Apple’s new CEO is reviving a Steve Jobs strategy from 25 years ago

Apple CEO John Ternus wants you to cognize that the iPhone isn’t going anywhere.

Ternus threw his value down the venerable instrumentality connected Wednesday during his archetypal keynote arsenic CEO, placing it firmly astatine the halfway of Apple’s merchandise strategy for the AI era.

“There’s nary merchandise successful the satellite amended designed to beryllium your intelligent idiosyncratic hub than iPhone,” helium said. 

This contrasts with the attack taken by erstwhile CEO Tim Cook, who tried clip and again to person Wall Street that Apple was much than conscionable the iPhone.

Ternus’ transportation is besides a rebuttal to pundits who person precocious formed uncertainty connected the iPhone. “The smartphone’s days are numbered,” said one headline. “The Tim Cook epoch is coming to a adjacent with an existential situation for Apple: figuring retired what comes aft the iPhone,” said another article.

But it’s not conscionable astir the hardware. Ternus has enactment the iPhone astatine the halfway of his “intelligent idiosyncratic assistant” strategy, a imaginativeness that could specify the institution for years to come. Steve Jobs did thing akin successful 2001 with the Mac, little than 10 months earlier helium announced the iPod.

At the time, galore observers thought the PC’s days were numbered. At a Macworld New York keynote, Jobs called retired bearish quotes from manufacture wonks similar Walt Mossberg and the leaders of Compaq and Gateway. 

“This is what everyone other is telling us. That our PC is waning if not the spread being dug,” Jobs said astatine the time, pointing astatine a tombstone for the “Beloved PC” connected the surface down him. “We don’t deliberation the PC is dying astatine all. We don’t deliberation the PC is moving distant from the halfway astatine all. We deliberation it’s evolving, conscionable similar it has since it was invented.”

“We deliberation the PC is connected the threshold of entering its 3rd large age,” Jobs added, a prediction driven by the proliferation of integer devices astatine the time, including camcorders, integer cameras, and DVD players.

The Mac would signifier the halfway of a “digital hub” that would link these disparate devices and, successful Jobs’ words, “add value” to each of them.

Later that year, Jobs pulled the iPod retired of his pocket, a instrumentality seemingly developed to reply the question, “Why bash you inactive request a PC?” The instrumentality turned retired to beryllium an tremendous hit, driving Apple’s profits 4th aft 4th and yet helping pb to the improvement of the iPhone.

Today, with the iPhone connected the cusp of its 20^th anniversary, Ternus is facing a mentation of the aforesaid question Jobs took connected successful 2001. We don’t cognize if Ternus is softly sitting connected an iPod-like product, 1 that volition unafraid the iPhone’s presumption a Apple’s hub for years to come. But helium is firmly rebutting the thought that the iPhone is past its prime.

“If you were designing the perfect mentation of this hub from scratch, however would you bash it?” Ternus asked, earlier listing the ingredients: a almighty processor, high-resolution cameras, persistent networking, and on-device AI.

It helps that the iPhone is one of the astir powerful idiosyncratic computing devices around, giving it an borderline successful the compute-hungry AI era. Its portability and adaptability marque it, for galore people, the lone computing instrumentality they need. Even among those who ain laptops and iPads, the iPhone is often the 1 instrumentality they can’t unrecorded without. Plenty of radical permission location without their laptops. Almost nary 1 leaves without their phones.

That operation of powerfulness and portability has fixed Apple a privileged presumption successful the AI world. Other companies person attempted to unseat the iPhone with each mode of wearable devices, but nary person succeeded.

Instead of sidelining the iPhone successful favour of the adjacent flashy thing, Ternus is leaning into it instead. In a way, he’s bringing Apple astir to what the remainder of america already know: The iPhone is beauteous great, and possibly we don’t request to regenerate it with thing else. Yet.