… It's this incredible, organic kind of transfer of Apple’s values.” Tim Cook did a fantastic job as Apple’s CEO, but left hanging how the company would dominate in the AI era. That’s John Ternus’s job. The clock is ticking. This is an edition of Steven Levy’s Backchannel newsletter. …
… Cook joined Apple in 1998, hired directly by Steve Jobs to be the company’s head of global operations. The now-65-year-old maintained a close working relationship and friendship with Jobs, and when the latter stepped down in August 2011—and died two months later—Cook was his natural successor. …
Rather than join the crowded trek down memory lane, I asked Apple to do what Jobs suggested—look forward. What does Apple want to happen in its next 50 years? …
… As the analyst Ben Thompson points out, some of the foundation-laying work for Apple’s services predated Cook’s term as CEO. The App Store launched in 2008, the year after Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, and it was Jobs’ foresight to charge up to a 30 percent “tax” on paid apps and in-app purchases. …
… Further complicating the rollout was the way Apple stores had altered their hiring and staffing over the years. Under Steve Jobs, Apple had prided itself on having well-staffed stores with highly trained employees. …
… This is an edition of Steven Levy’s Backchannel newsletter. …
… A lot of the time, these systems make mistakes that cost people jobs. …
… In 1990, Porat and Apple CEO John Sculley agreed that Apple would invest and take a board seat, but the project would spin out as a separate company and start courting partners. …
… So Apple never made a search engine, right? Search is one of the biggest businesses in the world. Apple never made a search engine, but Google pays Apple billions of dollars to be the primary search engine on the iPhone. …