Apple's New Leader Faces Biggest Challenge: What Comes After the iPhone?

Apple has a new leader. John Ternus, who took over as CEO from Tim Cook just weeks ago, just held his first major product launch—introducing the iPhone Duo, Apple's first foldable phone. But this isn't really a story about a new phone. It's a story about whether a new CEO can chart a different course for one of the world's most powerful companies.

For the past few years, Apple has been trying to figure out artificial intelligence (AI)—technology that can understand and respond to human language and requests). Under Tim Cook, Apple tried to "own and control" AI the way it owns the chip that powers iPhones. That didn't work. So Apple ended up partnering with Google to use Google's AI technology instead. Now, under Ternus, Apple is betting on a different strategy: it's building AI features (called "Apple Intelligence") into its devices and letting other companies handle the heavy lifting behind the scenes.

The real question is what comes next. Cook had three big ideas for what could replace the iPhone as Apple's centerpiece product: the Apple Watch (which eventually succeeded), the Vision Pro (which failed badly), and a self-driving car project (which was abandoned). None of them became Apple's next big thing. Now Ternus has a few years to figure out what Apple's future actually looks like—whether that's AI-powered glasses, a home robot, or something nobody has thought of yet. That's his real job. The iPhone Duo is just the warm-up act.