The first time I met him, he was fascinated by my rather vintage BBC-issued audio recorder, turning it over and over in his hands and admiring the buttons and dials (which I was rather hoping he wouldn’t start moving around).
I told him I’d had to borrow some wired headphones from his team as mine had broken, and jokingly expressed surprise that they were still allowed at Apple HQ in the AirPod era. He told me very seriously that they still sold them.
A while later, a member of his team told me Cook was visiting an Apple Store in Europe and saw wired headphones on the wall – and asked his colleague to pass on a message to me that they were still in demand.
It’s unfortunate for Cook that his last big product launch, Apple’s VR headset, the Vision Pro – which arrived years after VR got going and cost ten times more than its rivals – does not appear to have been a success.
New boss, new challenges
The big challenge for Ternus is AI.
Apple is renowned for moving slowly and strategically – and this has paid vast dividends so far when it comes to its gadgets. The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone on the market when it launched in 2007 but it was the one which redefined the landscape.
At the same time, the company has faced criticism for being slow to jump on soaring AI demand, eventually choosing to incorporate OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini technology into its operating systems, unusually choosing partnerships over proprietary AI in this booming area of the industry.
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