A day-one briefing for Apple’s new CEO

Executive Summary, Day One 📁 Inbox 5:05AM To: Ternus, John <jternus@apple.com> Reply-to: CEO-transition-team@apple.com

Welcome to your first day as CEO! Hopefully you’re finding your new office spacious and comfortable. If you have trouble with any of the doors just ping us — being a Jony Ive design, you won’t find anything as unsightly as a door handle here!

Today’s memo includes a summary of the business, broken out by division. The day’s schedule is also attached; please note that the Apple Intelligence team needed to delay the new Siri discussion until a later date, but they promise they’re “for real” this time.

Hardware Everything is in hand for the upcoming phone launches. We don’t anticipate the price hikes will have much impact on sales, since nobody in the US knows how much they really pay for their phone anyway. The team agrees that calling the camera on the upcoming AirPods a “sensor” would make it less creepy and is moving forward with that terminology. Morale on the Vision Pro team after their move to the basement is somewhat low, but we’ve scheduled a virtual offsite for them in Tahiti that we think will help.

Services Our new EU app store rules go into effect in exactly one month. We’ve compiled a simplified explainer breaking down how much commission app developers will pay and which companies can operate alternative app stores into an easy-to-parse, 300-page PDF (see attached). This does mean that our services revenue will take a hit, but on the bright side, we just rolled out ads in Maps to juice the numbers.

Despite the setbacks, services is still our best bet for growth since we, well, ran out of people to sell iPhones to . It might even become a bigger business than the iPhone someday. That could fundamentally change the kind of company Apple is — a hardware guy in charge of a services company? Or will a services company pivot back to hardware under a new CEO? Striking that balance without frustrating customers remains an ongoing challenge. Take a hint from your predecessor: Ted Lasso is so lovable nobody noticed that we raised Apple TV prices again .

Software The good news is that the updated Liquid Glass design is polling with higher approval ratings than last year. The bad news is that Brussels is still mad at us for holding back new Siri in Europe, Google’s kind of eating our lunch in the EU, and app developers are still unhappy with the new commission structure. We were, uh, not winning any popularity contests with app developers to start with, so this may be something to consider.

Operation Smarter Siri Take Two has been a success, and we’re finally back in the AI game. Unfortunately, in the time that passed since Smarter Siri The First Try, AI became deeply unfashionable. But it kind of works in our favor; we can let Meta and Google take the heat on building out all those data centers (pun intended?) while we cajole app developers into using app intents so Siri can actually do stuff.