Well, what about John Ternus? Who is he? Why do you think Apple chose him? And is there any unfinished business that Tim Cook is leaving him?

I think Ternus is interesting because Jobs recruited Cook from Compaq, and before that he was at IBM, and he came in as a vice president to handle operations.

Very different trajectory for John Ternus.

spent more than half of his life at Apple.

He's been there for 25 years.

He came up through the ranks of hardware design.

And that means that while Tim Cook, you know, had an incredible set of skills, John Ternus, I think, understands Apple at a deeper level because he really did kind of live the entire product cycle as a person working on hardware products at Apple.

But do you think that that's an unrealistic bar to set for John Ternus?

it's like oh you didn't know that about me

i know i'm legendary as data dave uh and so he did it so what so my house does not have an attic to speak of a crawl space a basement it's a concrete slab and the and there is an there is an attic to call it a crawl space would not even do it justice it's at its highest point, it might be like, you could wedge a small person in there, but you might not get them back.

It's a one-way trip.

It's not.

So you can't do stuff like that.

It would be an enormous undertaking to try to wire stuff in there.

Also, we discovered, actually, when we were trying to do some lighting and stuff in our living room that there's a beam that comes across the living room that completely blocks one side of the crawl space from the other a support beam because we thought we had blown insulation into this one crawl space and then we opened up the other half from the garage and discovered it was like a time capsule from 1954 or whenever they built the house it was pristine and There's nothing in it.

suppose i feel like just at a simple level if the thing that you put outside to track the weather doesn't get the sun your outlook if ever there was a product that should

Yeah.

So, um, the truth is, what did Data Dave do? You know, drilled a hole in my garage, ran three Ethernet cables out.

They're tacked under the eaves.

Um, one goes into, or is it three or maybe just...

Yeah, one goes into the living room, which is not very far.

One goes into the back bedroom, and one goes into, uh, Jamie's old bedroom, which we use as Studio B.

And so I've got wired Ethernet going into all three bedrooms 'cause there was already a wire going in, already Ethernet going into the, the, the other bedroom.

Mm-hmm.

It literally has

007.

Like, what 007 actor was the Cyborg role written for? Could be his neck size.

I'm going to say it was written for...

Oh.

So here's the thing.

It's the mid-80s.

Discovery Mirror thing and I thought these are still not great

... number one.

There was no doubt who was in charge, but I think with Steve, and this is gonna be a question for John Ternus, I firmly believe that the CEO has to be the CEO of the entire company, and the buck does stop with them, and they need to make the big picture decisions.

But also, what they choose to focus on is gonna be informed by what they know.

And so Tim Cook h- was always the, the head of oper- He was the COO, and then when he was the CEO, he also knew and, and cared about operations and all that.

So what will John Ternus care about? John Ternus is gonna be more like Steve Jobs just in the sense that he's more closely attached to the product process, and I think it may be that Sabih Khan and Kevin Parick, who are the COO and CFO, will be more involved, it...

more sort of like, not even necessarily responsible, like more directly involved with that part of the business where Tim might have had a little more informing him.

And I think that's natural.

But it's not like you're stopping what you're already doing.

Like, how do you interpret that finding?

That's really interesting.

I, I honestly am in so many different groups that have different opinions about AI, and it's such a...

I, I'm not even sure if it's a polarizing topic.

I think people are just all over the place.

And so I was curious, one, I mean, Weldon and I, um, and Tom all talk before we do this, and we kinda like hatch our plan of like what are our questions that we don't ask every year, like the ones that we've been asking for six years, but are like sort of special for the moment.

And I went into this when we hatched these AI questions thinking we would be able to measure separately a little bit the AI focus of the organizations that the people who took the survey, um, the, the, what the organizations feel about it, and that might be separate from what the individuals feel about it.

[laughs]

Mm

...

so that it doesn't replay things from the past or miss things, like a little link post that happened yesterday, that otherwise would've been dropped entirely.

If there was no newsletter yesterday, it needs to know so that it includes the content from yesterday as well as today.

So there's a lot of logic going on there in Python to do all of that based on the RSS feed.

Fires at 5:00 PM or 4:45 PM Pacific.

Um, and then there's a bunch of other stuff in there, like if there are certain tags or if it's above a certain length, my mail provider will not supportUm, items above a certain character count, so I have a bunch of, like, logic that's, like, if it's too big, it finds the little Read More post, uh, text that's in there and cuts it there and then inserts something that says, "This is too big for the newsletter.

[laughs]

What does John Ternus tell you about the future of the business?

Well, I f- I feel like every CEO has to be the CEO of the entire company, but they always bring a little bit of their baggage and a little bit of their knowledge with them.

And John Ternus being a hardware guy and having worked in Apple hardware, he's 50, he's literally worked at Apple half his life, and he's come from the hardware side, which is, you know, I would say the portion of the business that is functioning at the best and is running on all cylinders.

And it's funny when we talk about, uh, you, you mentioned the explosive growth of Apple in Tim Cook's era.

Sort of Steve Jobs launched a lot of those products, but it was under Tim Cook that the company became... had generated huge amounts of revenue, huge amounts of growth.

An operations guy like Tim Cook is, was in many ways the perfect person even though everybody was worried, "Oh, no, he doesn't know about products like Steve Jobs," he was the perfect person in many ways to handle that enormous growth that they had.

However, I think at its heart, Apple is a company about products and the products that are at the core of its business, and having somebody who is much closer, and even Tim Cook would say, John Ternus is much closer to the product development process than Tim Cook would ever have been.

A, a lot might sort of share that view, Jason, feeling that entirely because of Steve Jobs and what he achieved, that Apple should be looking for visionaries, people to be a bit radical and, and change the world [laughs] at the top of their business.

Yeah

... to connect to it.

So I was simultaneously, like, wiring the network and editing the paper, and that was like, "I think there's some strong signals here about what I'm gonna end up doing for my career," and those signals were accurate.

So yeah, I was an Apple II user and then a Mac user very quickly.

Huge, uh, huge Mac fan.

Bought a PowerBook when I went to grad school, and then met, uh, uh, um, I think I mentioned this in a, in a piece for, for Macworld that is not up yet but may be up soon.

Um, I met Pam Pi- Pam Pfiffner, who was the last editor-in-chief of MacUser.

Mm-hmm

Jason.

You know, um, a lot of, a lot of choices here.

Um, some of them I...

You know, there, there are failures, and then there are flops.

I feel like if something goes down and it doesn't do a belly flop, is it a failure? Like the Mac Portable was a failure.

The G4 Cube was a failure, but what was a flop? And when I was writing, um, one of these Apple 50 stories that I'm, I think I'm done now, uh, one of the ones I just kept coming back to is the fact that the Apple II was so successful that Apple just kept trying to ship replacements for it, and it never worked.

The, none of the replacements worked until finally, eventually, with the sort of second- and third-generation Macs, they got there.

And finally, Jason.

Oh, I hate that

... where they're, like, kinda lost their way.

Um, I think I, personally, I ascribe some of that to the fact that after Steve Jobs died, they desperately wanted to hold onto Jony Ive because they wanted to show that the whole place wasn't going to hell.

And as a result, they gave Jony Ive and all of his lieutenants way too much power.

And I think that the whole design and user interaction, uh, you know, philosophy at Apple got-... completely out of balance.

And so, you know, for people who don't know, like, the, the really, the Mac users who really, really care are, a-a, are deeply offended by the liquid glass design that came out last year.

I think it's just a symptom of a larger disease, which is that they've been kind of not thinking about these things in terms of usability, how people use them every day, and thinking more about how they look, and I think maybe if you're mostly focused on the iPhone, as they should be, because it's their biggest product by far, that you're thinking about that super broad market and, and that you need to dazzle them.

Mm-hmm.

[laughs]

... too much.

Maybe, maybe just to unconsciousness instead of death.

I...

Honestly, it's one of these things, too, where it's obviously the trend over the last few months is people talking about how terrible they think liquid glass is and how bad they think it is on Tahoe.

And I don't entirely disagree with that, but I do think that Tahoe has a lot of positives because they...

I mean, they added productivity features to Tahoe.

Hmm.

Yeah.

... they're like, they're just like gray on gray with little drop shadows.

Like, they, they, they don't have texture.

They...

It just looks so bad and, and that's a shame, but it's usable.

I mean, I, I've been using it and loving it and the new functional features of the Mac, of the Tahoe stuff, with the Spotlight and the, and the clipboard history and the changes to shortcuts and automations and the stuff that's going on in the menu bar.

I think there's some really exciting things in Tahoe.

Right.