3 minute read
The King really did step down today
Today’s the day. After nearly 15 years running Apple, Tim Cook officially handed the CEO title to John Ternus this morning, September 1. Cook isn’t disappearing, he’s sliding into the executive chairman chair, corporate speak for “still in the building, nicer parking spot.” It’s the biggest changing of the guard in tech in a decade, and it happened on a random Tuesday with almost no fanfare.
The RAM situation is genuinely ugly
Cook’s parting gift to Ternus wasn’t a card. On his final earnings call he described memory chip pricing as a “100-year flood,” not a phrase a CEO uses when things are fine. DRAM prices spiked as much as 90% this year because three companies basically control the whole supply. Apple already raised Mac and iPad prices to cope, and the new iPhones might get pricier too.
Google is now living inside Siri’s brain
Remember when Apple insisted on building everything itself? That era’s over. Apple now pays Google roughly a billion dollars a year to run Gemini under the hood of the new Siri, a humbling admission the in-house AI effort wasn’t cutting it. Great for users, less great for anyone who cared about Apple’s “we do it ourselves” mythology.
Brussels still has Apple on speed dial
The EU forced Apple to rework its App Store fees again this year under the Digital Markets Act, landing on a 26% cut for purchases through Apple’s own system and a much smaller cut for third party stores. It’s framed as a resolution, but Europe never really closes the file. Ternus keeps negotiating with a regulator that clearly enjoys the leverage.
The App Store just lost its dad
Right before the handover, longtime exec Phil Schiller quietly stepped back from running the App Store and Apple’s product events, per Bloomberg. He’s not leaving, just fading into an “Apple Fellow” role that sounds like a retirement lap. The App Store shifts to Eddy Cue’s services team. One more veteran off the field as the new guy grabs the wheel, and it knocked Apple stock down about 0.9% on the news.
iPhone forecasts are looking shaky
Apple trades around 33 times forward earnings after a 40% run up over the past year. That leaves zero room for a soft iPhone cycle, and forecasts heading into the September 9 event have been wobbly given the supply constraints Cook already flagged.
The one thing Cook actually got right
Say what you want about the last few years, but Cook turned Apple into an operational machine. Supply chain discipline, margins nobody else in hardware can touch, a services business that prints money. That’s the one thing Ternus cannot afford to fumble while he’s busy putting out AI and regulatory fires. Everything else is negotiable. That isn’t.
So what happens now
Ternus has a legendary record on hardware and zero record running a trillion dollar company through a memory crisis, an AI arms race, and a regulator that never sleeps. The training wheels are off.
Sources: Bloomberg, TechCrunch, 9to5Mac, MacRumors, The Motley Fool, CNBC, Engadget