transcript
Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
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Speaker 3:
[01:04] What is your pre-performance ritual? What are you doing 24 hours before that big meeting, an hour before your race? I'm Rabin Arsalan, VP and Head Instructor at Peloton and host of Project Swagger. This week, every step I take to lock in ahead of high stakes, high stress events. This is your performance toolkit. Follow Project Swagger now wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 4:
[01:32] Welcome to a live Vergecast, the flagship podcast of John Ternus, who we have to be nice to now because he's the new CEO of Apple. Is that how it works? Hi, Nilay. It's been a day, my friend.
Speaker 5:
[01:44] It has been a day. Right at the end, we're emergency podcasting.
Speaker 4:
[01:48] So the news, obviously, Tim Cook stepping down as the CEO of Apple. John Ternus, the not-quite-new, soon-to-be CEO of Apple. Nilay, we've got a bunch of stuff to talk about, but I'm just curious, immediate reaction, are you surprised, A, that this happened, and B, that it happened today?
Speaker 5:
[02:10] I am very surprised it happened today. Like, very, very surprised it happened today. Apple just turned 50. Tim Cook did a raft of interviews during that time in which he said he was not leaving anytime soon. So I'm-
Speaker 4:
[02:25] Which we should say is technically true. He's staying as the executive chairman. There's a quote that more or less makes it sound like Tim Cook's new job at Apple is to be the person who gets yelled at by politicians. So he is not technically leaving, so I'm sure there will be people at Apple who will tell you he was not technically lying. And yet, here we are.
Speaker 5:
[02:46] Yeah, I mean, the role of executive chairman, guy who gets yelled at by Congress and by foreign governments, is like a storied Silicon Valley role. The immediate comparison I would make is to Eric Schmidt, who was the CEO of Google. He was the adult supervision for Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Larry Page became the CEO. Eric kicked himself upstairs to do politics. And in particular, like run around and get yelled at by Europeans. So this is a pretty standard arrangement. Again, it's just the timing that really gets me, because it's a sort of out of nowhere on a Monday evening. It's not like a Friday news dump. There was no rumble that it was going to happen. And I, in particular, was expecting it to happen around the iPhone.
Speaker 4:
[03:30] Interesting.
Speaker 5:
[03:31] Right, I assumed that we would get a John Ternus iPhone introduction and then a one more thing. Our hottest new product is John Ternus. I had that staging in my mind. I wasn't expecting a sort of bomb to go off right after Apple 50. But again, the news is not surprising. I think we all knew it was going to be John Ternus. You and I have interacted with John Ternus many times over the past several years. He's always been very kind. He's in it. He is a hardware person. He will argue with you about USBC. So I'm excited for that turn for Apple in that specific way. And I'm not at all surprised that Tim Cook is going to stick around and manage China and manage Donald Trump. That is a totally different set of skills.
Speaker 4:
[04:17] Yeah. So is that your read of the breakdown? So basically, John Ternus, who was the SVP of hardware engineering, is becoming CEO. Johnny Sruji, who has been an interesting figure inside of Apple. There were rumors not that long ago that he was leaving. There's been this kind of executive parade out of Apple over the last 12 months. Some people saying essentially, this is great news. Thank God they're gone. Like Alan Dye, who was doing design, and a lot of people thought not very well. And then there are going to be a bunch of people who have left that were bigger losses. Johnny Sruji, there were rumors he was going to leave. He quashed those pretty aggressively, is now getting John Ternus' old job, but then a little more. His new title is Chief Hardware Officer. And I believe you're the titles expert on The Vergecast, but I believe Apple is one of those companies that is very deliberate about titles. And so the idea that it's giving Johnny Sruji a C-suite title is a big deal. So this is like, this is two hardware people being elevated to very important new positions inside of Apple. So should we take that as the sort of obvious sign that it feels like it wants to be, that this is a company doubling down on its hardware business?
Speaker 5:
[05:29] I mean, Apple has always been a hardware business. It's pretty hard to get Apple software without Apple hardware, except in the case of Apple TV, which is both a gadget, a service, a piece of software, a studio insert. Who knows what is going on there? That's the only truly horizontal piece of software they have that people talk about. Apple Music is another one, but that's about it, really. I think Johnny Sruji is a really important Apple. There are a lot of people who thought that Intel would poach him. There are big jobs he could take that he is more than qualified for. I think Apple needs to keep him, and the future of their products is so intimately tied to their chip roadmap that elevating the person who has led all the chip designs into the role of sheep hardware officer, but it makes a natural kind of sense. What we don't know is whether Surjit is any good at actually making hardware. I think he's great at making chips.
Speaker 4:
[06:26] He is very good at making chips.
Speaker 5:
[06:27] There's lots of other bits and bobs that go into a great piece of hardware. That said, John Ternus is still going to be there. His background is hardware. You expect him to pay some attention to that as well. On the title front, Apple has usually, historically, been really tight with titles. You can get up to SVP and that's where you live. Famously, Steve Jobs used to tell people that once they had an SVP title, they had no more problems. Their problems were their own. In the Tim Cook era, that has totally been changed. Everybody has had fake titles forever in the Tim Cook era. That's how he has managed his team. You're getting poached, here's a Chief Nothing title. Johnny Iva, the Chief Design Officer title. It literally meant that he was retired. So it's unclear what this actually means in the day to day, but given their emphasis on owning the whole widget from chips to software to distribution to market, you can see that this probably feels like more of a real title than not.
Speaker 4:
[07:26] Yeah, I think that's right. I think I've been looking around seeing just sort of the immediate reactions. I went to CNBC where they started talking about the stock price and all this stuff this is gonna mean. There's this swirl of stuff going on inside of Apple that I think is really complicated to pull apart and it's gonna be really interesting to see how it changes or doesn't with a new CEO. So there's Apple the hardware company, right? Which it fundamentally is. Apple is the iPhone company more than anything else. But it also has these other giant hardware businesses. It sells a lot of hardware. It sells at huge margins. It has done so for a very long time. Apple is also increasingly a services business and this is the bit of CNBC. I'm a financial genius now because I watched 8 minutes of CNBC while I was getting ready for this. Apple wants to be perceived as a software company making software margins, which is one of the reasons it has been pushing harder and harder into services. It has fought tooth and nail to continue to extract its 30% from everything that happens on the iPhone. There's a sense that, okay, even if the growth of our hardware business is going to stall, we're going to find more and more ways to make money from people. Then there is this mess that is AI and Apple Intelligence and Siri, which Apple has largely whiffed on, but I think in a funny way has come around on Apple, where actually being the company competing to make the frontier model that causes the most problems is not a great place to be, and instead being the hardware on which everyone will do these things, and thus you can extract your 30% rent becomes very important. There's all this stuff just swirling around, and I feel like one easy read of this would be to say that, okay, Apple has seen all of this, and even if you think AI is the future, Apple's big bet is that being the hardware maker of the AI revolution is going to be vastly more important than trying to go poach Demis Asabas from Google to come run your company and be an AI company forever. Did I just twist myself into knots, or does that make any sense?
Speaker 5:
[09:19] You're a little bit twisted, but let me help you untwist it.
Speaker 4:
[09:22] Okay.
Speaker 5:
[09:23] The Tim Cook era is defined by Apple squeezing every dollar from every part of its business that it can.
Speaker 4:
[09:31] It's really good.
Speaker 5:
[09:32] And boy, has Tim Cook been good at that.
Speaker 4:
[09:34] He has.
Speaker 5:
[09:35] And I'm not even saying the products are good or bad. I'm just saying it definitionally, the thing that Cook has done is say, well, we've run out of countries to sell iPhones in. And even if we spend all of our effort getting 10% more users to switch from Android, that won't move the needle because we're already so big. So what we're going to do is make all the app subscription apps and make all our money every time you push a button on the iPhone. And we're going to fight tooth and nail with epic games about Fortnite in-app purchases, whatever it is. That has worked. On the other side, every product line at Apple has now sprouted into 10,000 configurations. I can't tell you what an iPad is. There's so many of them that it boggles the mind. And the iPhone is now 50 different iPhones. Oddly, the Mac has gotten more constrained. You get the feeling Tim Cook doesn't pay as much attention to that. But every other product Apple is just so many configurations, it's so many price points. Every price point from zero to $10 million, there's an Apple product for you.
Speaker 4:
[10:39] And there have been rumors recently about Apple both pushing further down into cheaper prices and higher into luxury prices. This is a company that would like to sell you every imaginable thing at every imaginable price. And there's the thing that Tim Cook is probably best known for, which is the unbelievable supply chain work that he's done over 15 years. You talk about squeezing dollars, no one in this business is better at that than Tim Cook. And so I think he has found a way to squeeze every dollar out of the company and every one of its products in every way is like a perfect summation of Tim Cook's legacy. And you can either like that or hate it, but it is, boy, has it been good for business.
Speaker 5:
[11:19] It is impossible to understate how hard that is.
Speaker 6:
[11:22] Yeah.
Speaker 5:
[11:23] Very few companies where people can pull off the, just the one product, we're going to make a new iPhone every year at iPhone scale, and they do it every year without missing a beat. That is one of the most impressive feats in business history and manufacturing history and anything history. Like, there are armies that don't operate as with as clean logistics as Apple operates the iPhone supply chain.
Speaker 6:
[11:48] Yeah.
Speaker 5:
[11:49] That's remarkable. Here's my big criticism of the Tim Cook era. They don't make enough stuff. They simply do not have enough products. They're not taking enough shots. And when they do take the shots, they put too much pressure on them in weird ways. The example I always go back to, because I think it's funny, is the introduction of the Apple Watch, where they just overloaded the Apple Watch with expectations and hype, and Bono was there, and we all had to pretend the Digital Crown was an input method.
Speaker 4:
[12:20] I knew you were going to say that.
Speaker 5:
[12:22] It's so funny to me.
Speaker 4:
[12:24] The Digital Crown was going to be as big as the touchscreen. That's a real thing that they said.
Speaker 5:
[12:28] They made that case, and it's like, guys, you don't have to... You can just have more products. You can just try more things and see what works. The Vision Pro is the same way. It's like overloaded this VR headset with all of these expectations, because they weren't trying enough things, because the Tim Cook era is so much about optimizing the things that already exist. And certainly there are products during his tenure that are very important, like AirPods are very important. You can go down the list. There's a lot of important products that came up, but even AirPods are like, now there's 50 variations of AirPods. And so there just weren't enough shots, and I'm kind of hoping that the Ternus era combined with sort of the pressure of the AI era, where everyone is trying to find the new thing, because AI does feel like a meaningfully different way to interact with a computer, that they just take more shots, right? Not in the like crazy Samsung way, but just in the like, they should make a home device that you can talk to. They should expand AirPods and doing something else. And I'm kind of hoping that having a hardware person to lead makes them like try more things without all of that pressure. I'm not sure that they will, but that's my criticism of the Cook era, is that it was so deliberate because everything had to scale to a huge number, that sometimes their failures were even bigger failures than they needed to be.
Speaker 7:
[13:52] Yeah. Okay. This one says you get a free phone if you switch. Hey, this one also says you get a free phone if you switch.
Speaker 8:
[14:04] Yeah, they all do one.
Speaker 7:
[14:06] Wait, wait, wait, wait. The T-Mobile one says families saved over $3,700 versus the other big guys in the past five years. And their experience plans have Netflix included, plus the year of Dash passed by DoorDash.
Speaker 9:
[14:20] Hang on, let me see that.
Speaker 10:
[14:22] And a five-year price guarantee? Oh yeah, we're switching.
Speaker 7:
[14:24] That's what I'm talking about. Do we clap now or?
Speaker 11:
[14:28] I'm thinking high five. At T-Mobile, get savings that keep stacking up.
Speaker 12:
[14:33] That's value you can feel every day.
Speaker 13:
[14:35] Switch now at T-Mobile.
Speaker 11:
[14:39] Savings based on HarrisX billing snapshots from Q3 2021 to Q4 2025 among accounts with three plus voice lines compared to AT&T and Verizon, excluding discounts, credits and optional charges. See harrisx.com/t-mobile. Price guarantee on talk, text and data. Exclusions like taxes and fees apply. See tmobile.com.
Speaker 14:
[14:58] Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been talking about the war in Iran in distinctly biblical terms, citing Psalms, the resurrection of Jesus and the Book of Quentin.
Speaker 12:
[15:08] And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother.
Speaker 14:
[15:15] President Trump is comparing himself to Christ. President Vance is fighting with the Pope. Watching all of this is the increasingly influential pastor Doug Wilson. He co-founded the church that Hegseth attends. Wilson's a Christian nationalist who would like the USA to be a theocracy. He'd also like to help us get there, though he doesn't think it's going to happen anytime soon.
Speaker 10:
[15:35] I believe that it is accelerating. I believe that we're making significant gains. I see us assembling resources and I'm encouraged in that labor, but I don't expect to see what we're praying for in my lifetime.
Speaker 14:
[15:49] Pastor Doug Wilson and how much you should worry about his plans on Today Explained from Vox, weekdays, afternoons, wherever.
Speaker 8:
[15:59] Hi, I'm Brene Brown.
Speaker 13:
[16:01] And I'm Adam Grant.
Speaker 8:
[16:02] And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop.
Speaker 13:
[16:04] A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling, and questioning.
Speaker 8:
[16:09] It's going to be fun. We rarely agree.
Speaker 13:
[16:12] But we almost never disagree, and we're always learning.
Speaker 8:
[16:16] That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday.
Speaker 4:
[16:28] I mean, I also think you can look at the relentless drive to scale everything as a big part of the reason Tim Cook has made the political choices that he's made. You present Donald Trump with a big gold plaque because you want to make more money selling iPhones. It's just what it is, and you can chalk that up to straightforward business logic, and I'm sure that's what Tim Cook would do. This is the price of playing this particular game. But I think he has spent a lot of time during the Apple 50 Celebration, and even in some of his goodbye letter, talking about the values and the beliefs of Apple. I think the case against Tim Cook's legacy will be that he built this company into a hell of a business and lost its soul. But what I wonder is, to your point about the products, I think the part of me that's really excited about somebody like John Ternus, is that there is somebody who thinks about and sort of lives inside of hardware back in charge. Like that's just an exciting and cool thing. The flip side is he's been at Apple for 25 years. Like this is not a cultural revolution hire on his face inside of Apple. Like which is why I think you do this this way if you're Apple. This is not Tim Cook being forced out. This is not Tim Cook leaving on bad terms. It's very clear this is being done in a way that everybody thinks sets Apple up for success. And in part that's being done because his successor has been at Apple for 25 years and knows the company just about as well as anybody. He's been on the executive team for five years. He's been a high level executive there since I think 2013. Like he is as Apple as Apple gets. And I think there is just something like in the walls at Apple that doesn't let you try and fail publicly, right? Like I think all the time about this thing Google executives used to say, which is that one of the challenges of working at Google is that if you make something that doesn't reach billions of people, they'll kill it because Google's only focused on things that reach billions of people. So if they don't see potential for that, they'll kill it. But what Google will do is ship it. They'll ship every possible iteration of it, see what happens and then kill it. And I actually like the way Google does it because it's usually haphazard and sort of ridiculous, but like I also give Amazon a lot of credit. There was that run at Amazon where they were just like, we're going to ship every single thing we can even think of to make with Alexa in it. Some of it won't work, some of it will. This is the only way to find out. Apple is the precise opposite of that, right? Like this is the thousand nos for every yes company. And you can chalk that up to Apple misses less often than almost everybody. But especially now at this moment where we have absolutely no idea what the next version of hardware is going to look like. Everybody thinks it's pins or it's glasses. I don't think it's either of those. I think it's something else that no one has done yet. It seems very unlikely that John Ternus is going to be the one who's going to be like, let's try a bunch of stuff in public and see.
Speaker 5:
[19:28] Oh, I don't think that's going to happen. And I'm making the comparison to Samsung on purpose.
Speaker 4:
[19:32] Samsung would ship them all too.
Speaker 5:
[19:34] They would absolutely, and they have.
Speaker 4:
[19:36] Yes, they have already.
Speaker 5:
[19:38] Samsung and Google and that version of Amazon, I feel like they won, right? Google has a bunch of very big products, but they are also well known for killing things that people liked. And Apple has its reputation for a reason. I don't think Ternus is going to break that. What I'm getting at is, only trying to manufacture big winners prevents you from ever seeing anything new, and it's what leads you to getting caught flat-footed. And by all accounts, Apple was caught flat-footed by everyone using Chat2BD to just fall in love with their laptop. And then they scrambled to understand it. They scrambled to launch Apple Intelligence. This failed because not everybody wants like super spell check to just interrupt them all the time. And then they got lucky because the turn that AI needed to take, where it actually replaced the touchscreen as your primary interface, did not happen.
Speaker 4:
[20:29] It hasn't killed apps yet.
Speaker 5:
[20:31] Right. And you and I are talking like every week, like there's some sort of app store for AI moment that needs to happen, and no one knows how to do it or how it will work. And so that's not really what I'm getting at. What I'm getting at is they're not, there's so much pressure on every product to be a hit in the Cook era that they didn't make anything that wasn't hit. And so even things that you could make that were great in an Apple-y way, they haven't done it. Like the HomePod, the people in our chat are talking about the HomePod. You could have just iterated on the HomePod. Yeah. There could have been a screen on the HomePod 500 years ago, and they just didn't do it. I don't know why they didn't do it. I don't know what that argument looks like. I'm just sort of curious of having hardware people at the top changes the dynamic of that argument. And they say we have to at least start with something that we can make great. So when the time comes, it's ready. Like we've built the foundation for that. And I think they did that a lot in the jobs era. Yeah, for nothing, it was just Apple 50. So we've all read the coverage, like you and I both flipped through the David Pogue book. There was a lot more of that going on in the jobs era. I don't know if John Ternus is Steve Jobs, but maybe some of that spirit comes back.
Speaker 4:
[21:41] Yeah, it's an interesting one. The HomePod's actually sort of a fun example because I think the thing the jobs era Apple did really well which shipped the thing that got you to the thing, right? Like one of the funniest parts for us going through trying to pick the best 50 Apple products ever was the first one, the one that was like the ground breaking brand new incredible idea almost never was great. It was like a great idea, it was a big idea, it was a fascinating product, it was a fascinating launch, and then it's like the second or third one is actually when it became a really good product. And that requires a lot of dedication and a lot of interest in continuing to move the ball along. Again, sort of in public. And there's been a little bit of that at the Cook era Apple, but to a much larger extent, it feels like what we've seen are much smaller ideas that are much less likely to miss. And when they do something that doesn't hit, the HomePod being a perfect example, Apple kind of just pretends it doesn't exist. Like they just mothball it and don't talk about it anymore and sort of hope that it falls off the face of the earth. And the funniest thing about the HomePod is like lots of people who have HomePods really like them. They sound good. The problem was it was way too expensive. And so it's like if you just keep revving that thing, which again, maybe somebody who is sitting in the hardware in a different way and can see the roadmap differently and sort of understands how we get from here to there in a much deeper way, looks at it and says, okay, I'm actually going to be able to sell the thing that we wanted to sell in three years. And, but I have to sell this one to get there. And that just requires being willing to play a different kind of game with your products. Then I think Cook just really liked delivering perfect, polished objects. And when that's what you want, you can only make a certain kind of thing with a certain kind of risk tolerance.
Speaker 5:
[23:30] Well, also, you know, the Cook era was defined.
Speaker 4:
[23:33] Or the touch bar, which is the exception that proves all the rules.
Speaker 5:
[23:37] We're never getting rid of this keyboard. No, I mean, the Cook era was defined by just absolute weirdness in the design part of Apple.
Speaker 4:
[23:45] Yeah.
Speaker 5:
[23:46] Right, again, it is interesting that this is all happening after Apple 50, so I can't help but think about the sweep here, but Steve Jobs, right before he died, just ran around saying two things that I think Tim Cook had to overcome. One, he kept saying that he'd figured out TV and he finally cracked it, and that was just a decade of bad ideas after that. Then two, he kept saying Johnny Ive was the most powerful person at Apple. So if you're Tim Cook, you're like, well, I'm not going to screw with that. It turns out, actually, the most powerful person at Apple was Steve Jobs. Yep. And Steve Jobs was like, no, we have to make products that work that people like. And Johnny Ive was like, what if it was super thin forever? And something about that dynamic made it happen. I think Tim initially deferred way too much to Ive. And you could see that as Apple hired a bunch of fashion designers.
Speaker 4:
[24:35] I mean, that's a big part of the story of the Apple Watch. That was the most form follows function thing Apple had maybe ever made.
Speaker 5:
[24:43] And so, and then he brought that back. And then there's, you know, just design turmoil at Apple resulting in what can only be described as the disaster of liquid glass. I still want to upgrade to Tahoe on my computers. I have a MacBook Neo. Every time I open it and look at Tahoe, I'm just like, viscerally angry at that computer. It's so cute and so stupid in the same breath.
Speaker 4:
[25:05] What does it notice?
Speaker 5:
[25:06] That's one part of the Cook legacy is he managed through that. Johnny Ive is no longer at Apple. The other part is, you know, supply chain excellence and the ability to get more out of everything that they were making in sometimes very aggressive ways that caused them a lot of problems, but they still got the more. The question is whether all of that kept them from seeing new products for what they could be, instead of putting pressure on something like the Vision Pro. And, you know, the Vision Pro was like the subject of a vanity fair cover story because they couldn't let tech reporters actually at the thing because we would have all asked the questions that we all asked when we actually got the thing. And there's just some dynamic there that you kind of hope that the actual product CEO, the person who's been building the products and thinks about the products in the beginning, changes in the culture. Now, we all know that Apple's roadmaps are years long.
Speaker 4:
[25:57] Right.
Speaker 5:
[25:58] So, I don't think the whole thing is getting blown up tomorrow. But you started talking in the beginning, they've gotten rid of a lot of executives. And you kind of wonder if that was Cook clearing the decks for Ternus to institute a culture change without having to be the person who fired everybody.
Speaker 4:
[26:16] Yeah. I mean, it does seem very much like this has been in the works for a long time. I mean, it's been publicly reported that Ternus was the obvious heir apparent for like many months and planning like this takes a long time. And I think there's a reasonable case to be made that a lot of the org changes inside of Apple over the last year have been in one way or another about this change. And it is certainly true that for better or for worse, Ternus is going to have many fewer like Apple lifers to turn to than he might have otherwise. To be fair, he will still have lots of them, right? Like the executive suite at Apple is filled with people who have been at the company for decades. I think like, would it have been fun if Craig Federighi had been named the CEO instead and we just got to make fun of his hair the whole time? Sure, but he's still there and presumably not going anywhere. So like, I think if you're if you're waiting for a completely different Apple to appear from this, I think I think you're wrong. But I don't think that's what you're saying. I think you're saying is like this is a company that can continue to be Apple, but maybe act a little more like Apple when it was smaller and not Apple when it was big, right? Like this is classic. Apple became the biggest company in the world and you are incentivized in every way to act really differently when you're the biggest company in the world than when you're just like trying to make fun of IBM at press conferences. It's a lot easier to be that.
Speaker 5:
[27:46] Apple is the global economy. I have a lot of criticisms of Tim Cook to issue.
Speaker 4:
[27:51] Sure.
Speaker 5:
[27:52] I think the way that he has cozied up to Trump in ways that are contra to Apple's values, his own values, a lot of his customers' values, there's a lot to criticize there. I think the way Apple has kept China at arm's length, even as they participate in the repression of the Chinese government, is he's done it masterfully. Is he still responsible for something? Of course, he is, right? The way that Apple has treated developers. You can issue all kinds of criticism to him. He has built the company from something that was of medium size to the thing that the global tech economy operates around. TSMC exists at the kind of scale it does, because Apple ships that many iPhones. If TSMC goes under nobody gets an iPhone anymore, right? Well, that has arguably kept a bunch of World Wars happening. That's Apple's scale. I don't envy him for having to manage through all of that. But one thing that I think is easy to criticize is I don't think Tim Cook runs around having ideas for new products. And so Apple product development is executives having to argue through a gauntlet of their competitors and peers inside of Apple to get their product to the finish line and then ship it to people, and that has put too much pressure on it. You get the feeling John Ternus, who is a product person, is going to wake up and be like, we should do more MacBook Neos. And then that might just happen because he's confident in his ability to make and ship products. And I think that little bit of culture change might be important for the future of Apple in a way that they've still got Tim Cook to run around and present Donald Trump with gold trophies for existing or whatever Donald Trump needs today to keep the tariffs low. And I'm just curious if that dynamic actually changes how Apple approaches its products. Because that's the most, that's all I need to be. The only reason anyone's in the chat is that the products are good.
Speaker 4:
[29:44] Yeah, it's got to be.
Speaker 5:
[29:45] Someone says they're watching this in their Vision Pro right now. I hope my head is janky.
Speaker 4:
[29:49] Don't worry, it always is at any screen size.
Speaker 2:
[29:56] Hey, so we're not paying taxes this year, right?
Speaker 6:
[29:59] Until the Pentagon passes one damn audit, we shouldn't pay any more taxes.
Speaker 15:
[30:07] People don't want to pay taxes anymore because they don't trust the way the government is spending and tracking our money.
Speaker 14:
[30:13] Americans are fed up with paying taxes, and I know, I know, but hear me out. Americans are extra fed up with paying taxes lately, according to some Gallup polling and some posting. But are we being short sighted?
Speaker 16:
[30:26] I think that it's important to have a government. I think that humans tried anarchy for quite a long time and it didn't work so well. A lot of people got hit over the head with rocks. We didn't have a whole lot of economic development. Almost everyone agrees that the United States should have a military to protect it from foreign invasion, that we should have law enforcement, firefighting, schools, et cetera.
Speaker 14:
[30:50] Anti-taxers and where this could all be heading on Today Explained, dropping every weekday afternoon.
Speaker 17:
[30:57] Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue.
Speaker 18:
[31:00] President Trump is now targeting predominantly democratic cities for ice raids and deportations.
Speaker 9:
[31:05] Protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday.
Speaker 19:
[31:10] We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.
Speaker 17:
[31:18] But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period?
Speaker 20:
[31:28] I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time.
Speaker 17:
[31:48] The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually, every Saturday in your audio and video feeds.
Speaker 4:
[32:03] I do think, I mean, I would think, if I'm becoming the CEO of a company like that, being able to say, here is a person at the company who has been here a long time, who has all of the cache and all of the relationships, who can just go do that for me, sounds amazing. Like if I'm John Ternus, this has got to be the best possible outcome where Tim Cook can go off and make the deals and kiss the rings and glad hand with whoever you need to and give the plaques to whoever he wants to, and you just get to make products. I'm sure it doesn't actually sort out perfectly that way, but that's got to be the dream.
Speaker 5:
[32:40] I mean, every time we-
Speaker 4:
[32:42] Nilay, what if your job involved no management of anything outside of just making the verge.com?
Speaker 5:
[32:49] That would be pretty good.
Speaker 14:
[32:50] That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 5:
[32:52] Although at some point, Eric Schmidt left Google and they're like, well, we don't want to do this. You're Sundar, you'll be the handshakes. One thing that I think about a lot is this is going to sound reductive, but I think this is true. I think this is a real consideration when you are a company of Apple's global scale and influence. I don't think Donald Trump can know a new guy right now in 2026.
Speaker 13:
[33:18] Sure.
Speaker 5:
[33:19] I think if Apple was like, Donald, Tim is leaving, there's a new guy. He'd be like, what? No, bring me Tim again.
Speaker 4:
[33:27] Travis, our producer pointed out that Tim Apple sounds a lot better than John Apple.
Speaker 5:
[33:32] Maybe, actually Donald might be able to get John Apple. Legitimately, however you feel about the president, I think you have to concede you can't throw new characters at him right now. He's very distracted by a lot of things. So I think maybe if there wasn't that dynamic, you'd be like, John, you're going to take the whole thing. But I think Tim Cook's job is to manage through the end of the Trump presidency, because that is still very volatile. And policy by True Social Post is a thing that exists for all of these companies, and you can't just throw a new guy in the mix. It needs to be the guy he knows. And again, you can have all kinds of feelings about how Tim Cook has managed that. I have all kinds of feelings about it. But it does seem like a constraint. It's not like maybe Tim really just wanted to retire and that's just not a choice. It's not a choice in 2026 if you're the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world.
Speaker 4:
[34:27] Yeah, we've been saying all along that you can't just leave at this particular moment if you're one of these CEOs.
Speaker 19:
[34:32] Yeah.
Speaker 4:
[34:33] Like, this is the game you've signed up to play.
Speaker 19:
[34:36] That's what the money's for.
Speaker 5:
[34:36] Oh my god, somebody else is watching on their Vision Pro.
Speaker 4:
[34:39] We love all of you.
Speaker 5:
[34:40] How many, if you're watching on your Vision Pro, can we just get a hand up and chat? There's two of you. I'm just dying to see if there's three.
Speaker 4:
[34:46] And also, what would you give it out of 10? Please tell Nilay.
Speaker 5:
[34:50] To people who are still on their Vision Pro watching us on YouTube Live, it's 10s out of 10 all the way.
Speaker 4:
[34:55] That's very fair. And just know we love all of you and your strange spending choices. Real quick before we get out of here, WWDC is in give or take six weeks. What do you look ahead to differently knowing that this is coming? Do you have any different feelings about what Apple's about to show us? This is ostensibly a really big WWDC. This is when we're supposed to see the new Siri that we've been promised for a long time. This is when Apple fixes or doesn't fix liquid glass. This is the future of Apple's software business in a meaningful, important way. I think I'm just curious what you look ahead to six weeks from now, the fact that this is announced now and not later.
Speaker 5:
[35:38] Sorry, I'm completely distracted by the fact that we now just have like a vision pro chat, like fully vision pro-themed chat of people. Give me like 10 out of 10. It's very good.
Speaker 4:
[35:48] Okay, this gives me an idea. At some point, I don't know when, but at some point we are going to do a Vergecast only for the vision pro. I don't know how we're going to do this, but it is only going to be playable in the vision pro and it will be just for all of us.
Speaker 5:
[36:02] So that, I mean, if John Gerber does it again, I'm confident there'll be, that's what I'm looking forward to most at WWC, is the live talk show in the vision pro. Here's, I'm actually curious about staging. I'm not somebody who like over reads keynote stories or announcements. My belief is always that the products speak for themselves and the stories the companies tell and how they tell them are sort of secondary. You can say whatever you want about the new iPhone. People are going to get them and they're going to, it's how people use them that actually matters. In this case, you got a new CEO, you got a new way of working. I thought the way they did the MacBook Neo was utterly fascinating. You and I were both at that event. Where I will never forgive myself for getting the screen technology wrong. Now, I'm just embarrassed again, just thinking about it. John Ternus was there. He was just wandering around talking to people. It was great. It was very loose. It was very casual. He was very proud of the products that day. If you were looking to see who would be the next CEO of Apple, his presence in New York that day was very much like, oh, this is going to be the next CEO of Apple. It was very obvious that everyone was there to meet him, and the laptop was very important, but he was very present. I'm wondering if at WWC, they get away from these ultra-produced infomercials that had I think really just sort of taken the life out of Apple events in a very real way, and they just let him do it. Again, I don't put a lot of emphasis on companies, keynote presentations. I think the products speak for themselves. But in this case, that's a thing that I'm looking for. Yeah. Because those ultra-produced infomercials, Apple really likes them. They travel a long way. People watch them on the Internet at much higher rates and people would re-watch the live events. But isn't this a moment to be like, okay, the ultra-corporate cook era is over, and the new product CEO is going to take over and talk about the products in a way that makes it feel like he understands them deeply, which was not a thing Tim Cook could do. You cannot deny his overall success, but the criticisms are also fair game and Tim Cook did not sit around. He never sat down with us and was like, let me talk to you about the iPhone screen. Every other executive would be like, I know you have feelings about this display, I'm going to get into it with you. That was just not Cook's vibe. I'm very curious if they start making clear that Ternus has different strengths in some way at WWDC.
Speaker 4:
[38:33] It is a fun way to think about those performances, and they are very much performances as reads on who the CEO is. What these things look like just as a reflection of Ternus' own personality and what he thinks he can do on stage, will be really interesting. I also think, my galaxy brain theory is that they did this because they think Siri is going to work. And I don't think you do this if you then immediately are like, oh God, we're going to fall completely flat at WWDC again, and everybody's going to hate Siri yet again. I think this to me feels like Apple thinks it's playing offense and not defense in a very real way. And I think unless you think Siri is good, which it's not and hasn't been for a long time, maybe it will be, you can't possibly be playing offense right now.
Speaker 5:
[39:21] Can I just say, someone in our chat just said, I wonder if John Ternus becomes more open to gaming. No, he's been there too long. It's in his blood to be like, I will say that the Mac is good at gaming and lie to your face.
Speaker 4:
[39:32] But he will, I can say confidently, continue to ship you five year old games on your Mac at intervals that don't make any sense.
Speaker 5:
[39:40] Is there a version of Assassin's Creed from two years ago that you've been dying to play? It will be in the next keynote. I promise you it will be there. That's what Ubisoft is for. Yeah, I mean, they licensed Google's models. It seems like a very complicated deal in which you get a lot of access that other people don't get, which makes sense. We're seeing Google start to pull it off on Android in small ways. Allison has tested the agentic features in Android. It's starting to work in small ways. Yeah, there's some evidence that it can do some of the things they want it to do. There's also some evidence that just letting Siri be a front-end to Gemini will just be fine.
Speaker 4:
[40:16] Yeah. Or that maybe everybody hates AI, and actually Apple is just going to like, Ternus is just going to get on stage, light a Siri flag on fire and be like, AI sucks, hardware forever, and that's the new Apple.
Speaker 5:
[40:30] I would take that. That would be the greatest Apple keynote of the past 15 years.
Speaker 4:
[40:36] I would enjoy that very much. I would go to Cupertino for that one. We should get out of here. You and I both have Children to Feed and other stuff to do, but we're gonna talk a lot about this the rest of the week. Our team is spun up on a bunch of coverage, a bunch of reporting. We have all kinds of stuff coming. You and I will be back on Friday's show. Presumably talking about this, unless Sam Altman does something. You never know.
Speaker 5:
[40:56] What you've got here was the pre-reporting where we just reacted. Now we have all of our ideas. We have to go report them out.
Speaker 4:
[41:02] Now we're gonna go learn some stuff, and then we will come back on Friday's show with even more stuff. Thank you to everybody who's here in the chat. Thank you to all the folks on our team who got this done. Rude of anyone to put out news after 4 p.m. But I'm glad to be here with you. This is fun.
Speaker 5:
[41:18] Wait, wait, now we have a conspiracy theory. Someone says there's no YouTube chat on the Vision Pro. I don't know the answer, and I never will, so.
Speaker 14:
[41:26] I don't know what to tell you.
Speaker 5:
[41:30] Shout out to the people lying about being in the Vision Pro and the people who are in the Vision Pro.
Speaker 4:
[41:35] Add that to the reporting list of stories I have no interest in accomplishing. To all of you in the Vision Pro, we love you. Nilay, thank you. It's good to see you, buddy.
Speaker 5:
[41:44] Good to see you, man.
Speaker 4:
[41:45] That's it. That's The Vergecast. Rock and roll.