of each other. Maybe MacBook Neo is a like a positive version of that cuz that's technically a parts spin 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 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. Now, we just need them to step up their software game to match because between Mac OS 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. bookmark this video and come back to it in 5 to 10 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. Catch you guys in the next one. Peace.