John Ternus, who took over as Apple’s chief executive at the start of September, used an interview with Wired’s Steven Levy to push back on the idea that the company has fallen behind in AI.
He conceded that everyone has an opinion about Apple’s position and the delayed, finally delivered Siri upgrade, then said he likes where the company stands.
A deliberate absence
New products will draw on AI, Ternus said, but Apple does not intend to ship AI for its own sake. Done properly, he argued, the technology becomes invisible: customers judge whether a device delighted them, not which stack produced the result.
Pressed on agents that might make apps unnecessary, he did not dispute the convenience. Product creation, he answered, is a human and personal craft that the company genuinely enjoys.
The bet underneath
Ternus’s framing is a wager that distribution and integration beat model benchmarks. Apple controls the silicon, the operating system and the default assistant on a large installed base, which gives it room to absorb AI quietly rather than advertise it.
It also sets a measurable standard, and one that is hard to audit from outside: if customers cannot tell where the intelligence came from, nobody can score it either. The company this week also confirmed Apple Intelligence is heading to China in iOS 27.3.
