This Is My Last

John Ternus and His Human and Personal Thing

Steven Levy, Wired, interviewed John Ternus, the new CEO of Apple:

“Everyone has an opinion—I really like where we’re at,” he said. “I would hope people recognize that the work we do is building incredible products that make their lives better. We’re absolutely going to leverage AI to do that. We don't want to ship AI for AI's sake. When we're doing it right, people won’t have to think about whether it was AI that made this happen or more traditional software. What matters is, did we build something that they really love?”

That assumes that AI, as powerful as it is, will wind up as a “normal” technology, organically integrated into our current gadget-sphere. Another school of thought is that AI is an apocalyptic disruptor that will shred the current ecosystem. In that vision, all those cool apps Apple supports will be subsumed by AI-concocted agents generated from prompts, or even autonomously. Ternus doesn’t buy that scenario. “That could make life really easy, I suppose, but the creation of products is a deeply human and personal thing, something that we love to do,” he said.

The current round of Apple products, from devices to operating systems, do emphasis AI, a lot. I hope next year's releases -- say, starting from WWDC 27 -- there will be minimal mention of AI, and more about how new technologies will benefit customers and developers. (I am assuming Apple will still need to talk about AI on the next round of non-Pro launches in Spring 27.)

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