Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. It was big news all over the world. Apple is getting a new CEO in fine John Turners. The current chief executive, Tim Cook, will step aside in September, and longtime Apple executive John Turnas will succeed him. Cook is sticking around. He'll become Apple's executive chairman because, as he told ABC's Good Morning America,
I can't imagine life without Apple. During Cook's tenure, Apple's market value sword by more than three point six trillion dollars. It sold its billionth iPhone, reached five hundred and forty stores worldwide, and it's celebrated as fiftieth anniversary. Those are big milestone sure.
But what we haven't seen are real breakthrough new types of products under Cook.
That's Bloomberg's Mark German, who's covered Apple for years.
I think there was a recognition that Apple is at an inflection point in its history where you're seeing Open Ai, Meta and other companies cropping up with new types of devices.
And Mark says the careful CEO succession plan is an indication Apple sees just how much is at stake.
You know, when Steve Jobs picked Tim Cook, the idea was that they had this product roadmap. They needed someone to execute the ideas broad and manufacturing, bring the iPhone into China, release new types of variations of existing products. What they need now is someone who can lead Apple into a new era with entirely new types of products. And so they're betting on who else but their hardware engineering person, the youngest person on the executive team, to
take the company into the new era. Tim Cook is always going to do what's best for Apple, and really what's best for Apple at this point is for Tim Cook to no longer be CEO. So I think Tim Cook is doing right by Apple by passing off the baton.
Right now, I'm David Gura, and this is the big take from Bloomberg News today. On the show A New Era for Apple, Mark walk us through John Turner's resume at Apple.
He worked on their product design team. He worked on cinema displays early on. Then he worked on a bunch of max He worked on the IMACG five, he worked on some Mac notebooks and what have you, and then he was selected to be part of the leadership building the original iPad. And what turn has made his name
on was product durability. If you ever held the original iPad, I think the thing that people remember was how durable it felt, how good it felt in the hand, and it felt like this strong piece of equipment.
Or the original iPad. Turnis was put in charge of development for the Mac and spearheaded the creation of AirPods. He would seeing that someone who had a real gift for coming up with new products and product designs for Apple.
And then his final test was actually at the turn of the decade, going into twenty twenty, Tan Riccio, his boss at the time, he ran harder engineering. He shifted engineering of the iPhone to Turnis. Could he bring a major new iPhone to market? And very successfully They were able to bring the iPhone twelve that was at at the height of COVID and only launched at about a month a month and a half later than their usual patence.
What Turners was able to bring to market was a major new redesigned iPhone, the first iPhones with five G, which kickstarted a new supercycle of launches for the company.
Mark says it was that success during the pandemic that set up Turners to succeed Tim Cook.
Twenty twenty one turnas officially becomes head of hardware Engineering for Apple and served on Tim Cook's executive team for the last five six years in that position.
What do we know about who actually picked Turn? Is this the board's decision?
Tim Cook, he made this election. He made the choice. And my strong belief is that Eddieq, the head of Services at Apple, who had worked very closely under Steve Jobs, was Tim Cook's perhaps chief advisor on this election here. Apple doesn't do CEO transitions too often, and it's fair to say this is the first sort of well executed CEO transition in Apple's history. Obviously, the Tim Cook era began because Steve Jobs, the company co founder, was about to pass away, and that was very sad, and Cook
was pushed into this role. But now we're getting a formal transition here where a successor is being handpicked and is going to ease into the role over the next three to six months or so. And so I would say this was a choice made between Tim Cook, Eddieq, and Apple's board of direct But ultimately Apple's board is going to go with what Tim says. He's now the exec chairman, and they voted unanimously to select John Turnis as the CEO.
What is that background, that emphasis on hardware say about the way he's likely to approach the big job at Apple.
The role that Apple CEO is to take what they're best at and apply that knowledge to those specific areas at the company. When you're the CEO of such a gigantic company, and Tim Cook he has about twenty direct reports. The way Apple's organized is that all the major functions report up to the CEO directly, and so you have to pick your spots. You can't really get your hands
dirty with every function. Tim Cook a finance guy, a sales guy, an operations guy, so he put his fingers and all that and had been deeply involved in the operations, the supply chain, the manufacturing of the company. What you're going to see with Turnus is he is going to leave the operational stuff, manufacturing, supply chain, you name it to the other leaders at Apple who are in charge
of those functions. They have a new COO, they have a new CFO, so they have a new procurement person, they have a salesperson who's been elevated in the company in recent years. But you're going to see him apply his attention to the product design teams, the hardware engineering teams, the silicon teams, probably the software teams, and really get
knee deep in the product development side of things. And I also expect him to have a very strong influence and involvement on Apple's AI work, not only in how the company is run, but AI products as well.
Ahead of the CEO announcement, Mark notis Turnus got a marquee role at a major Apple event last month.
We're so excited to have you go out here so you can get your hands on all living price screen announces this week. He kicked off the event, which was usually what Tim Cook did.
And it's not just a big deal that he, rather than other Apple executives, took center stage, but it was the kind of product that he rolled out next, one that, according to Mark, has the potential to this rep the lower end of the laptop market, totally.
New from the ground, a new system to do just that.
And we call it MacBook VU, the MacBook Neo, an Apple laptop for five hundred and ninety nine dollars, almost half as much as the MacBook Air.
Turnus's big push with the MacBook Neo was this idea that they need something fun, cheap and cool for students, for kids, for people who don't want to spend you know, eleven hundred dollars plus a on a Mac computer. In order to bring more people into the Apple ecosystem, the thought is, if you get a MacBook Neo at an early age, you'll become an Apple customer for life. Get the phone, get the iPad, get the AirPods, get the watch,
you name it. They needed some sort of gateway entry level product into the Apple ecosystem, and they knew that for students an iPad in many cases wasn't going to cut it because the effectiveness of a Mac is so
much better. For years, Apple's marketing people they really pushed back against the idea of what they called chasing market share with cheaper products, and so turnis really pushed for this, and as Eddie q, Apple Services chief said in a town hall meeting with employees after the CEO introduction, he said, it's the hottest product in the world right now. But it is indicative of turnis being able to fight for something, push through something, and make a meaningful change when it
comes to a product at the company. The truth of the matter is is that they've been preparing for twenty twenty seven twenty twenty eight to be this big product moment. For the last several years, Turnis is externally not talking about the plan, but I can tell you that Turnis has been leading the charge on six major new products that are all new product categories for Apple.
Compared to these six products planned for the next two years under Turnis, Mark says Apple only launched three new product categories during Cooks fifteen years as CEO. So what are these six products have in common? AI AI AI AIAIAI.
So the first one we'll see is a product that is a smart display. This is a home pod with a screen. It's a mini sized iPad that you can put on your wall or put on a speaker base. Then it has facial recognition. It could play nicely with the new SERI and be a home hub command center for everything you want to do in your home. The second product is a tabletop robot. It's that same device
I just explained, but with a robotic arm. So you put on your desk, your kitchen counter, and then that display can move around in air in space with a robotic actuator, sort of like an artificial limb. And then the third product is going to be a privacy focused security camera and home security system.
The other three products are going to be AI wearables.
You're going to see new AI AirPods with AI features. You're going to see smart glasses, and you're going to see a pendant. They have computer vision cameras so they can feed data into the Apple Cloud and into your iPhone with AI processing to do things like visual reminders
or visual turn by turned directions. You could wearing the air pods or the smart glasses, and when you're walking down the street with maps going and instead of it telling you turn right in one thousand feet, it'll say turn right by the gray building with a bunch of windows on the outside.
Marx's Apple also has plans for new features and updates in existing product categories, like a new twentieth anniversary iPhone with curved glass and touchscreen MacBooks. Assuming all goes to plan, but of all the potential products that Mark is anticipating, the incoming CEO to release first.
John Turnis is going to become CEO the first week of September, and then a week later he is going to introduce the biggest new Apple product in several years the foldable iPhone.
Why is a foldable iPhone such a big deal?
First of all, I think FULLI ofble iPhone is freaking cool me personally, and I can't wait. And it's a game changer, you know. The big difference with this foldable phone is that Apple has really upped the quality in three key ways. One is durability. Foldable phones are known for being really flimsy and breaking easily. And turnus is non for someone that wants to apply very high product quality reliability so people can get really long term use
out of these things. But it's really an engineering marvel, technical marvel, and they're going to get into the nitty gritty about why this is so complex, And like the new CEO is the guy who spearheaded it. Not everyone's going to want to buy it or be able to afford it, but I'll be first in line.
Up. Next, what does the leadership change at Apple mean for the company's relationship with President Trump? Tim Cook, who has been the CEO of Apple for fifteen years and has worked at the company for twenty eight years, is staying on as Apple's executive chairman. I asked Bloomberg's Mark German. How Cook is going to approach that new role.
What he said is there's one CEO at a time. He's not getting in the way of Turnus. He said, he is going to be there for whatever he's called upon by Turnis and to serve as a sounding board as an advisor to him. The other thing he said is that he'll be very focused on policy reading between the lines. He's very focused on the next three years of Donald Trump's term, dealing with him, Very focused on dealing with China, very focused on world stage related matters.
How were you thinking about Tim Cook's legacy as CEO amidst all this.
Tim Cook's legacy is that he took over for a generational once in a lifetime technology company co founder and leader. And when he took over for Steve Jobs, I mean, if you remember, it was pretty tumultuous and uncertain of the time. You know, things could have gone either way. But he kept that ship steady. He executed the vision
of Steve Jobs. He brought new products to market, and he squeezed so much lemonade out of the lemons that was Apple at the time, to make variations of products, growing the financials of the company, to such an incredible mind boggling I melting degree, taking Apple into services really in a big way for the first time, Apple TV,
Apple Music, health products, financial services. The other thing he did was that China Mobile deals, getting the iPhone into China in a big way in the early twenty tens. So his legacy is nothing short of incredible. I think it could have been even better if there were a few product related things that worked out. He's leaving Apple with an AI legacy so far that is negligible and
very unfortunate for them. The other thing was a mishandling of the self driving car project, where Apple spent a decade and tens of billions of dollars working on that self driving car. Obviously, the hard calls to cancel that project were made, but quite frankly, with Apple's resources and ideas and manufacturing capabilities, they should have been able to bring something to market and they simply didn't.
I think about the challenges this company faces, and you've alluded to a few of them, certainly lagging in the AI race. You've written about this exodus of top talent from Apple to competitors and other companies, particularly in the AI space. How well equipped is John Turnis to write the ship when it comes to those issues and others.
I think Turnis is definitely equipped. I think that one of the biggest issues Apples facing right now are some of these AI companies wanting to build hardware basically pillaging the hardware ranks of Apple. And I think putting a hardware engineering person at the top of Apple, who's going to leave Apple right now? In the middle of this from your hardware engineering standpoint, when now you have heard engineering running the company versus sort of what people have called the being encounters.
Tim Cook has been the job for fifteen years. Let's assume that John Turners has a similar tenure fifteen year tenure.
Well, if he doesn't, then this was all a failure. The whole idea was that Turnis could walk in for fifteen years.
Played out for me, what does this company look like fifteen years from now if John Turners has a successful run at CEO.
Well, fifteen years from now, if he had a successful run as CEO, they would invent new types of product categories that we haven't seen from other companies. Maybe he brings the car project or some sort of mobility project back to fruition. Maybe he's able to get Apple into the humanoid space, helping lead the charge to move away from manufacturing all their silicon essentially in Taiwan and move it to the US and elsewhere at a faster pace.
You know, at least doubling or tripling the size of the Apple ecosystem and the user base, just like Tim Cook was able to do. Make this a perhaps if you look at inflation and everything like, this should be a ten trillion dollar company by the time you know all I said and done. But most of all, most important thing is retaining the Apple brand, keeping and growing. Apple is the strongest technology brand in America and not losing steam to newcomers like open ai and Meta.
This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura. The show is hosted by Me, Sarah Holder and One. The show is made by Aaron Edwards, David Fox, Jeff Grocott, Eleanor Harrison Dengate, Patty Hirsch, Rachel Lewis, Chrisky, Katie mcmurran, Naomi Julia Press, Tracy Samuelson, Naomi Shaven, Alex Sekura, Julia Weaver, Young Young and take Yasuzawa. There's much more on bloomberg dot com. Get unlimited access to all of our coverage at a special rate for listeners at Bloomberg dot Com
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