Can John Ternus find Apple’s next big thing?

Today, I’m talking with Mark Gurman, who is the world’s best-sourced Apple reporter — both as Bloomberg’s chief Apple correspondent and the host of the upcoming podcast Power On.  Earlier this month, Apple hosted its annual iPhone hardware event, virtually every detail of which was reported ahead of time by Mark. But this event was special, for a number of reasons.  It was new Apple CEO John Ternus’ first major product launch since he took over for former CEO Tim Cook less than two weeks prior. It was also the debut of the iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable smartphone. The timing of those two things was not at all coincidental, as you’ll hear Mark explain. Apple takes these hardware events — and the stories they tell — extremely seriously.  This year’s story actually says a great deal about what’s happening at Apple, how Cook managed in wholesale leadership ranks over the past year, and how all of that might change Apple’s culture. Furthermore, what all that tells about Ternus’ plan to navigate Apple from what you might call the iPhone era into the AI era. Okay: Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman on the future of Apple. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.  Mark Gurman, you’re the chief Apple correspondent and the managing editor of consumer technology at Bloomberg. Welcome to Decoder. Good to be here finally. Thanks for having me. And it’s been a while, so it’s good to catch up on all things Apple. Yeah, I’m really excited to talk to you. Obviously, Apple just had its big event. They announced the iPhone Duo. It was John Ternus’s first event as CEO. This is a Decoder episode, so we’ve got a new CEO, and we’ve got a new org chart inside of Apple. There’s been a lot of shuffling. You’ve been chronicling them very, very deeply over the past few years. Let’s just start with the event. I have a very basic question for you. Sure. Do you ever get nostalgic for a time when you didn’t know what was going to happen at the iPhone event? Do I ever get nostalgic?  Do you ever wish that you, Mark Gurman, were about to be surprised? Honestly, I never think about it that way. I’m just fixated on delivering the goods and delivering the news. And people love their Apple. People want to know everything that’s coming down to the last minute, so I’m here to provide it for them.  The thing with me, and I don’t know if most people know this about me, but I hope people know this about me, is that I’m a huge Apple fan through and through, and I’ve always been. And I’m so lucky to be able to cover a company that I love, a company that I am obsessed with, and a company whose products I use. There are so many people who cover companies that they couldn’t care less about. That’s not me.  So I do what I do because I love Apple and I love covering Apple. I love the community around it, and I love talking about it. And it’s always fun to get a peek at the future and help keep not only myself informed, but people informed around me. That actually leads me to a lot of things because I’ve known you forever. We’ve been working in and around the same spaces forever. You got your start as an Apple blogger at the Apple rumor sites.  There’s a whole culture around Apple that has grown up and changed over the years, and you can trace it to different eras of hardware, to different CEOs, to different sizes of the company. This was the first event with John Ternus as CEO. Apple announced a big new product in the iPhone Duo. Do you sense that the community is changing? How do you think that community has changed over the years? And do you think Ternus is going to lead to a difference in what that community feels like? I have to say, this event really didn’t feel much different than a Tim Cook event. They felt pretty interchangeable. It could have been Tim up there introducing it. It could have been Ternus up there introducing it. The one thing I will say that did feel slightly different is that Ternus came out swinging with a point of view on AI. The first thing he came out with was about the intelligent personal hub. Now, here’s the big difference between Tim Cook and John Ternus in terms of their management style. You’re inside Apple, you’re an executive, you’ll come to him with an idea, you’ll come to him with a viewpoint, a decision, an opinion, and he’ll just pepper you with more questions. He won’t make a singular decision in many cases. It’s very much communal decision-making, collaborative decision-making.  John Ternus, if you come to him and you want him to make a decision, he’ll make a decision. He’ll have an opinion. Now, you may hate his opinion; you may completely disagree with him, but he has a viewpoint. But that’s the big difference between talking to people about Ternus and Tim. Ternus comes out talking about his view on AI. I may disagree with it. A lot of people may disagree with it. They may think the OpenAI or Anthropic approach is superior, but at least he came out and had a viewpoint.  Apple’s been