It’s officially the Ternus era at Apple.
Tim Cook stepped down as CEO this week, handing the company to former hardware chief John Ternus, whose first memo promised a “huge launch next week” — timing that puts Apple’s next iPhone event on his desk before he’s even settled in. Cook isn’t going far, though: he’s staying on as executive chairman, focused on the kind of policy relationships that recently turned something as small as a map label into a very public balancing act. All of which raises an obvious question: what does the Ternus era look like, and how much rope will shareholders give him to figure it out?
On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec and Sean O’Kane unpack what Ternus is walking into, why he may actually be better positioned to make progress on software than hardware in this new AI era, and more of the week’s news.
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Chapters
00:00 Intro
1:12 Tim Cook steps down & John Ternus takes over as CEO
13:33 Nvidia’s spreading its AI bets
21:58 A big week for robotaxis: Tesla, Waymo, Zoox & Uber
29:09 a16z’s $1.1B “machine age” fund and $8.5B growth fund
32:39 GoPro’s $285M acquisition and pivot to AI/defense
36:34 Outro
