Source: BIT Securities
On September 1, Apple marked a highly symbolic day: Tim Cook’s 15-year term as CEO officially came to an end, and John Ternus, who leads the hardware business, took over the same day.
In today’s AI-crazy era, after Ternus took office, the central question he faced was hardly a surprise—how to regain competitive advantage in the AI era with this consumer electronics giant that built its strength on hardware.
1. Apple, lukewarm and steady, was suddenly “purchased in bulk” by OpenAI
In this wave of AI excitement, Apple’s stock performance has been steady and conventional—it hasn’t fallen behind, but it also hasn’t exactly been a star player.
However, a newly revealed piece of news may allow Apple to once again get a seat at the AI table: OpenAI has already purchased tens of thousands of screenless, keyboardless Mac mini and Mac Studio machines to strengthen reinforcement learning training and the development of AI agents in the "computer operations" category. Anthropic is also renting Mac compute power at scale through AWS.
Why are AI companies targeting Mac one after another? The answer lies in Apple’s chip architecture. Apple chips use a unified memory architecture, allowing them to directly load quantized models with billions—even over a trillion—of parameters. There’s no need to shuffle data back and forth between video memory and system memory the way Nvidia GPUs do. For those running large models, what is saved is not only time, but real money as well.
II. The earnings report has already moved first: Mac has become Apple’s fastest-growing hardware
A surge in enterprise demand is reflected directly in the numbers. In the most recent quarter, Mac revenue rose nearly 29% year over year to $10.3 billion, making it Apple’s fastest-growing hardware product line.
Even more convincing signals come from competitors: within Nvidia, Apple has already been viewed as the biggest competitive threat in the local AI market. Its earlier DGX Spark, with its form factor, is basically identical to a Mac mini—Nvidia has effectively "paid tribute" to it, and that in itself is a kind of status credential.
III. The new boss, Ternus: a product-focused engineer who rose from working on the Mac
So what’s the background of Apple’s brand-new successor at this critical moment—Ternus? In fact, Ternus has already been at Apple for 25 years. He started as a Mac engineer, went on to lead iPad, AirPods, and iPhone, and ultimately took charge of the entire hardware engineering system—an Apple-insider widely recognized hardware expert.
From the moment he took office, the tests were already lined up: the iPhone product launch event in September, as well as the full-scale deployment of the new Siri AI.
And the new product pipeline he is driving is nothing short of ambitious: this coming fall, Apple is set to launch a foldable iPhone, as well as an intelligent display device that can recognize the speaker and personalize content delivery accordingly. Whether these products can live up to their promises will directly determine whether Apple can hold its ground in the AI hardware race.
IV. The board of directors’ unspoken message: Apple doesn’t lack money—it lacks innovation for its next product.
Looking back at this leadership change, the candidate itself has been sending signals.
Over the past decade or more, the thing Apple has been best at is operations, supply chain, the ecosystem, and making money. But in the AI era, what Apple truly lacks is neither money nor users, but "the next round of product innovation." Therefore, the board didn’t choose a finance-oriented CEO; instead, it handed the baton to a product-focused engineer from a mechanical engineering background who has spent 25 years honing hardware expertise.
In the short term, replacing the CEO has limited impact on the stock price, because Cook will continue as executive chairman, so Apple will not face a power vacuum. What truly determines Apple’s future valuation is not whether the next-generation iPhone sells a few million more units, but whether Apple can find a new entry point again in the AI era. In the next 3 to 5 years, Apple’s biggest bet may no longer be the iPhone, but the combination of "AI + chips + a new hardware entry point."
V. Closing words
Fifteen years ago, Cook took over Apple from Jobs and used operations and the supply chain to push the company to the top of global market capitalization. Fifteen years later, the board hands the scepter to a hardware engineer—an open admission that the windfall of the "operations era" is over, and Apple must return to the "product innovation era."
OpenAI is scooping up Mac mini, and Nvidia is listing Apple as its top local AI rival—these signals show that Apple has actually always kept an entry ticket for the AI era in its hands: the chip with a unified memory architecture. What it lacked in the past was product imagination to put that ticket to use.
Whether Ternus can make up for this lesson will be clear at the fall keynote soon, and the next 3 to 5 years will further prove it.
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