September 1 will put hardware chief John Ternus in Apple’s top job, with Tim Cook shifting to executive chairman in an unusually orderly succession for the iPhone maker.
Twenty-five-year Apple veteran Ternus inherits a more urgent test than the handoff itself: delivering a rebuilt Siri after Apple’s assistant fell behind ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude and after Apple already delayed the overhaul once.
WWDC in June laid out Apple’s answer — on-device AI backed by Private Cloud Compute and Apple Foundation Models built with Google technology — preserving privacy while outsourcing part of Siri’s intelligence layer to a rival.
That Google tie-up, previously reported at about $1 billion a year under a multi-year partnership, underscores the trade-off facing Ternus: keep Apple’s hardware-and-privacy edge while proving it can still ship AI people use daily.