🍏 Apple’s AI bet got a CEO

Apple’s board picked John Ternus, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, to succeed Tim Cook on September 1.

Not Craig Federighi (software) nor Eddy Cue (services). The hardware chief.

A month ago I shared with you all why I changed my mind about Apple. I’d been in the camp that wrote it off on AI. They had no hyperscale capex, Siri hadn’t meaningfully improved in a decade, and WWDC was seemingly losing steam. What I missed was that every time I switched between ChatGPT and Claude, I was doing it on an Apple device.

My read is that Ternus’s appointment reflects a bet on hybrid computing. Frontier model training compute has been growing around 5x per year in recent years, while GPU memory bandwidth has improved around 28% per year. That creates a widening systems bottleneck and strengthens the case for shifting routine AI tasks to edge devices while leaving heavier workloads in the cloud.

This new device landscape is still evolving, but it will be a combination of the highly porta…