Today is Cook's last day as CEO!

  It's the first time in the history of the world.

August 31 is Cook's last day as CEO!

From tomorrow, Apple will be hosting the John Ternus era.

Tenus, a 51-year-old hardware engineer, has officially grabbed the whip of the nearly 5 trillion-dollar "super empire".

This epic crossover has been in preparation for two years.

The moment Cook actually stepped down from the CEO's office, an era really ended.

In August 2011, Cook took Apple from Jobs. Less than two months later, Jobs left.

At the time, the biggest concern outside was whether Apple would still be an Apple without Jobs.

However, today, 15 years later, Cook delivers the perfect answer to a volume of global business history.

He didn't become the "second job" but chose a different path.

After his appointment, Cook first established Apple's core team, allowing the Jobs-era executive to remain in office.

The company then launched its most familiar "operating capabilities" globally, turning Apple into a precise and efficient "printing machine".

Jobs left behind products that changed the world, and Cook sent them around the world.

In 15 years, Apple's annual revenues have ranged from $108 billion to over $41 billion, with a market capitalization of about $350 billion to over $4 trillion.

The service business has grown from about $9 billion a year to a new pillar of over $100 billion.

The iPhone is still at the center, with Apple Watch, AirPods and service businesses enriching Apple's revenue structure.

Self-development of the chip has allowed Apple to take over the technological base of its products.

In the meantime, Cook did not create another era-splitting item, the iPhone.

But he made the AirPods and Apple Watch a best-seller and successfully launched Apple Pay and Apple Music.

This has transformed Apple from a purely "hardware device maker" to an "ecological empire" with a very high user density.

Of course, it's not that we don't regret it.

The HomePod speaker never caught fire; it took a decade to burn billions of dollars worth of self-driving car projects and was shut down by him in 2024.

He also expressed hope for the Vision Pro title, which he had hoped would become a box office success, but its commercial performance remains bleak.

This is Cook's 15th year in an individual audition at Apple.

Interestingly, 65-year-old Cook did not really "go away" this time, and he will remain Apple's "executive chairman".

In the future, he will also maintain relations with the government, making Apple's affairs a "first priority".

However, the AI tests of the Cook era, which had not yet been completed, are now all over Tennis' shoulders.

Since joining Apple in 2001, Tnus has spent 25 years working in the field of hardware engineering.

From being a design engineer for a Mac, to taking over the iPad, AirPods, iPhone, to dominating the entire hardware engineering department, he is a typical "Apple manufacturer".

The "first mission" after Tennis took office was clear: to really put AI into Apple's products.

I must admit that in the last three years, Apple has clearly fallen behind.

After ChatGPT ignited the heat of AI at the end of 2022, Apple reacted slowly: it tried its own big models, high-priced miners, looking for acquisition targets everywhere.

However, Apple's intelligence performance did not live up to expectations, and Siri upgrades have been delayed several times.

After the failure of the self-developed model, Apple turned to Google's Gemini for the new Siri, and the team's major adjustments led to the loss of AI talent.

This is a bunch of "dirty stuff" waiting for Tennis to pick it up.

The real test is this September, when the WWDC is imminent.

The new Siri AI is going to go live on a massive scale, and it's going to be hard on ChatGPT.

In the future, Apple also wants to earn revenue through subscriptions or third-party applications.

But before they talk about the business model, they have to solve the most basic problem: convince people that Siri is really useful.

Tennis's solution is very clear: allowing AI to perceive and interact with the environment, and then installing the capabilities into Apple's best hardware.

Internal planning, camera AirPods can understand the surrounding objects and scenes; smart glasses can bring Siri from the phone to the user's eyes; smart home screens can recognize speakers.

If successful, AI will become the systemic ability to penetrate iPhones, headphones, glasses and home devices.

In addition, AI will also enter the inside of Apple.

Tennis also launched an AI platform to accelerate product development, hardware testing and reliability verification.

He attempted to make AI the "super brain" of Apple engineers by absorbing lessons from past product experiences to solve the technical dead end of new product research and development.

Apple's AI battlefield, divided into two lines

Additionally, iPhone, AirPods, glasses and home appliances have new sensory capabilities.

In-house, AI shortened R&D cycles to improve internal development efficiency.

Tennis takes over, and there is another problem that is causing him headaches: management.

The two started off slightly differently than when Cook took turns that year.

Fifteen years ago, Cook inherited a year-old team of starving executives who were extremely loyal to the company.

Now, let's look at what Tennis has taken over from a group that has dominated Apple's corporate culture for decades, but is now in its 60s and has amassed a staggering amount of wealth over the course of its tenure.

According to internal sources, within the next few years, half of Apple's executive team may choose to leave.

One of the most important, the soul of the hardware and chip team, Johny Srouji, is most likely to leave within a year or two of a smooth connection.

In addition, marketing, service and retail executives have been with the company for almost 40 years and are about to retire.

Tennis had to take shifts and exchange blood for the aging executive team.

The most anticipated event is the upcoming Apple Autumn launch.

This autumn's new lineup is a long-running, self-directed series of "ambitious works".

Apple's first folding-screen iPhone is about to be officially unveiled.

The first folding iPhone will be the most powerful AI-concentrated product

At WWDC26, Siri AI, which made its first appearance, is completely different from the current generation of Siri, and features:

• Personal ContextYou can find information from emails, text messages, photos, etc.

• Screen perceptionYou know what you're looking at right now;

• AppOperational capabilitiesIt can be used to execute actions directly across applications.

• Calling on network knowledge to answer real-time questions

For example, if you're booking a hotel, you can ask Siri directly: How far is this hotel from where I'm meeting this afternoon?

It can be combined with screen content, calendar, and email addresses to continue processing. Apple even made Siri a standalone app to save and continue previous AI conversations.

Another, which may be easily overlooked, but technically important.

It is reported that the folding iPhone will be equipped with 12GB of RAM, which can run Apple's most powerful end-to-end AI model.

It is also the only one capable of completing advanced capabilities to run Siri AI, such as more accurate voice transcription, and more sophisticated Siri voice performance control.

Not only that, the first folding iPhone will also be an "AI visual desktop".

Siri AI is installed directly into the camera, takes pictures of the real world, understands objects, words, food, etc., and then continues to perform operations.

At the same time, it can understand images and text on the screen, recognize food nutrition information, search for items in front of it, understand the text on the screen, etc.

This ability has a natural advantage when it comes to folding screens:

Put the image/PDF/web page on the left and let Siri understand, summarize, search, execute directly on the right.

In fact, the AI logic is getting closer and closer to the iPad.

The upcoming folding screen is likely to be the most complete AI-enabled iPhone of Apple's generation.

On September 9, Apple officially opened its annual autumn launch of new products.

Cook may sit in the front row, but he will no longer be the main character.

Tennis will stand alone in the spotlight to show the world Apple's new answer to the AI age.

Cooke's Odyssey is on shore, while Tennis's AI expedition is just beginning to flute.