Apple's John Ternus Era Begins: Can Hardware Win the AI Race Without an Apple Frontier Model?

John Ternus started his first day as Apple CEO on September 1, ending Tim Cook's 15-year run at the top. Ternus, 51, joined Apple's design team in 2001 and rose through the ranks to senior vice president of hardware engineering before taking the company's top job.

He inherits a company that has largely ceded the frontier AI model race to Google and OpenAI. Rather than build its own foundation model, Apple is reportedly paying Google roughly $1 billion a year for a custom 1.2-trillion-parameter Gemini model to power a rebuilt Siri — betting that owning the best hardware and product experience matters more than owning the underlying model.

That leaves Ternus with a narrower but still difficult mandate: he doesn't need to build the best AI model in the industry, but he does need to prove Apple can keep shipping the best AI-powered products in the industry — built on models it doesn't own — without eroding the margins those products have always depended on.

Aerial photo of Apple Park via Wikimedia Commons, © Daniel L. Lu (dllu), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.