Ternus Opens Apple CEO Tenure With Foldable iPhone Debut and Vision Pro Defense

The event took place less than two weeks after Ternus replaced Tim Cook as CEO, The Verge reported. The proximity of his takeover and the iPhone Duo debut was not coincidental, Bloomberg chief Apple correspondent Mark Gurman said in an interview with The Verge's Decoder. Gurman said Apple treats its hardware events and the stories they tell with extreme seriousness, and this year's event said a great deal about the company, how Cook managed a broad reshuffling of leadership ranks over the past year, and how that might change Apple's culture. It also offered clues about Ternus's plan to move Apple from the iPhone era into the AI era, Gurman said.

Gurman, who reported virtually every detail of the event ahead of time, said the presentation itself did not feel much different from a Tim Cook event. He described the two executives as interchangeable on stage. The difference, he said, was that Ternus came out with a point of view on AI, beginning with the intelligent personal hub.

Gurman also drew a distinction between their management styles. He said Cook tends to respond to an executive's idea, viewpoint, decision or opinion with more questions and in many cases will not make a singular decision, favoring communal and collaborative decision-making. Ternus, by contrast, will make a decision and offer an opinion; people may hate or completely disagree with it, but he has a viewpoint, Gurman said.

In a separate interview with French outlet Clique TV, Ternus gave what 9to5Mac described as the best defense yet for Apple Vision Pro. Clique TV's Mouloud Achour asked Ternus whether the Vision Pro was a test, a flop, or the first step toward the future of computing. Ternus replied: "Vision Pro to me is an amazing device. It's an absolutely amazing device. But I think of it as like the early days of computers. It is the early days of a long journey."

Ternus compared the headset's current stage to the early days of the Mac, when people found different reasons the computer allowed them to do something never before possible, such as desktop publishing. With Vision Pro, he said, early adopters love and enjoy the device, while surgeons are starting to use it in surgery because it is a fundamentally better tool than a monitor sitting nearby. In film production, he said, people are using it for set development. "We're going to continue to grow and find more and more compelling use cases, and I think there's a very bright future," Ternus said.

9to5Mac noted that Vision Pro has not been commercially successful in the way the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and AirPods have been, though it called the device a technological marvel with a small base of loyal fans. Tim Cook previously defended its underwhelming sales by calling it an "early adopter product." 9to5Mac wrote that Ternus invoked Cook's language but also offered a helpful comparison to the early days of computing, when personal computers were expensive and had extremely limited use cases before eventually unlocking possibilities that were hard to imagine at the outset. The dream of lightweight glasses offering full-fledged spatial computing features may be several years away, the site wrote, but it is easy to see that future arriving and Vision Pro being a key part of it.

Editor's Summary

John Ternus's first major Apple event as CEO introduced the foldable iPhone Duo and gave him a platform to present an AI viewpoint, while a separate interview with Clique TV saw him defend Vision Pro as an early-stage computing platform. Mark Gurman described the event as stylistically similar to a Tim Cook launch but said Ternus differs by making decisions and taking clear positions. 9to5Mac called Ternus's Vision Pro comparison to early personal computing his strongest defense yet, while noting the device remains far from the commercial success of Apple's main products.