Apple New CEO Ternus Puts Focus Back on Design

Let's get right to the design bit. Um, you know, is that something you expected of the areas where John Turner would say, okay, I'm going to focus here rather than let other executives do that, that area. Yeah, very much so. Uh, I expected this. The reason is that Apple doesn't have a chief design officer or ahead of design at this point. That's a position that was never really filled since the departure of Jony Ive in 2019. They have a head of industrial design, Molly Anderson, and they have a head of user interface design that's now Steve LeMay. And the two of them worked, uh, together, and they've been reporting the Turners for quite some time. But now that it's a CEO, he's spending a lot of time in the design studio, part of both industrial design and human interface design, uh, working closely with the leadership team and the designers there. Uh, and this is a big change for Apple in terms of the CEO participating in the design process. That's something that Tim Cook really never got involved in. I mean, I'm told that they'd be lucky to see him in there for a month. Uh, for an hour a month. He would come in for the quarterly reviews, but definitely not in the thick of things. Turn us, on the other hand, is trying to get his hands dirty with everything going on in the design world. So how does this, um, show up? You know, we talked about a wave of new products. Are there specific lines where John Turner's, like in the first instance is saying, okay, this is where I'm going to have my my product expertise come into play? Oh, it's very much to be seen, right? I mean, the design process, the product development process, uh, these are things that could take three, 5 or 7 years, depending on the product. Uh, so he's working on very much longer term stuff. You know, the design team, he has been part of the engineering process obviously, for for decades at this point. He's been in the thick of things there. But carrying that over to the CEO role is quite notable. It's different from how he's handling things like finances, operations and sales. He's essentially taking the opposite approach to cook. And each of these, you know, CEOs are spending their time where they can have the most value, which is what cook told us to do. Uh, Mark, you've launched the power um, podcast. Some people call it pop. I don't know that that's for you, but what's it been like? I mean, to me, the reception seems just incredible. Yeah, we were ranked pretty much immediately in the top five. Top ten on at least Apple Podcasts for the technology, for the technology section and the top charts. So it seems to be resonating so far. People are really enjoying it. Uh, to be clear, this is separate from the newsletter. It's the newsletter continues. The Power On podcast is its own thing. Uh, we record every week. We air every Thursday. Uh, this week's episode, we're going to go deeper into this is impact on Apple. The changes he's making, uh, will go deeper on the Vision Pro. And then next week, of course, we'll be giving our impressions for everything. Apple introduces, uh, at its big smart home launch. So looking forward to these next two episodes and beyond.