As Apple gears up to anoint John Ternus the new company CEO in September (while current leader Tim Cook takes a seat on the board) the company appears to be firing on all cylinders ahead of the leadership transition.
What’s going well
Just look at the evidence:
- Apple is building market share across its entire product range; even memory-driven price inflation doesn’t seem to have dampened demand for its hardware yet.
- While Apple had to raise prices, the company’s MacBook Neo remains seriously popular. It’s sitting atop Amazon’s US best-selling chart, which currently includes six Macs in the top 10. The Neo has topped this chart since its introduction.
- Apple’s iPhone 17 series continues to sell well, with recent market data showing sustained growth. Both Counterpoint and IDC tell us that iPhone shipments continue to increase, even as other vendor shipments slide.
- IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo recently estimated that Apple’s upcoming foldable iPhone Ultra could grab 29.4% of global folding smartphone sales this year, rising to 34.9% in 2027.
- The company’s new 27 series of operating systems is attracting a great response as beta testers report that it is already solid, stable, and performing well.
- The AI narrative has really changed, with analysts no longer quite so starry-eyed at the prospects for the big frontier AI firms. Apple’s edge-AI-enabling approach is winning converts.
What’s coming up
The company’s newly-filed lawsuit against OpenAI may or may not succeed, but it will certainly help consolidate recognition of the importance of Apple’s designs and intellectual property in whatever hardware emerges from the AI firm. It also means both Apple and OpenAI are already competing in hardware, even though neither company yet offers anything that directly challenges the other.
Apple has just set out its stall to brand-loyal fans in a big way and did so before OpenAI gets to woo the same set of customers with a wriggle of its Jony Ive-tinged talisman.
The stage is set for intense competition between the two. Though some say Apple’s needs to improve employee retention, if it does find proof of efforts to use recruitment to engage in industrial espionage, it’ll be easier to represent its own products as being the OG for new hardware.
If nothing else, it means consumers will forever be asking, “If OpenAI’s designers are so good, why did it need to poach them from Apple?” Doubt is a weapon.
Managing perception
It doesn’t matter how the case goes, because there fight is already affecting consumer psychology. It also means that as Ternus prepares to take his seat atop the rainbow-colored Apple throne, we can already size him up. “A man is measured by his enemies,” Joe Abercrombie wrote in “The Trouble With Peace.”
Given the proximity of the leadership transition, it’s highly probable that Ternus signed-off on the litigation; in doing so he — and Apple — tell us to expect more of the same.
Apple has, rightly or wrongly, decided that OpenAI will become its new existential bugbear, following in the footsteps of Microsoft Windows, Real Networks, Adobe Flash, Android, and Samsung, all of whom have been useful foils against which Apple has been able to build and maintain its identity.
Looking at that list, you’d be tempted to believe that nothing much is new. Apple has often defined itself by the enemies it sometimes keeps. What has been will be again, which in this case means even as OpenAI attempts to carve out an identity as a hardware manufacturer delivering solutions to compete with Apple and Google, Ternus’ team’s looks to drive a consensus-shaped wedge into the pro-LLM propaganda.
That blow comes as Apple finally gets its act together around AI, and as the company prepares for a future in which the world’s most-used wearable device also becomes the wearable way to woo Siri AI.
My kingdom come
Rising market share, powerful solutions, an increasingly recognized and respected approach to AI, and an ideological crusade — these details constitute Apple’s place today and are Tim Cook’s coronation gift to Ternus. He’s passing along a strong and hyper-profitable baton that screams of timeliness and relevance even as the company gets set, ready, to go with a year or two of new product designs, new product families, and a 20thanniversary iPhone.
This is Apple’s party. OpenAI’s name didn’t make the list.
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