I'm curious what those might mean for Cook's legacy as CEO.

In terms of legacy, Cook is stepping down as CEO, but he's going to take over this role as executive chair.

It's a role that's really interesting because it speaks to this question of: What is Apple without Tim Cook now? Can Apple survive without the chief diplomat, the politician, essentially, that Tim Cook is? And it's taken Cook a long time to start diversifying away from China, de-risk the supply chains, look at places like India, Vietnam.

And Cook's achieved that because he's also been a consummate diplomat who's flying between Washington and Beijing all the time.

He's done a masterful job of managing sort of Trump's fits of pique around tariffs.

And so going back to the executive chair role, Cook's still writing his legacy to some extent.

So what are the biggest challenges that he's gonna be inheriting from Tim Cook now?

Beyond this sort of slow-burning geopolitical question around Apple's ties to China, we're coming off a quite extraordinary couple of years for Apple, where it's really been exposed as maybe missing the boat when it came to artificial intelligence.

What went down?

Yeah, so Jensen was in Taiwan for the COMPUTEX conference, which is a sort of major tech exposition show, uh, in Taiwan every year, and the headline message was basically successive US government administrations have been wrong in their attempts to play a game of Whac-A-Mole with US chip companies that are trying to sell into China.

All it's really accomplishing is pushing China to become a real AI technology powerhouse of its own.

At the same time, there was this sort of message of confidence in Taiwan, and so NVIDIA's announced a massive new office space in Taiwan.

There's also a supercomputer it's building with Foxconn and the Taiwanese government with 10,000 of its latest chips.

So, it was a pretty big statement of confidence in Taiwan at a time when the US government has obviously got a real focus on trying to onshore leading-edge technology manufacturing, in many cases with these exact same companies.

You know, where's it looking to go?

Yeah, so one thing that's become clear from tracking how Jensen has talked about what he calls this AI revolution over the last couple of years is the first wave of interest in buying these chips was very driven by the Googles and the Microsofts and the Amazons.

And what has Apple done in the days since the tariffs snapped into place?

Well, we've literally seen iPhones being bundled onto planes in India and flown to the US.

The reason being India is much more conciliatory towards Trump than China, and so the prospects of India potentially reaching a trade deal seem safer at this stage.

Not only that, but according to the estimates that we have from analysts, around 30 million of the 50 million or so iPhones that are exported to the US each year could technically come from India, and they don't at this stage.

So one short-term solution to the tariff impact on Apple's China imports is to sort of pivot to India and really earmark that iPhone output for the US market to reduce the impact on prices in the short term.

Can it actually do that?

I think the answer from most people who closely monitor Apple supply chains is no, but that hasn't stopped the White House press secretary this week being very vocal, reiterating the idea that the US can become an iPhone assembly center.

There are a number of challenges with that, one of which goes to this component issue again.