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John Ternus Is Apple’s CEO. His New Bio Focuses on Durability and Repairs.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Editorial,
Apple's leadership page changed today. John Ternus is listed as CEO, Tim Cook has moved to executive chair with a seat on the board, and the board section now carries headshots instead of a plain list of names. Apple also rewrote the bio under Ternus's photo. Day one came with no keynote and no memo to the troops. It came with a webpage, and somebody at Apple picked every word on it.
The longest paragraph in that bio skips past iPad, AirPods, and the run of iPhones he shepherded through hardware engineering. It's about things not breaking. "John has led much of the company's focus in areas like reliability and durability, introducing new techniques that have made Apple products remarkably resilient," it reads, before listing a recycled aluminum compound now used across multiple product lines, the 3D-printed titanium in Apple Watch Ultra, and "advancements in reparability that have increased the life spans of several Apple products."
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Apple Says an Ex-Engineer Took Circuit Schematics to OpenAI, Then Tried to Erase the Trail
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Artificial Intelligence,
Apple's trade secrets fight with OpenAI now has a name attached to it. In an amended complaint filed August 31, Apple accuses Chang Liu, a former senior system electrical engineer who left for OpenAI, of downloading dozens of confidential Apple files after he'd already started the new job. Circuit schematics among them, Apple says.
Then it gets worse for Liu, at least in Apple's telling. Apple claims that once he found out about the internal investigation, he directed an OpenAI coworker to "restore" Apple-issued devices, which Apple reads as an attempt to destroy forensic evidence. All of this is an allegation in an active lawsuit. Nothing has been proven, and OpenAI denies it.
John Ternus Becomes Apple CEO Tomorrow With Nine Days Until the iPhone Event
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News,
Today is Tim Cook's last day as CEO of Apple. Tomorrow the job belongs to John Ternus, and nine days after that he has to walk onto a stage and sell you an iPhone. That is the entire honeymoon.
Apple announced the handover back in April, so the date is not a surprise. The placement of it still is. Apple chose to swap chief executives in the week before its biggest launch of the year, which makes Ternus's first public act as CEO the September 9 keynote, an event Apple is calling "Surprise and Shine." Most companies give a new boss a quiet quarter. Ternus gets a countdown.
Phil Schiller Leaving Apple, Handing Off the App Store on Tim Cook’s Last Day
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News,
Watch any Apple keynote from the last twenty years and you were watching Phil Schiller's work. Follow any App Store fight of the last ten and you were watching him take the punches. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports he has stepped back from both jobs.
Per that report, Schiller has given up running the App Store and overseeing Apple's product events. He stays at the company as an Apple Fellow, working on projects nobody has described publicly. Apple has not announced any of it: no press release, no memo, no comment. Executive changes at Apple normally show up with a scripted quote attached.
Apple Reportedly Built an Apple Pencil for the Foldable iPhone, Then Backed Away
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Rumors,
Apple built an Apple Pencil for its folding iPhone, and then appears to have talked itself out of it. That comes from Mark Gurman's Power On newsletter for Bloomberg, published Sunday. He describes a stubbier Pencil, sized for a phone rather than an iPad, that snaps magnetically onto the side of the device to sit and charge there. Apple tested it. Gurman says it probably will not be announced next month, and probably is not going on sale at all.
Apple has confirmed none of this, and none of it is a product. It is one reporter's account of an internal prototype, and killing prototypes is a normal part of how hardware gets made. The reasons he gives describe why a stylus on a folding phone is hard before anyone gets near the software.
Apple TV Now Costs $14.99 a Month, and the Annual Plan Took the Bigger Hit
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Home Entertainment,
The annual plan is where this one bites. Apple raised US prices for its Apple TV streaming service today: $14.99 a month, up from $12.99, and $119 a year, up from $99. The monthly bill went up about 15%, and the yearly one went up 20%.
Apple didn't send a press release. Its Apple TV page now lists $14.99 a month after a seven-day trial, and points to Apple One "starting at $21.95," which confirms the Individual bundle went up two dollars as well, and Apple's own marketing pages don't list a yearly price at all.
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Spatial Audio in CarPlay Reaches the Volvo EX90, With a 25-Speaker Catch
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Portable Audio / Video, Transportation,
The car is where a lot of people still listen to music on purpose. Alone, on a highway, with nobody interrupting and nothing else competing for the speakers, you hear the bass line in a way you never do at your desk. It's the closest thing most of us have to a listening room, and audio companies have been circling it for years.
Volvo is pushing Spatial Audio in CarPlay, powered by Dolby Atmos, out to the EX90 through a software update, and confirmed it in a press release this week. Back in July it named the EX60, EX90 and ES90 as the three models getting it. There's a catch, and it's an expensive one. The feature needs the optional Bowers & Wilkins sound system.
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The New Mac mini Starts at $899, and That Price Is the Real Story
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, PC / Laptop,
The Mac mini used to be the easy recommendation. Somebody asks what desktop to buy, you say Mac mini, they say how much, you say $599. Apple dropped a new one on Tuesday with no keynote and no fanfare, and the cheapest one now costs $899.
That's a $300 jump from where the M4 model launched in October 2024, in under two years. You get the same 16GB of memory and the same 256GB of storage you got at $599. What the extra money buys is speed.
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Apple’s Fall Event Is Set for September 9, and It’s John Ternus’s First One
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Announcements, Apple,
Apple finally put a date on the biggest phone announcement of the year, and the most interesting thing about it might not be a phone at all. Invites went out Wednesday morning with the tagline "Surprise and shine." The event happens Wednesday, September 9 at 10 a.m. Pacific (1 p.m. Eastern) at the Steve Jobs Theater on the Apple Park campus.
You can watch it the usual ways: Apple's website, YouTube, and the Apple TV app. What actually separates this one from the last decade of Septembers is who will be standing at the front of it. John Ternus takes over as Apple's CEO on September 1, with Tim Cook shifting to executive chairman. That makes September 9 Ternus's first keynote in the job.
Tim Cook Has One Week Left, and Ternus Inherits an Apple Mid-Pivot
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News,
Apple threw Tim Cook a party. Roughly 200 people at Caffè Macs, OneRepublic playing in the courtyard, tributes from Laurene Powell Jobs, services chief Eddy Cue, former COO Jeff Williams, and the man taking his job. It happened on August 23, one day before the fifteenth anniversary of the day Cook replaced Steve Jobs.
On September 1, John Ternus becomes Apple's eighth CEO. Cook doesn't leave the building, though, as he becomes executive chairman. He'll be focused on engaging with policymakers around the world, which is a polite way of saying he keeps handling the regulators and trade fights he has spent a decade getting good at.
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