The Story
This episode has the energy of two people sprinting into a studio because history just happened. The big news is that Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple’s CEO, with longtime hardware executive John Ternus taking over, while Cook moves into the executive chairman role. What immediately grabs Nilay and Dieter isn’t just that the transition happened, but when it happened: suddenly, on a Monday evening, right after Apple’s 50th anniversary, and far earlier than they expected. They’d imagined Ternus being unveiled around the next iPhone launch, in a carefully staged handoff. Instead, Apple dropped a bomb.
From there, the conversation turns into a fascinating read on what this move says about Apple. Ternus, they argue, was always the obvious successor. He’s deeply rooted in hardware, personable, and unmistakably part of Apple’s internal culture. Alongside him, chip chief Johny Srouji gets elevated to chief hardware officer, which they read as a strong signal that Apple wants to double down on the thing it has always done best: making devices. At the same time, Cook staying on feels like a practical division of labor. Ternus gets products; Cook gets politics, China, Trump, tariffs, and the endless parade of global power brokers.
That setup leads them into a bigger reckoning with the Cook era. There’s real admiration in the way they describe it: Cook turned Apple into a machine of astonishing scale, with supply chains and margins so efficient they border on historic. He squeezed value out of every part of the company, from iPhones to services to the App Store. But that success came with tradeoffs. In their telling, Cook’s Apple became obsessed with optimizing what already worked instead of taking enough swings on what might come next. Products like the Apple Watch and Vision Pro arrived carrying impossible expectations, as if every new device had to be a cultural revolution on day one.
That’s where their hope for Ternus starts to emerge. Not that he’ll suddenly make Apple chaotic or experimental like Google or Samsung, but that he might restore a more product-led instinct — a willingness to ship the thing that leads to the next thing. They imagine a company a little less scared of imperfection, a little more willing to iterate in public, and a little more connected to the messy reality of invention.
Main Themes
The deepest theme running through the episode is the tension between operational excellence and creative risk. Cook is praised as maybe the ultimate manager of scale, someone who made Apple richer, larger, and more globally central than almost any company in history. But that same discipline may have made Apple too cautious, too polished, and too reluctant to test uncertain ideas.
Another thread is the split between products and power. Apple is no longer just a company that makes gadgets; it’s a geopolitical actor, entangled with governments, trade wars, and regulatory pressure. Cook remaining in the chairman role suggests that Apple sees those relationships as a full-time job in themselves. Ternus’s promotion, then, hints at an Apple trying to separate the business of surviving the world from the business of inventing for it.
And hovering over everything is AI. The hosts suggest Apple may have decided not to win by building the smartest model, but by remaining the hardware platform through which everyone else’s AI flows. In that sense, this leadership change feels less like a revolution than a recalibration: Apple choosing, very deliberately, to bet on the device again.
Full Transcript
Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up, and audit tread? It's time for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place, and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clearer visibility, faster deals, zero chaos. Call it compliance, or call it com-pliance. Get it? Join the 15,000 companies using Vanta to prove trust. Go to vanta.com/com. Welcome to a live Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Jon Turnus, who we have to be nice to now because he's the new CEO of Apple. I'm Dieter. Hi, Nilay. It's been a day, my friend. How are you? It has been a day, right at the end, where we're emergency podcasting. So the news, obviously, Tim Cook stepping down as the CEO of Apple, Jon Turnus, the not-quite-new, soon-to-be CEO of Apple. Nilay, just we got a bunch of stuff to talk about, but I'm just curious, immediate reaction, are you surprised, A, that this happened, and B, that it happened today? I am very surprised it happened today. Like, very, very surprised it happened today. Apple just turned 50. Tim Cook did a raft of interviews during that time in which he said he was not leaving anytime soon. So I'm... Which we should say is technically true. He's staying as the executive chairman. There's a quote that more or less makes it sound like Tim Cook's new job at Apple is to be the person who gets yelled at by politicians. So he is not technically leaving, so I'm sure there will be people at Apple who will tell you he was not technically lying, and yet here we are. Yeah, I mean, the role of executive chairman, guy who gets yelled at by Congress and by foreign governments, is like a storied Silicon Valley role. The immediate comparison I would make is to Eric Schmidt, who was the CEO of Google. He was the adult supervision for Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Larry Page became the CEO. Eric kicked himself upstairs to do politics, and in particular, like, run around and get yelled at by Europeans. So this is a pretty standard arrangement. Again, it's just the timing that really gets me, because it's A, sort of out of nowhere on a Monday evening. It's not like a Friday news dump. There was no rumble that it was going to happen. And I, in particular, was expecting it to happen around the iPhone. Interesting. Right, I assumed that we would get a Jon Turnus iPhone introduction and then a one more thing, our hottest new product is Jon Turnus. Like, I had that staging in my mind. I wasn't expecting a sort of bomb to go off right after Apple 50. But again, the news is not surprising. I think we all knew it was going to be Jon Turnus. You and I have interacted with Jon Turnus many times over the past several years. He's always been very kind. He's in it. Like, he is a hardware person. He won't argue with you about USB-C. So I'm excited for that turn for Apple in that specific way. And I'm not at all surprised that Tim Cook is going to stick around and manage China and manage Donald Trump. Like, that is a totally different set of skills. Yeah, so is that your read of the breakdown? So basically, Jon Turnus, who was the SVP of hardware engineering, is becoming CEO. Johnny Shruji, who has been an interesting figure inside of Apple. There were rumors not that long ago that he was leaving. There's been this kind of executive parade out of Apple over the last 12 months. Some people saying, essentially, this is great news. Thank God they're gone. Like Alan Dye, who was doing design. And a lot of people thought not very well. And then there have been a bunch of people who have left that were bigger losses. Johnny Shruji, there were rumors he was going to leave. He quashed those pretty aggressively. Is now getting Jon Turnus's old job, but then a little more. His new title is Chief Hardware Officer. And I believe, you're the titles expert on The Vergecast, but I believe Apple is one of those companies that is very deliberate about titles. And so the idea that it's giving Johnny Shruji a C-suite title is a big deal. So this is like, this is two hardware people being elevated to very important new positions inside of Apple. Should we take that as the sort of obvious sign that it feels like it wants to be that this is a company like doubling down on its hardware business? I mean, Apple has always been a hardware business. It's pretty hard to get Apple's software without Apple hardware, except in the case of Apple TV, which is both a gadget, a service, a piece of software, and a magazine insert. Who knows what is going on there? That's the only truly horizontal piece of software they have that people talk about. Apple Music is another one, but that's about it, really. I think Johnny Shruji is a really important Apple. There are a lot of people who thought that Intel would poach him. There are big jobs he could take that he is more than qualified for. I think Apple needs to keep him. And the future of their products is so intimately tied to their chip roadmap that elevating the person who's led all the chip designs into the role of chief hardware officer, it makes a natural kind of sense. What we don't know is whether Shruji is any good at actually making hardware. He's great at making chips. He is very good at making chips. There's lots of other bits and bobs that go into a great piece of hardware. That said, Jon Turnus is still gonna be there. His background is hardware. You expect him to pay some attention to that as well. On the title front, Apple has usually, historically been really tight with titles. You can get up to SVP and that's where you live. And famously, Steve Jobs used to tell people that once they had an SVP title, they had no more problems, like their problems were their own. In the Tim Cook era, that has totally been changed. Like everybody has had fake titles forever in the Tim Cook era. That's how he has managed his team. Like you're getting poached? Here's a chief nothing title. Like Johnny I've had the chief design officer title. It literally meant that he was retired. So it's unclear what this actually means in the day-to-day. But given their emphasis on owning the whole widget from chips to software to distribution to market, like you can see that this probably feels like more of a real title than not. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, and I think I've been looking around seeing just sort of the immediate reactions. I went to CNBC where they started talking about the stock price and all this stuff this is gonna mean. And there is, there's this swirl of stuff going on inside of Apple that I think is really complicated to pull apart and is gonna be really interesting to see how it changes or doesn't with a new CEO. So there's Apple, the hardware company, right? Which it fundamentally is. Apple is the iPhone company more than anything else. But it also has these other giant hardware businesses. It sells a lot of hardware. It sells it at huge margins. It has done so for a very long time. Apple is also increasingly a services business. And this is the bit of CNBC. I'm a financial genius now because I watched eight minutes of CNBC while I was getting ready for this. The Apple wants to be perceived as a software company making software margins, which is one of the reasons it has been pushing harder and harder into services. It has fought tooth and nail to continue to extract its 30% from everything that happens on the iPhone. There's a sense that, okay, even if the growth of our hardware business is going to stall, we're gonna find more and more ways to make money from people. Then there is this mess that is AI and Apple intelligence and Siri, which Apple has largely whiffed on, but I think in a funny way has sort of come around on Apple where, like, actually being the company competing to make the frontier model that causes the most problems is not a great place to be. And instead, being the hardware on which everyone will do these things and thus you can extract your 30% rent becomes very important. So, like, there's all this stuff just swirling around. And I feel like one easy read of this would be to say that, okay, Apple has seen all of this. And even if you think AI is the future, Apple's big bet is that being the hardware maker of the AI revolution is going to be vastly more important than, like, trying to go poach Demis Hassabis from Google to come run your company and be an AI company forever. Did I just twist myself into knots or does that make any sense? You're a little bit twisted, but let me help you untwist it. Okay. The Tim Cook era is defined by Apple squeezing every dollar from every part of its business that it can. In 2010, has Tim Cook been good at that? He has. And I'm not even saying the products are good or bad. I'm just saying it definitionally, the thing that Cook has done is say, well, we've run out of countries to sell iPhones in. And, you know, even if we spend all of our effort getting 10% more users to switch from Android, that won't move the needle because we're already so big. So what we're going to do is make all the apps subscription apps and make all of our money every time you push a button on the iPhone. And we're going to fight tooth and nail with Epic Games about Fortnite in-app purchases, whatever it is. That has worked. On the other side, every product line Tim Cook is probably best known for, which is the like unbelievable supply chain work that he's done over 15 years, right? Like you talk about squeezing dollars. No one in this business is better at that than Tim Cook. And so it's like, I think he has found a way to squeeze every dollar out of the company and every one of its products in every way is like a perfect summation of Tim Cook's legacy. And you can either like that or hate it, but it is, it is, boy, has it been good for business. It is impossible to understate how hard that is. Yeah. Very few companies or people can pull off the just the one product. We're going to make a new iPhone every year at iPhone scale and they do it every year without missing a beat. That is one of the most impressive feats in business history and manufacturing history and anything history. Like there are armies that don't operate with as clean logistics as Apple operates the iPhone supply chain. Yeah. That's remarkable. Here's my big criticism of the Tim Cook era. They don't make enough stuff. They like simply do not have enough products. They're not taking enough shots. And when they do take the shots, they put too much pressure on them in weird ways. The example I always go back to, just because I think it's funny, is the introduction of the Apple Watch, where they just like overloaded the Apple Watch with expectations and hype. And Bono was there and we all had to pretend the digital crown was an input method. It's like, it's so funny to me. The Apple Watch was going to be as big as the touchscreen. That's like a real thing that they said. They made that case. And it's like, guys, you don't have to, you can just have more products. You can just try more things and see what works. The Vision Pro is the same way. They just like overloaded this VR headset with all of these expectations because they weren't trying enough things. Right. Because the Tim Cook era is so much about optimizing the things that already exist. And certainly there are products during his tenure that are very important. Like AirPods are very important. You make, you can go down the list. There's a lot of important products that came up, but all even AirPods are like, now there's 50 variations of AirPods. Yeah. And so there just weren't enough shots. And I'm kind of hoping that the Turnus era combined with sort of the pressure of the AI era where everyone is trying to find the new thing because AI does feel like a meaningfully different way to interact with a computer that they just take more shots. Right. Not in the like crazy Samsung way, but just in the like, they should make a home device that you can talk to. They should expand AirPods and doing something else. And I'm kind of hoping that having a hardware person at the lead makes them like try more things without all of that pressure. I'm not sure that they will, but that that's my criticism of the Cook era is that it was so deliberate because everything had to scale to a huge number that sometimes their failures were even bigger failures than they needed to be. Wow. Okay. This one says you get a free phone if you switch. Hey, this one also says you get a free phone if you switch. Yeah, they all do one. Wait, wait, wait, wait. The T-Mobile one says families saved over $3,700 versus the other big guys in the past five years. And their experience plans have Netflix included plus a year of DashPass by DoorDash. Hang on. Let me see that. And a five-year price guarantee? Oh yeah, we're switching. That's what I'm talking about. Do we clap now or... I'm thinking high five. At T-Mobile, get savings that keep stacking up. That's value you can feel every day. Switch now at T-Mobile. Savings based on HarrisX billing snapshots from Q3 2021 to Q4 2025 among accounts with three plus voice lines compared to AT&T and Verizon excluding discounts, credits, and optional charges. See HarrisX.com slash T-Mobile. Price guarantee on talk, text, and data. Exclusions like taxes and fees apply. See T-Mobile.com. 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Now you have a thriving miniature town in your living room. Since their tax smart tools help you keep more of your deferred tax returns, you're no longer afraid of tax day. You start to sleep better and remember to put on your PM moisturizer every night. People give you compliments on your glow. It gets kind of weird. Focusing on your life more than your money. That's the Betterment effect. Get started today at Betterment.com. That's Betterment.com to start investing. Investing involves risk. Performance is not guaranteed. Betterment is not a tax advisor, nor should any information herein be considered tax advice. Please consult a qualified tax professional. I mean, I also think you can look at the relentless drive to scale everything as a big part of the reason Tim Cook has made the political choices that he's made. You present Donald Trump with a big gold plaque because you want to make more money selling iPhones. Like, it's just what it is. And you can chalk that up to straightforward business logic, and I'm sure that's what Tim Cook would do. Like, this is the price of playing this particular game. But I think he has spent a lot of time during the Apple 50 celebration and even in some of his, like, his goodbye letter talking about the values and the beliefs of Apple. And I think the case against Tim Cook's legacy will be that he built this company into a hell of a business and kind of lost its soul. But what I wonder is, to your point about the products, I think the part of me that's really excited about somebody like John Turnus is that there is somebody who thinks about and sort of lives inside of hardware back in charge. Like, that's just an exciting and cool thing. The flip side is, he's been at Apple for 25 years. Like, this is not a cultural revolution hire on its face inside of Apple. Like, which is why I think you do this this way if you're Apple. This is not Tim Cook being forced out. This is not Tim Cook leaving on bad terms. Like, it's very clear this is being done in a way that everybody thinks sets Apple up for success. And in part, that's being done because his successor has been at Apple for 25 years and knows the company just about as well as anybody. He's been on the executive team for five years. He's been a high level executive there since, I think, 2013. Like, he is as Apple as Apple gets. And I think there is just something, like, in the walls at Apple that doesn't let you try and fail publicly, right? Like, I think all the time about this thing Google executives used to say, which is that one of the challenges of working at Google is that if you make something that doesn't reach billions of people, they'll kill it because Google's only focused on things that reach billions of people. So if they don't see potential for that, they'll kill it. But what Google will do is ship it. They'll ship every possible iteration of it, see what happens, and then kill it. And I actually, like, the way that Google does it is really haphazard and sort of ridiculous, but like, I also give Amazon a lot of credit. There was that run at Amazon where they were just like, we're going to ship every single thing we can even think of to make with Alexa in it. Some of it won't work, some of it will. This is the only way to find out. Apple is the precise opposite of that, right? Like this is the thousand no's for every yes company. And you can chalk that up to Apple misses less often than almost everybody. But especially now at this moment where we have absolutely no idea what the next version of hardware is going to look like. Everybody thinks it's pins or it's glasses. I don't think it's either of those. I think it's something else that no one has done yet. It seems very unlikely that John Turnus is going to be the one who's going to be like, let's try a bunch of stuff in public and see. Oh, I don't think that's going to happen. And I'm making the comparison to Samsung on purpose. Samsung would ship them all too. And they have. Yes, they have already. The Samsung and Google and that version of Amazon. It's not like they won, right? Like Google has a bunch of very big products, but they are also well known for killing things that people liked. And Apple has this reputation for a reason. I don't think Turnus is going to break that. What I'm getting at is like only trying to manufacture big winners prevents you from ever seeing anything new. And it's what leads you to getting caught flatfooted. And by all accounts, Apple was caught flatfooted by everyone using ChatGPT to just fall in love with their laptop I think that the thing the Jobs era Apple did really well was ship the thing that got you to the thing, right? Like one of the funniest parts for us going through trying to pick the best 50 Apple products ever was the first one, the one that was like the groundbreaking brand new incredible idea, almost never was great. It was like a great idea. It was a big idea. It was a fascinating product. It was a fascinating launch. And then it's like the second or third one is actually when it became a really good product. And that requires a lot of dedication and a lot of interest in continuing to move the ball along again, sort of in public. And there's been a little bit of that at the Cook era Apple, but to a much larger extent, it feels like what we've seen are much smaller ideas that are much less likely to miss. And when they do something that doesn't hit the home pod being a perfect example, Apple kind of just pretends it doesn't exist. Like they just mothball it and don't talk about it anymore and sort of hope that it falls off the face of the earth. And the funniest thing about the home pod is like lots of people who have home pods really like them. They sound good. The problem was it was way too expensive. And so it's like, if you just keep revving that thing, which again, maybe somebody who is sitting in the hardware in a different way and can see the roadmap differently and sort of understands how we get from here to there in a much deeper way, looks at it and says, okay, I'm actually going to be able to sell the thing that we wanted to sell in three years. And but I have to sell this one to get there. And that that just requires being willing to play a different kind of game with your products than I think Cook just really liked delivering perfect polished objects. And when that's what you want, you can only make a certain kind of thing with a certain kind of risk tolerance. Well, also, you know, the Cook era was defined or the touch bar, which is the exception that proves all the rules. We're never getting rid of this keyboard. No, I mean, the Cook era was defined by just absolute weirdness in the design part of Apple. Yeah. Right. Again, it is interesting that this is all happening after Apple 50. So I can't help but think about the sweep here. But Steve Jobs, right before he died, just ran around saying two things that I think Tim Cook had to overcome. One, he kept saying that he'd figured out TV and he finally cracked it. And that was just a decade of bad ideas after that. And then two, he kept saying Johnny, I was the most powerful person at Apple. And so if you're Tim Cook, you're like, well, I'm not going to screw with that. And it turns out actually the most powerful person at Apple is Steve Jobs. Yep. And who was and Steve Jobs was like, No, we have to make products that work that people like. And Johnny I was like, What if it was super thin forever? And there is something about that dynamic like made it happen. Right. And I think Tim initially deferred way too much to Ive. And you could see that as Apple hired a bunch of fashion designers and fashion. That's a big part of the story of the Apple Watch, right, is that that was like the most form follows function thing Apple had maybe ever made. And so and then he brought that back. And then there's, you know, just design turmoil at Apple resulting in what can only be described as the disaster of liquid glass. I still want to upgrade a Tahoe on my computers. I have a MacBook Neo. And every time I open it and look at Tahoe, I'm just like viscerally angry at that computer. Complete it's so cute and so stupid in the same breath. So that's one part of the Cook legacy is he managed through that. Johnny I was no longer at Apple. The other part is this, you know, supply chain excellence and the ability to get more out of everything that they were making and sometimes very aggressive ways that caused him a lot of problems, but they still got the more. The question is whether all of that kept them from seeing new products for what they could be instead of putting pressure on something like the Vision Pro. And, you know, the Vision Pro was like the subject of a Vanity Fair cover story because they couldn't let tech reporters actually at the thing because we would have all asked the questions that we all asked when we actually got the thing. And there's just some dynamic there that you kind of hope that the actual product CEO, the person who's been building the products and thinks about the products in the beginning changes in the culture. Now, we all know that Apple's roadmaps are years long. So I don't I don't think the whole thing is getting blown up tomorrow, but I'm, you know, you you started talking at the beginning. They've gotten rid of a lot of executives and you kind of wonder if that was Cook clearing the decks for Turnus to institute a culture change without having to be the person who fired everybody. Yeah, I mean, it does seem very much like this has been in the works for a long time. I mean, this has been it's been publicly reported that Turnus was the obvious heir apparent for like many months and planning like this takes a long time. And I think there there's a reasonable case to be made that a lot of the org changes inside of Apple over the last year have been in one way or another about this change. And it is certainly true that for better or for worse, Turnus is going to have many fewer like Apple lifers to turn to than he might have otherwise. To be fair, he will still have lots of them, right? Like the executive suite at Apple is filled with people who have been at the company for decades. I think, like, would it have been fun if Craig Federighi had been named the CEO instead and we just got to make fun of his hair the whole time? Sure, but he's still there and presumably not going anywhere. So, like, I think if you're waiting for a completely different Apple to appear from this, I think I think you're wrong. But I don't think that's what you're saying. What I think you're saying is like this is a company that can continue to be Apple, but maybe act a little more like Apple when it was smaller and not Apple when it was big, right? Like this is classic Apple became the biggest company in the world and you you are incentivized in every way to act really differently when you're the biggest company in the world than when you're just like trying to make fun of IBM at press conferences. Yeah, I mean, Apple is the global economy. I have a lot of criticisms of Tim Cook to issue. Sure. I think the way that he has cozied up to Trump in ways that are contra to Apple's values, his own values, a lot of his customers values. There's a lot to criticize there. I think the way Apple has sort of kept Apple the way Apple has kept China at sort of arm's length, even as they participate in the repression of the Chinese government is he's done it masterfully. Is he still responsible for some of course he is, right? The way that Apple has treated developers. You can issue all kinds of criticism. Tim Cook. He has built the company from something that was a medium size to the thing that like the global tech economy operates around. TSMC exists at the kind of scale it does because Apple ships that many iPhones. If TSMC goes under, nobody gets an iPhone anymore, right? Well, that has like arguably kept a bunch of world wars from happening. Like that's Apple's scale. I don't envy him for having to manage through all of that. Yeah, but I one thing that I think is easy to criticize is I don't think Tim Cook runs around having ideas for new products. And so Apple product development is executives having to argue through a gauntlet of their competitors and peers inside of Apple to get their product to the finish line and then ship it to people. And that has put too much pressure on it. You get the feeling. John Turnus, who is a product person, is going to wake up and be like, we should do more MacBook Neos. And then that might just happen because he's confident in his ability to make and ship products. And I think that little bit of culture change might be important for the future of Apple in a way that, you know, they've still got Tim Cook to run around and present Donald Trump with gold trophies for existing or whatever Donald Trump needs today to keep the tariff flow. And that I'm just curious if that dynamic actually changes how Apple approaches its products because that's the most, that's the only reason anyone's in the chat is because the products are good. Yeah. 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You deserve to feel great. Book your virtual visit today at joinmidi.com. That's joinmidi.com. Recommendations can be amazing. I mean I'm John Turnus, this has got to be the best possible outcome where Tim Cook can go off and make the deals and kiss the rings and glad hand with whoever you need to and give the plaques to whoever he wants to, and you just get to make products. I'm sure it doesn't actually sort out perfectly that way, but like, that's got to be the dream. Like what if your job involved no management of anything outside of just making The Verge.com? That would be pretty good. That's what I'm saying! Although at some point, you know, Eric Schmidt left Google and they were like, well, we don't want to do this. Here's Sundar. He'll do the handshakes. One thing that I think about a lot is, this is going to sound reductive, but I think this is true. I think this is a real consideration when you are a company of Apple's global scale and influence. I don't think Donald Trump can know a new guy right now in 2026. Sure. Like, I think if Apple was like, Donald, Tim is leaving, there's a new guy, he'd be like, what? No, bring me Tim again. Travis, our producer, pointed out that Tim Apple sounds a lot better than John Apple. Maybe, actually, Donald might be able to get John Apple. But legitimately, however you feel about the president, like, I think you have to concede, like, you can't throw new characters at him right now. He's very distracted by a lot of things. So I think, like, maybe if there wasn't that dynamic, you'd be like, John, you're going to take the whole thing. But I think Tim Cook's job is to manage through the end of the Trump presidency because that is still very volatile. And policy by true social post is a thing that exists for all of these companies. And you can't just throw a new guy in the mix. Yeah. Like, it needs to be the guy he knows. And again, you can have all kinds of feelings about how Tim Cook has managed that. I have all kinds of feelings about it. But it does seem like a constraint. It's not like he… Maybe Tim really just wanted to retire and that's just not a choice. This is not a choice in 2026 if you're the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world. Yeah, we've been saying all along that you can't just leave at this particular moment if you're one of these CEOs. Like, this is the game you've signed up to play. That's what the money is for. Somebody else is watching on their Vision Pro. We love all of you. How many? If you're watching on your Vision Pro, can we just get a hand up in chat? There's two of you. I'm just dying to see if there's three. And also, what would you give it out of 10? Please tell Nilay. To people who are still on their Vision Pro watching us on YouTube Live, it's 10 out of 10 all the way. That's very fair. And just know we love all of you and your strange spending choices. Real quick before we get out of here, WWDC is in give or take 6 weeks. What do you look ahead to differently knowing that this is coming? Do you have any different feelings about what Apple is about to show us? This is ostensibly a really big WWDC. This is when we're supposed to see the new Siri that we've been promised for a long time. This is when Apple fixes or doesn't fix liquid glass. This is the future of Apple's software business in a meaningful, important way. I'm just curious what you look ahead to 6 weeks from now, the fact that this is announced now and not later. Sorry, I'm completely distracted by the fact that we now just have a Vision Pro chat, like fully Vision Pro themed chat of people giving 10 out of 10. It's very good. Okay, this gives me an idea. At some point, I don't know when, but at some point we are going to do a VergeCast only for the Vision Pro. I don't know how we're going to do this, but it is only going to be playable in the Vision Pro. And it will be just for all of us. So I mean, if John Gerber does it again, I'm confident that's what I'm looking forward to most at WWDC is the live talk show in the Vision Pro. I'm actually curious about staging. I'm not somebody who, like, overreads keynote stories or announcements. My belief is always that the products speak for themselves and the stories the companies tell and how they tell them are sort of secondary. You can say whatever you want about the new iPhone, but people are going to get them and it's how people use them that actually matters. In this case, you've got a new CEO. You've got a new way of working. I thought the way they did the MacBook Neo was utterly fascinating. You and I were both at that event where I will never forgive myself for getting the screen technology wrong. And now I'm just embarrassed again just thinking about it. John Ternus was there. He was wandering around talking to people. Yeah. It was great. It was very loose. It was very casual. He was very proud of the products that day. If you were, like, looking to see who would be the next CEO of Apple, like, his presence in New York that day was very much like, oh, this is going to be the next CEO of Apple. It was very obvious everyone was there to meet him. And the laptop was very important, but he was very present. I'm wondering if at WWDC they get away from these ultra-produced infomercials that had, I think, really just sort of taken the life out of Apple events in a very real way and they just let him do it. And again, I don't put a lot of emphasis on companies' keynote presentations. I think the products speak for themselves. But in this case, that's a thing that I'm looking for because those ultra-produced infomercials, Apple really likes them. They travel a long way. People watch them on the internet at much higher rates and people would rewatch the live events. But isn't this a moment to be like, okay, the ultra-corporate cook era is over and the new product CEO is going to take over and talk and talk about the products in a way that makes it feel like he understands them deeply, which was not a thing Tim Cook could do. Right. Again, you cannot deny his overall success, but the criticisms are also fair game. And Tim Cook did not sit around. He never sat down with us and was like, let me talk to you about the iPhone screen. Every other executive Apple would be like, I know you have feelings about this display. I'm going to get into it with you. And that was just not Cook's vibe. So I'm very curious if they start making it clear that Turnus has different strengths in some way at WWDC. It is a fun way to think about those performances. And they are very much performances as reads on who the CEO is. And so what these things look like just as a reflection of Turnus's own personality and, like, what he thinks he can do on stage will be really interesting. I also think my galaxy brain theory is that they did this because they think Siri is going to work. And, like, I don't think you do this if you then immediately are like, oh God, we're going to fall completely flat at WWDC again and everybody's going to hate Siri yet again. I think this, to me, feels like Apple thinks it's playing offense and not defense in a very real way. And I think unless you think Siri is good, which it's not and hasn't been for a long time, but maybe it will be. You can't possibly be playing offense right now. Can I just say someone in our chat just said, I wonder if John Turnus becomes more open to gaming. No. Like, he's been there too long. It's in his blood to be like, I will say that the Mac is good at gaming and lie to your face. But he will. I can say confidently continue to ship you five-year-old games on your Mac at intervals that don't make any sense. Is there a version of Assassin's Creed from two years ago that you've been dying to play? It will be in the next keynote. I promise you it will be there. That's what you'll be softest for. Yeah, I mean, you know, they licensed Google's models. It seems like a very complicated deal in which to get a lot of access that other people don't get, which makes sense. We're seeing Google start to pull it off on Android in small ways. Alison has tested the Agentic features in Android. It's starting to work in small ways. Yeah, there's some evidence that it can do some of the things they want it to do. There's also some evidence that just letting Siri be a front end to Gemini will just be fine. Yeah. Or that maybe everybody hates AI and actually Apple is just going to, like, Turnus is just going to get on stage, light a Siri flag on fire and be like, AI sucks. Hardware forever. And that's the new Apple. I would take that. That would be the greatest Apple keynote of the past 15 years. I would enjoy that very much. I would go to Cupertino for that one. All right, we should get out of here. You and I both have children to feed and other stuff to do. But we're going to talk a lot about this the rest of the week. Our team is spun up on a bunch of coverage, a bunch of reporting. We have all kinds of stuff coming. You and I will be back on Friday's show, presumably talking about this unless Sam Altman does something. You never know. Yeah. What you've got here is the pre-reporting where we just reacted. Now we have all Support for this show comes from Indeed. When the pressure's on and you need to hire the right person for the job, Indeed Sponsored Jobs has your back. Sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. 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