TBPN - Full Interview: Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman on Apple’s AI Stack, Anthropic, and the Future of Siri

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

This is our full interview with Bloomberg’s Managing Editor, Mark Gurman, recorded live on TBPN.TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to podcast platforms immediately after.Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://Ramp.comAppLovin - https://axon.aiCognition - https://cognition.aiConsole - https://console.comCrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.comElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.ioFigma - https://figma.comFin - https://fin.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comGraphite - https://graphite.comGusto - https://gusto.com/tbpnLabelbox - https://labelbox.comLambda - https://lambda.aiLinear - https://linear.appMongoDB - https://mongodb.comNYSE - https://nyse.comOkta - https://www.okta.comPhantom - https://phantom.com/cashPlaid - https://plaid.comPublic - https://public.comRailway - https://railway.comRamp - https://ramp.comRestream - https://restream.ioSentry - https://sentry.ioShopify - https://shopify.comTurbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comVanta - https://vanta.comVibe - https://vibe.coSentry - https://sentry.ioCisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.htmlFollow TBPN:https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

And without further ado, we have Mark German. The German, manager, managing editor of Bloomberg in the Ultradome. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking a time. Come on down. Yeah, right here. We'll have this microphone for you. You have a Diet Coke, so you're locked in.

How have you been? How's your new year going so far? Oh, freaking great. Yeah? Yeah, had a, my wife and I had a baby at the end of the last year. Gong, gong, gong. I need to get one of those things that you guys make on the Twitter and just me. The card.

Baby. Baby. We're happy to do that. We're happy to do it. We never, we never, yeah, we never, we never know. Some people want to be, you know, more low-key about it. Oh, I am low-key about it. I just figured, you know, but how do you rate parenthood?

How does it feel being in it versus, you know, all the expectations that people have? It's just taking care of this. individual and they're being so reliant on us and getting to teach them but uh shout out to my wife for being the one really pulling the strings there and taking care so it's great anything like i feel like reporting in parenthood are especially hard to balance in some ways still early well i would yeah no i would i would just like obviously it's completely possible and you're clearly doing fine, but the nature of the work means that, like, a story is happening and you want to be the first to provide the best coverage, and sometimes, you know, babies

crying. Yeah. And you might not be able to pick up the phone. But you get through. You know what? People have been hearing crying babies over the phone for, uh, for, for forever. So they'll have to deal with it. I just can't wait until we go on an airplane.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I already told my wife, like, yeah, you know, we're going to get, like, bam. for American Airlines. No, I've said this on the show before. Like, the funniest thing is growing up, I assume that when a baby was crying on the airplane, it means that the parents were bad parents.

Like, they were doing something wrong. Totally, totally. And in reality, babies just cry for a million reasons, and it's totally possible that there's no solution sometimes. I just need to all sleep. Yeah, I saw, like, an Instagram reel of a mother talking about her kid and the kid was crying in the background. I was like, why would you take advice from her?

Like, that's such a bad mom. Yeah, it has nothing to do with that. And then it's not even at all. It's like, now it's like, baby's always crying. It's crazy. They're hungry. They have gas. They don't like the sweater they're wearing.

There's a million reasons. You know, they didn't like my article. Who knows? But anyways. Let's talk about Apple. Let's talk about Apple. I mean, we've been talking about new Siri, expectations there. The big news yesterday was Claudebot.

Have you been, do you think there's anything about, how have you been processing the Claudebot now Mold Bot? now MaltBot story, what's possible there, expectations around AI assistance feel sky high in the open source community. What do you, do you think, like, anyone at Apple's, like, updating on Claudebot and MoldBot and what's possible? Well, let me just take a step. Please, yeah, yeah. You know, with Apple and AI. Yeah. So in 20, what is it, 2018, they hired John, Gene Andrea. He was this high flyer at Google. He ran AI in search. And Apple thought they had a coup here. Apple thought they would hire this guy and really just hit the ground running and be at the forefront of artificial

intelligence. Just seven years earlier, they announced Siri. In 2011, there was absolutely nothing like it. It was breakthrough. But then it just became utter junk, like Google Assistant lapped it, Alexa lapped it. So they thought they were going to bring this guy in and it'd be a game changer. Turns out, and maybe this will be Tim Cook's fade accompli, but this was the biggest mistake this hire of Tim Cook's tenure, I think it's easy to say. Apple is so behind an AI, there's been so much ink spilled on this and so many conversations on this, and I've written about it and talked about it half a million times. I think it does, you haven't even scratched the surface about how big of a problem this is for Apple, right? They've completely screwed up AI in every

which way, and it comes down to just hiring the wrong people and entrusting the wrong people. And entrusting the wrong people. But is it a do nothing win scenario? Because I think we're seeing a situation now where the Mac Mini might end up selling out everywhere. Stock seems fine. Are you seeing like financial? That's the problem. When you've had no real negative hit, it's hard to go wartime. And acknowledge that there is a failure because all the numbers are holding. But it is, it is war time. Yeah. The numbers are great. Tomorrow, They might report their first $135 billion to $140 billion quarter, right? Let's go.

Like, I don't, you know, the problem is how can you put $140 billion and Tim Cook needs to go retire in the same sentence? Yeah, exactly. It doesn't make sense. But when you think about the long term, you think about the future, these things are going to need to get rectified. And I guess the good news is they are on a path to rectifying it to some. extent. This Google Gemini deal is a breakthrough for Apple. It's embarrassing. I mean, it's absolutely crazy that... You poached their guy, and then years later, you're paying them billions. He screws you up, okay? You pay him 25 million a year for eight years, right? And then now you're

paying basically 4x that, 8x that, maybe a little bit more, in order to get, you know, the new good stuff. And so they'll announce a new series next month. The thing with this new series is, It's basically a replay of everything they announced in June 2024. So it's basically everything they announced two years ago coming very late. Things like using what's on your screen to fulfill, surrey queries, being able to control your apps. And then in June is when the good stuff launches. That's when Apple launches its first chatbot. It's interesting because they've spent the last two years saying nobody likes chatbots.

Everyone hates chat GPT. It's terrible. It's running the world. Okay, then you have chat chagipt with nearly a billion, right, active users. They're like, okay, we kind of got to do this or work. screwed, so they're doing it. Yeah. And it's actually going to run on Google servers,

Google Cloud Platform, Google TPUs. This is great for Google too. And I think some people at Apple think this is going to be like a short-term thing. You know, we're going to partner with Google until we get our act together. No. I definitely think that this is more of a long-term play unless these

models continue to get commoditized, which they will eventually, but this is not a 12, 24, 36-month thing. This is This is longer term, I think, than people expect. And Apple can't just go wrap Lama because of the terms of service that META's put that around. They said you can't use the Lama. Well, I don't think they want to use Lama. I don't think they want to work with META.

So there aren't that many games in TAC. Well, let's take a step back here. So they're using Google in the U.S., right? But they're going to have to do something in China. Okay. And so you'll see them use a combination of Alibaba, and I think it's Waybo or Tencent or one of those, different AIs for different features.

So they'll use them. And just because they're partnering with Google Gemini on Siri in this chatbot doesn't mean they're not using other players. There's a lot of open AI and a lot of applications. They launched their creative cloud competitor today, and a lot of those AI features are powered by ChatGPT, like some image generation stuff. I still think on an image generation,

side, you're getting a little bit better on Open AI than you're getting from Google. And then a lot of stuff internally. Like Apple runs on Anthropic at this point. Anthropic is powering a lot of the stuff Apple's doing internally in terms of product development, a lot of their internal tools. So that's a big one to watch. They have custom versions of Claude running on their own servers internally too, because this Google deal, this just came together a few months ago.

they were not going to use Google. Apple actually was going to rebuild Siri around Claude. But Anthropic, they were holding them over a barrel. They wanted a crap ton of money from them, several billion dollars a year, and at a price that doubled on an annual basis as well for the next three years or so, from what I understand. At the time, Google was really an afterthought because they were in the middle of the trial with the Department of Justice. And then for some reason, the judge ruled that Apple and Google's deal was kosher, even though everyone knows it's a huge issue and our monopoly and all that. I'm not here to be a judge. I write.

I don't make judgments for legal proceedings. But anyways, Apple and Google get off scot-free. They can do whatever they want now. And, you know, they're not being held back at all. And then obviously, Open AI, that is a real firestorm for Apple right now. like OpenAI, obviously, they're working on these AirPods competitors, the Chad GPT built in, Sweet P, Sweet P, Johnny Ive is, you know, running the show and design there. That's a big freaking deal.

Okay, he rated the whole design team, all of the Apple designers that were there under Johnny Ive, not all of them, 95% of them are gone. You know, a ton of them are now working at Love From and Open AI and other companies. Some of them have retired. But the crux of it is, like, how do you partner with a company that's, trying to put you out of business, right? So there's no way that they were going to work with with OpenAI, no matter how good the thing. What do you think about some of the projections that you've seen or kind of estimates around, I forget, was it Foxcon was saying like preparing Yeah, preparing to be able to produce something like that in the first year. It feels like a massive

number, but at the same time you have a billion users. You know. Talking about the Open AI earbuds. sweet you know it's so interesting and and one more thing there yeah the earbuds the benefit of them versus some of these other AI hardware is like if you can just take calls and listen to music like already you have some functionality that people are using all day long sure sure so it's not the same as like wearing a pendant or having some other little gadget that like actually serves no real use case or at least not a powerful use case if I can just listen to calls or sorry take calls listen to music, at least there's like some like base level functionality and then you layer on the AI and maybe it turns into this amazing, you know, super differentiated experience.

I just don't see it. I just don't see them selling 45 million units. I just don't see it being a success. The barrier to entry for a new hardware company, as you know, is extremely high. Like can you even think of one hardware company that just came into being and became an immediate success? Like, I just don't see it. And I also think the reason they're doing earbuds is because it's more low-hanging fruit, to your point, and it's easier to accomplish. Isn't not what they want it to do. What Open AI wanted to do is they wanted to create an iPhone killer. Instead, now they're trying to create an AirPods killer, and I don't think they're going to

be able to accomplish that. Will they look nicer than the AirPods? Probably. Will they have better AI than the AirPods? That's an open question, right? What stops Apple from expanding this Gemini deal to its AirPods and just basically adding a bunch of AI functionality to the AirPods? They have very fast processors, very tight iPhone integration.

Apple can replicate whatever OpenAI is going to do pretty quickly by relying on Google and Gemini and whatever they can cook up functionality-wise there. Do you think that AI specifically products that we had the creator of MaltBot on yesterday, and he was saying, like, there's so many applications, and he was referencing, like, My Fitness Pal. Do I really need My Fitness Pal if I can just take a picture and just send it in? to my agent and it'll track it. And so what I was thinking there is like, does that make the App Store broadly,

potentially less of a hurdle with OpenAI as launching, eventually launches a new phone and they have a new OS and they don't have an app store, they don't have an app store at day one. It's the equivalence of apps on the fly. Well, if you ask me, you know, we're already in the territory where iOS and the app store are legacy features, right?

Like the App Store is a legacy world. the iOS user experience, the MacOS user experience where you're jumping between applications, where you're going into something to get information, where you're going back to your home screen and launch another app. Apps are the past. AI agents are already here, and that's the move forward. And whenever OpenAI comes out with a phone,

and I do eventually anticipate them coming out with a phone. And when I say phone, I'm not talking necessarily about something you put to your ear like a classic phone, like an iPhone, I'm talking about, I feel like people are always going to have some sort of slab in their pocket, right? Yeah. Because it's convenient. You get the display. You get the sensors.

You get the battery. You get the cameras. It's not a replicable experience, no matter how many different gadgets you want to put on your body. Maybe you make a banana. Like a plastic banana. Smart banana. That would be fun. Yeah.

So, yeah, AI agents are where the world is going. And I totally expect Apple to move in this direction. This new Siri, Campo, that they're launching at the end of this. here, that is a huge step towards the AI agentification of different features on the phone. And being able to, for instance, tell your phone, pull up this photo that I took at the studio, find photos where I have bottles of water and remove the bottle of water from the photo and email or to text it to Mark, right? the AI agentification of iOS is happening.

Sure. Yeah, and theoretically, Siri should have killed, like, the weather app a long time ago. Yeah. Because I don't, like, when you think about, like, if you're just going to navigate to the weather app and you're traveling somewhere and you're like, oh, where is this city? Oh, I don't have it saved. I'm going to search and add it. And then you're, like, finally looking at it, and it should just be a prompt that you're firing.

But then when you try and click a level deeper, in the current Siri experience, you just can't get that. That is the big problem with Siri. and the big difference from ChatGPT and Gemini is it has the going a level deeper problem. There's no back and forth. It forgets context very easily. It has no memory. It doesn't have that tight integration with applications

because the app developers, they know Siri is so terrible. Here's a question. So what if I told you that you could call an Uber with Siri, right? Like you guys probably know that, but does anyone use it? I don't have the data, but I can tell you that they announced support for that

and they actually rolled out support for that? No, 10 years ago. 10 years ago. Okay? It doesn't work because nobody uses it because it's too cumbersome. Totally. Okay? Like, I'm very tech forward.

As anyone watching this probably knows. You know, it's right up my alley to have Siri call my Uber for me. But like, I've never done it because you know what? I don't freaking trust it. Yep. It's not, I don't think it's going to work. And it's just going to be a time suck. And people didn't trust chat GPT with 3.5, but now on 5.2 pro.

I would trust Chad GPT with ordering an Uber. I would trust Chad GPT with my life. But Siri? Okay, so on the Siri rollout, it seems like there's a couple milestones that we're going to be tracking throughout this year. When will, when do you think I'll be able to go to Siri and just say a general, Googleable question, you know, give me the history of the Roman Empire? The type of thing that any LLM can just pull up a couple paragraphs on, but, current Siri does not have that ability.

Okay, I can't tell you that you're going to be able to do it. I can tell you that you're supposed to be able to do it. How's that? I'll speak. I'll speak. I just mean, is that, like, what's the goal? No, no, I just mean like there's knowledge retrieval. End of March. And then there's, and then there's like agentification, like making, interacting with the apps, doing all the things like pulling what's in your camera roll together with your

iMessage and all of that. End of March. And that feels harder for both of those end of March. They're supposed to be end of March. Okay. But the latter. in terms of the app manipulation and the AI agent, that's going to be split probably between hard.

Because that seems harder than just integrate Gemini and just give people the Gemini answers when they ask Siri for a question. You know, it's so funny. I look back to WWC 2024, and obviously I made a big deal about all the delays because, of course, I did. But then you think about it, it's like,

was anyone to use any of these features anyways? Like, we're talking about a few features that were delayed, and you look back at the announcement of these features at WWC 2020. 24. It's like Apple totally downplayed them too. They gave a few cool demos, but it's like, this is some game-changing stuff if it's marketed correctly. So not only did they pre-announce it, not only did they delay it, but like they didn't even market what they had in the hand correctly, which I guess in hindsight, like, you should have realized that it wasn't that

compelling or ready to go if they weren't going to market it. Because I'm telling you, they can market anything. How does, how do you see search fitting into Siri? Because so much of what people are using LLMs for is search now and you're seeing more commerce integrations and I've always thought the labs like obsession with the browser was interesting because in many ways like I feel like using LLMs it already feels like you're using a browser it's just kind of a new experience and a big question is like okay so Google's powering the new Siri what happens when people start doing searches with high intent in CIR?

Do you Google search anymore? I do. I don't. I specifically still Google search when doing like product research, shopping, et cetera. I don't. Do you? I still go to Google if it's something that I know is fastest in Google. So today I wanted to know what year the Avengers movie came out.

And I know that that's half a millisecond in Google. And I know that that's five seconds in any LLM. And so I'll Control T to go there. But for any level deeper, I also wanted to know about the VFX house that worked on it and what technology they used and when that happened, that was an LM query. Yeah. Yeah, I don't really use Google anymore. I have my action button on my phone sent to Chad GBT, and I'm just like living in Chad GPD.

Sure, sure, sure. You can't ask it the weather. Yeah. Can't ask it to do anything on your phone. Sure, sure. That's, I guess, the differentiator for what the new series is going to be. They've built a feature called World Knowledge Answers, it's the internal name, and it's basically a perplexity rip-off or, a web search rip-off and chat GPT,

which is to bullet out summaries and information and give you citations and context. Is it using Google directly for that, or is it some other? It's an Apple solution. Okay. It's an Apple solution. But what they've been trying to do now

is under the hood change that to the Gemini model. Again, all this stuff was supposed to come out. Because Gemini is very good at Google Search. Gemini is very good at Google Search, but there's no Google Services in this new Siri. It's literally a model. It's basically like they hired the Google deep mind team to develop the model to power its AI in Siri. Yeah, so I guess what I'm getting at is, is will I ever get, if I'm doing using Siri to research a product, will I ever get an ad powered by like an Apple ad network because it is a high intent search?

Like ever? Yeah. I think the end game for all these guys is to put ads in this stuff. Yeah. You know, one thing that I haven't talked about in a while... And that's just... And I just feel like that's been somewhat under-discussed because people are so obsessed with just make Siri work

that if it does end up working really well, then you would have effectively a search engine. Well, yeah, if it works... They have all the tools to do a search engine, and if it does work well, yeah, they'll probably eventually put ads in it. A couple things haven't discussed in a while. One, is they're, you know, working on a new Safari web browser, and you're going to see AI search at the forefront of that.

The other thing is the adsification, the advertisingification of the Apple operating systems. That starts this year. You're going to see them up the ad slots in the app store in search in search in particular. Give it up for more ads. Yeah, ads. Any sponsors we want to give a shout out to people over here?

And then... Don't tempt jump. I will do it. And then you're going to see ads and Apple Maps. Oh, interesting. You know? That's been one of the main differentiators in the different apps. Well, you know, it'll be all AI and it'll be targeted to based on things that you're searching.

Like, if you see a sushi restaurant, search for sushi, whatever, you may see some search results get elevated. It's kind of like what Yelp does. Yeah. Right. By the way, it's so funny on Siri. Like, there's this Japanese restaurant. the valley I like and it's named after a city in Japan or province in Japan. And it's like, take me to Chiba. Yeah. Right? And I've been, that's the name of the place.

Shout out to Chiba. Okay, boss, you're going to need to get in a boat. Oh my God. It's like, all immediately pops up 7,652 miles away. I'm like, I've been to this place 50 damn times. You should know by now. Talking about the restaurant, 20 miles away. Yep. Not the city. 8,000 miles away. That's great. It's really amazing. hiring, chartering an aircraft, sir. Yeah, I got a bunch of other stuff in the Apple ecosystem. First, Starlink is reportedly planning to integrate Apple's reportedly planning to integrate Starlink connectivity into the iPhone 18 Pro. How do you think about this?

You saw this stuff floating on Twitter the last couple days. There's been no reporting on this recently, by the way. This is another, see, this is one of the downsides of the AI. People just spew BS on Twitter. Oh, interesting. Okay. So Apple already does work with Starlink. Yeah.

You can hook in, if you have a T-Mobile iPhone, you can get on to Starlink. So that already exists. Yeah, I have, I've experienced, I think during the fires last year. So, no, all the cell service was down. I'm on Verizon. If you want satellite. I have satellite on the 17, but it's not, what? You don't want to be on Verizon.

I should get off of it. But it's not Starlink. It's the old network. On which, on the Verizon one? Yeah. You're talking about on the Apple network. Yeah, yeah. Like if I'm in an emergency situation,

I can get out like one text message. It's really, really slow. And it's clearly going with like, I think, Viasat. The Apple network is just super legacy. Yeah, it's just older. Yeah. They've got to strip that down and partner and rebuild or something.

Anyways, the iPhone 18 is going to have enhanced satellite connectivity. Sure. And they'll, you know, obviously work with Starlink and, you know, whoever, whoever. So that's coming. What else do we got on our plate? You want to talk about John Turnus?

Absolutely. Talk about Turner. Turn us around, John. Yes. John. Okay. Yes. So I have a bunch of questions.

Let's start with, like, how, what is going on behind the scenes of this campaign? It feels like there's potential. It feels like internally politics. There could be, like, people like pushing for him, pushing against him. There's this weird quote that keeps going out that people say he's never made a decision in his life. Everybody keeps making the most underhanded compliments that I've ever seen. Yeah? It's like, yeah, he's shipped a lot of products, but.

He's never had to make a hard decision. That's the one. Just wait for my profile in Bloomberg. You'll get the real story soon. Okay, fantastic. I'm not going to give it all away today. Of course. But I'm here for the company.

I appreciate it. Got to give the shout out. Stay tuned for the article. Of course. Subscribe to Power On. Yes. Of course. Tech bundle.

Yeah. That's great value. Okay. Turnus. He's 50. Everyone else in the Apple executive team, late 50s through their mid-60s, turning 66 this year in the case of Tim Cook.

Your Apple's board. You like continuity. You like an insider. You like people who know what they're doing. They've been there for a while. They know where the bodies are buried. Okay. These guys all have hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.

Yeah. At 50, he's the only one who is, if let's say Tim Cook hangs out another three to five years, you're not going to point another CEO who's 65, 70 years old. He's the only guy. Apple, they get vast majority of the revenue from hardware. he's the hardware guy. Have they screwed up any hardware since he's been in charge? No.

He's a steady hand. He knows what he's doing. He's really the only choice. There was this New York Times report a few weeks ago, basically saying that it could be Greg Jawswiak, could be Eddie Q, could be Dierdra O'Brien, could be Craig Federegi. It's for sure not going to be Craig.

It's not going to be Dierdra. It's not going to be Eddie. It's not going to be Jaws. The only category that makes sense is an operations person because you look at the current CEO, Tim, obviously, he comes out of the ops world. You look at the guy who would have been CEO if Tim Cook didn't stay so long. I'm not saying he shouldn't have stayed so long he's done. Obviously, a fantastic job for shareholders and the employees and what have you.

It would have been Jeff Williams. He was the COO. So Sabi Khan, he was named CEO a few months ago, but he's really been in that job for the last half a decade, I would say. So anyways, it'll be Ternis or Sabie or someone completely out of left field. I don't think this is imminent. So we'll see what ultimately happens, but all signs are treading towards Ternus. Everyone has an opinion that Ternus is going to be the next CEO.

Fine. I've been shouting this from rooftops the last two years, but no one has given evidence, like, what is this based on, right? Has there ever been a baton handoff? Is he getting more responsibility? Do they have a big baton? They don't have one of these. You know what?

You have white smoke coming out of... Sure. Well, actually, no, there's no smoke. There's no smoke. Very environmentally friendly. So, you know, maybe out of the parking garage. A white reflection out of the solar panels. Yeah.

Glint off the solar panels. Exactly. So what? You want evidence? You want to hear that he's been getting more responsibility? Okay. One, a few months ago, took full control of the Apple Watch engineering team that was co-run with the old COO until he retired.

Okay, there was something for you. when they started soft firing, the head of AI, the guy we were talking about earlier, they took the robotic stuff away from him. They gave that to Ternus. And then the real news, as I broke last week, is that even though on paper, Tim Cook is running the Apple design teams,

it's not, it's Ternus. He took over at the end of last year for a variety of reasons, but you look at who's run design at Apple over the course of history. well, like Steve Jobs, Tim Cook himself, between 15 and 17, Jeff Williams, who was the number two in Air Apparent for a long time, and then obviously all heard of Johnny Ive. Now you add John Ternis to that list.

It's a big sign. It's a big indicator because you look at what Apple is known for as a company and its design, right, that design function. And it's not just hardware, it's hardware and software that he's overseeing as the manager of both of those teams. So I would say that is your first piece of evidence that he's getting some more material. What does he have to do, since he's the hardware guy,

to communicate that he has a steady hand on the tiller as Apple transitions into the AI age? Like, the narrative is that they have delivered on hardware. They have not delivered on AI. No, they haven't. And so how is he going to communicate that he's forward thinking and can be the one to keep them on the cutting edge? Taking a step back, you think about, like, succession

at all of these big tech companies, right? like who's going to take over Google one day, who's going to take over Microsoft one day, who's going to take over Amazon one day, right? Like, it's probably going to be the AI guys at all of these companies, right? Apple doesn't really have an AI guy. Sure.

They're trying to make Craig Federigi the AI guy, but he's not CEO material. He's voices himself, so don't get mad at me, Craig. But, yeah, Ternis, can he become the AI guy at Apple? I think it's too early to tell, and I think that is a big question there. Like do you put a hardware person in charge of the AI era? People have been speculating that Apple would do some big M&A deal to bring some AI native talent in-house.

They wanted to buy perplexity. So the origin story, they were really talking about it. Like Eddie Q was seriously considering Adrian Preak, other head of Corp Development M&A reports to Tim Cook. They were looking at this pretty closely. Then they pulled out, why were they going to buy perplexity? to power the search stuff we were talking about earlier, became less important after the Google deal was about to live. And do you think they would have done it

if perplexity hadn't been marked up to oblivion? I think they would have done perplexity at a reasonable price. Apple doesn't overpay. Yeah, that's the thing, low single digit. I think they would have done it up to $5 or $6 billion. Yeah. Yeah, but like at this $1520, and then perplexity started, you know,

trying to say they're going to buy Google Chrome if it got divested and all that. And I think they would have done it if the Google search deal was torn apart. Yeah. In order to bring a search product to market faster. They like to buy companies to, I'm not trying to do Apple corporate speak here, but this is like legit. They buy companies to accelerate their roadmap. You'll hear Tim Cook use those exact words tomorrow, okay, by the way. But literally.

Tomorrow? Apple earnings. This guy. This guy. My God. Come on. Hey, head in the game. But is there specifically a deal that he'll be talking about tomorrow?

No. No, no, no, no, no. Like, he will be asked about it. I bet he'll mention the Gem and I think. Because he was asked that in the last earnings. And everyone was like, why haven't you done a mega deal? He says this every. Okay, so he just says this every.

It's just going to be more of the same. Got it. You know, what is fair to say is their pace of deal making has decelerated significantly. Interesting. Significantly. And so he will be, I mean, in the last earnings, he was sort of like managing that. saying like, oh, we're still doing deals, but we're selective, and we only do it to. He's like, well, they also don't care to announce, like, 95% of the deal.

Well, they're big enough. They have to. You know, like, Golden State Warriors, they want Yonis, but they don't want to make a big trade. They don't want to give them all their draft picks, right? They're like, yeah, the same with the Lakers. This is like my existential crisis. The Lakers, like, yeah, we'll trade the picks if the right guy becomes available. Yeah, and they know the right guy's not going to become available, right?

Just like Apple knows these companies are always going to be out of the price range they want to pay. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. The thing with Apple is, like, very frugal, money-wise, extremely frugal. The other thing is, is they've been burned countless times of the acquisitions. Like, that Beetz deal, terrible process for integrating that company. Well, and even then, I think it was like a 3x revenue multiple. Weren't they doing it?

It wasn't Beets doing like a billion dollars a year. Oh, from a financial standpoint, it was just like a home run. People criticized that deal, but they made it back in months. Oh, interesting. Oh, Beets? They made the money, but it was a nightmare from a... Yeah, from a... No, but it's worth...

It's worth noting because, like, even paying for perplexity at $5,6 billion, it's going to be years until you monetized that probably. Yeah, I mean, Beats was monetized from day one. Obviously, you're selling the headphones, which are terrible, by the way, but everyone loves them. And then Apple Music, you know, Beets started the whole subscription services business at Apple. And so if you look at it, Beats is one of the most wildly successful technology acquisitions of all time. And then you compare it to how much. criticism it got because it's oh Dr. Dre and Jimmy I mean whatever whatever whatever and the

headphones are crap you know what from a financial standpoint home run home run you know but integrating into Apple's culture is not easy yeah speaking of hardware what what's going on with the robotic arm that will live in your kitchen yeah the Pixar lamp it's the Pixar lamp it's the Pixar said it's uh you got this nine inch display it's like an iPad display on a robotic arm it can float around your desk, it can twirl and turn around. Like, you know what we'll do? A few years when this thing comes out, you'll have me back on. And instead of me actually being here, you'll have this on here.

Oh, yeah, maybe. You know, you'll be my head floating around. Yeah, I mean, meta tried to do something like that with the... Meta tried to do something like that. You know, these things are big in China. They are. It's a big thing in China right now. No one really talks about them, but it's a category that has some potential.

Okay, yeah. But it's years away, just because of how it moves slowly? Stay tuned. Yeah. What about the foldable phone? That's not yours away. That's closer? Yeah.

No, that's decades away. No. That's coming out in the fall. Okay. That'll be fine. I can't wait for that. Yeah. Are you going to be a buy?

$2,200 on it. Oh, it's that can be? It'll be at least. Is it going to be the highest tier, the biggest, the most powerful? For Apple? Yeah, that's going to sit at the top of the line. It's going to sit at the top of the line. Okay.

New status symbol. Sorry. I like that. We had Ben Thompson on maybe before the end of the year. Feel bad for Ben. You know, he's a big Milwaukee Bucks fan and they're about to ditch you on us. The Milwaukee Bucks, that's sports team?

Really? I don't know. Yeah, it's sports. Yeah. Oh, okay. I do know it's a basketball team. I do know that it's Ben Thompson's favorite team. He was talking about the Apple Vision Pro.

He was talking about the Apple Vision Pro. I wanted to demo the, you know, you can watch the NBA live. Yeah, basically, Ben's pitch was like, screw the Apple produce high, produced, you know, they're cutting around all the time. And he's like, just invest the money to set up like the actual hardware in every single stadium. The cameras. The cameras so that anybody can just drop in. So you can just sit there, watch the game. And you can see this. You don't need the, you don't need the Apple announcer because you can just look at the scoreboard.

You can listen to what's going on. Yeah. So he's saying strip the guys out of it. Yeah. Yeah. Look, I watched it. It was great. You watched the whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Trust me. people at home are not happy that night. You put that thing on, crying baby, crying baby, and then you're completely isolated. I mean, I'm telling you, VR does not work for families. It's true, yeah. It just

doesn't. It's really, yeah, it is one of the major because then, I mean, the family people have the disposable income more likely so then they buy it, but they can't use it. It doesn't work. Yeah. Okay, here's the problem. Yeah. It's like once a month. They've got like five games on the calendar. Well, and that, and that was Ben's point is, like, just set up the infrastructure

and sell me a pass so that I can drop into any game and sit courtside. Because right now they have to pull up with a production truck, they need editors, they need voiceovers, they need pre-game, post-game show. He's saying like there's basically one-time fixed cost of like he did the math. Put them in all the NBA's.

Yeah, he said it's like 40 grand. It's like not like a huge amount of money. And you have no incremental cost per show. You're not dealing with producers and running a live, you know, program. But they need to decide if this hardware is going to continue to exist before they keep investing in the content

strategy, right? It's a chicken and the egg problem, right? How do you sell this thing if there's no content? But why invest millions in the content if you're not playing to sell this thing anyways, and you're pivoting to smart glasses? Don't forget, they were supposed to come out with the Vision Air in 27, the product called N-100. I forgot when my article came out. It's times a blur. A few months ago, six months ago. Anyways, they killed that thing. We killed it entirely. Killed it. And the smart glasses. They shocked the vision team on that, by the way. The smart glasses, Was that just completely reactionary to meta? Oh, yeah.

They started toying with the smart glasses in terms of like this non-A-R smart glasses, right? First of all, AR smart glasses, that has been the vision from day one for a decade plus. But in terms of like this non-display smart glasses, that is a concept that meta has really popularized. And, you know, when these things started to gain a little bit of steam in 22, 23 is when they started taking a very hard look at it. And they're going to do it. And I think they're going to destroy meta with them, I'll be honest. Yeah. Feel bad.

The styling, the pricing, the features, the integration. The integration. To me, the challenge is if you can't deliver me, I message. Yeah. Apple has the ingredients because of their login to destroy any company in any hardware. It's just about them figuring out how to do it and get it done and not waiting too long. You know, the biggest problem with them is they just take it. too long and over-engineer everything.

Like, the Vision Pro is the most over-engineered device ever, right? They could have got that out three years earlier with a little bit less fit and finish, and maybe it would be more successful today. Yeah, yeah. It does feel like there was a cycle where the iPhone was ahead of the curve on so many things, touchscreen, and then you, then in like that middle decade period, you had the Android folks being like, oh, we've had this Apple feature for a year. We've had this for two years.

Now it's like five years. You know how many people wouldn't be caught dead with a non-Iphone? You know, like, it doesn't matter. But AI changes that equation. Sure. That changes the equation. Especially if it's a Johnny Ive product and it's expensive. Well, you know, Johnny Ive, obviously, he's done amazing things.

And the new headphones or whatever they come out with are going to look amazing and probably work amazing. It's just the barrier to entry on hardware is so high. There's so much risk there. Yeah. I just, I still wonder if the, like, the Claudebot, these like open, agents. I don't know that everyone's going to adopt those, but something like that that sort of opens up the ecosystem just by brute forcing it. We were debating this earlier. Like, you can't get iMessage notifications on the meta rate of band displays, which is a

have them. Do you guys have them? I think we do have a pair here. We have got one at home. We've used the non-display as much, and then we demoed the displays and have used them a fair amount. And it's just a hard sell if you're an I-Message user. A hard sell if you're an I-Message user, but the potential is just oozing with potential. Like, they've got a solid product there. Yeah. And like a couple iterations on that. Make them a little lighter.

Get the display resolution up. Yeah. Work better outdoors. Yeah. It's compelling. And in a world where you have some sort of agent running on your Mac Mini, scraping all your eye messages and then putting them into WhatsApp or something. You know, maybe I'll do that.

Maybe you guys will do that. It's rare. Yeah. It's rare. Nobody wants to deal with that. Yeah. You know, nobody wants to deal with it. Even if it's just an app that you download like Napster, you don't think so.

People don't have time for that. Yeah, probably not. Probably not. I feel like nobody cares about anything anymore. You know? That's a good take. Back in my day, we used to care. We used to care.

The world has changed. Yeah. The world has changed. They just want everything in front of them. They want everything in their eyeballs. They all want it set up from the get-go. They don't want to put any work in. They just want it to start working, right?

And I think that's been the Apple ethos from the beginning, which is just like give people what they need, let it get up and running and not deal with any of them. BS. What's going on in China? A lot's going on in China. With Apple. Are they shutting down more stores? Shutting down more stores? No, not that I know of. I don't see Apple just shutting stores at this point.

I think the retail arm still is extremely profitable and successful. All the shutdowns... But in China, there's less of the... You're not... Somebody's not embarrassed to not be using an iPhone. Problem, yes. The problem is, is that Apple hasn't done anything. bespoke for the Chinese market. The competitiveness there is just unbelievably.

It's amazing. It's like no other part of the world. Are there compelling AI hardware integration? Yes. I mean, I mentioned the robotic thing. I mentioned, well, like the foldables are taking over the universe there, right? And so, you know, Apple's an American company launching American devices, European devices, and they're trying to shoehorned into the Chinese market,

and they've never really done anything just for the Chinese market or built around the Chinese market. Why? The iPod's like, okay, maybe that was, I mean, I don't know. But why, why? It's such a massive market. Why not? Because they're a global company.

But I think the foldable is going to do extremely well in China, you know? It might do better in China than it does here. Interesting. I don't know. I'll be having one. I'll tell you that much right now. What's the future of the iPhone air? It's like the price difference.

Sam Altman's got one. Great. But he doesn't care about money. The price difference. He just breaks it and buys a new one. He doesn't get paid by Open AI. He's probably got both. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, he doesn't get paid. Yeah. The iPhone Air and the iPhone Pro, it's like negligible pricing-wise. It's the same price if you get the battery pack. Oh, yeah. Right? It's like 99, 99 plus 100.

Sure. Yeah. Right. You're going to get the battery pack. Yeah. So, I don't know, like, you look at the features comparison, you look at the cameras, I mean, most people are going to always pick the pro over the air. There needs to be more of a price gap between the two. And eventually, you know, those two lines are going to merge.

It can take five years, but, like, eventually you're going to be able to get a pro as thin as an air or an air with the same bells and whistles as a pro. I mean, you look at the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air today from a perform. These are different laptops and they're exactly the same. Yeah, so what? I have the air. The air, he's got the pro. And they're identical. It's the same thing because the chips, right?

The big differences between the two are, it's a little lighter. Okay. The display is terrible on that thing compared to that thing. Like if you use, like I tried out the 15-inch MacBook Air, okay? Yeah. The thing is sleek and slick and awesome. Yeah. But like I've been ruined visually by how amazing the display is on the MacBook.

Okay, maybe I've got an upgrade. Okay. And so, you know, you have to think about the different changes. You want to talk about big things happening at Apple this year. It's that new MacBook Pro, right? You got the OLED, you got the thinner, you got the touch. I cannot wait to drop $4,000 on that thing. It's going to be a touchscreen?

Yeah. I cannot wait to get my fingerprints all over. If somebody's looking at my computer and they touch the screen, I'm just like... Isn't it the worst thing ever? Like, I... You've got to be carrying a polishing cloth. You've got to be carrying a polishing cloth. the Apple official polishing clock.

20 bucks. You know, just 20? I thought it was like 75 or something. Well, Apple makes one of the, Apple makes a Pixar lamp that just kind of polishes your touchscreen. That'd be great in AI for screen cleaning. Yeah.

Yeah, you know, the Apple polishing cloth, they got so much, you know, flack for that thing. Like, you would think that it was $75, but it was $20. Come to think of it, like, it's really not that big of a deal. Also, I know someone who is OCD

and is obsessed with keeping their screen perfectly clean. Yeah. And I was like, what's the secret? You must have some secret formula, like Windex or something that you're using. And he's like, no, just the Apple polishing cloth. It's the one that works. You know what?

I need to get one of those. I was like, that's a glowing. You know, one did come with my Vision Pro. Yeah. There you go. They threw one in as a bonus. Isn't that nice of them? That's so nice to them.

You know, 3499 you get a free polishing cloth. That's 20 bucks off. Yeah, maybe the Ternus narrative can center around, like, as the models commoditize, like the hardware becomes more important. You want to be able to run different models. locally and so pushing that like the hardware's great chips are great yeah the software i'll even tell you is maybe not it's between good and great sure okay i'm not going to say it's only good sure i'm not going to say it's as great as the hardware yeah but it's good enough yeah how's that

the a i is like yeah the worst in the industry yeah but i mean right now you're seeing people go out and buy mac minis to run ai okay let's think about it you see these people on twitter doing that right yeah how many extra mac minis do you think were sold because of all this jazz, I would guess, I would put the over under on 500 units. 500? Nah. I thought it was 10,000. I just seen it on Instagram.

There's 40,000 GitHub stars. Okay, if it's on Instagram, maybe I'm wrong. Yeah. So there's 40,000 GitHub stars. It's clearly a big me. 60. Maybe it's in the thousand. But yes, I mean, it's a quarter million a quarter or something like that.

And I think so much of it is just performative. Go on the Apple online store. No, people. Go to the Mac Mini. They're in stock. Are they all in stock? They're in stock. They're in stock.

Look at the ship dates. Funny thing, two weeks ago, I go to the Pasadena Mac store. You know what's out of stock? Apple Vision Pros. To me, to me, a lot of the buying, I think, is purely status-oriented and just signaling. No, no, selling the Mac Mini, and people just saying, I want to signal that I'm AI-native and I'm at the... They're going to use it for two weeks. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then forget about it. I think that's going to be a real thing. I mean, how many people actually need to live in these type of workflows? Not many, just the hackers, which is a niche community. It's a niche community. It's a great community. But it has made me think maybe I should start using Apple's native file system and actually bring my data out of the cloud, out of drive, and store it locally.

You don't need to because Cloudbot will go and access your cloud. So what's the deal with the Mac Mini? It's shipping. Order now, pick up in store today. It's available. Order by 3 p.m. delivers two hours from the store. They haven't been all the stores.

Yeah, it's everywhere. They're widely available. They're widely available. So maybe I am right. Available tomorrow at the Americana brand. Today, the Apple Glendale- Goal-a-Rillo. It's literally available at every Apple store.

Yeah, yeah. I think that's it? Yeah. And so it doesn't take that many if they're projecting out, hey, we're going to sell. It's not like they, I would imagine, They don't have all of them that they're going to sell this year sitting in stock already. I'm curious how the Mac quarter is going to go tomorrow, right?

Like, there might be a little bit of a drag on that. Yeah, what should people pay attention to? Well, the China number, to your point. The iPhone number is basically everything tomorrow, right? Either they grow 10% as they say they will or they won't. Either Tim Cook gets to keep his job or he doesn't. I'm just joking. But you think about, like, the product, right?

Like, they didn't do much iPad or Mac last year, right? This year is going to be the biggest year for the Mac in a long time. Got new MacBook Pro is about to launch, same design as those ones with the faster chips. You've got the iPhone chip-powered, low-cost MacBook, which is going to destroy PCs and Chromebooks and be, like, just an utter game changer. You've got the touchscreen MacBook Pro end of year. You've got a refresh Mac Mini. You've got a refreshed Mac Studio.

You've got the M6 chip. You've got the first new monitors from Apple in four years. Where will those sit? The monitors? Yeah. In terms of... They'll sit on my desk. I'll tell you that one.

But is it going to displace the studio or the Pro XDR? The one I know about is going to replace the studio. But there's a new XDR also. Oh, okay. Yeah. Because the XDR... Remarkably long-term. Like, I cannot believe how-

Why is there no camera on that thing? Because it was created 15 years ago. Like, it was so old, and you go, and you look at, like, you could YouTube search for the pro-D-Pro display XDR right now, and there's guarantee a new video, why you should buy one in 2026. It's still good in 2026. Like, it's still the best option for 2026.

I mean, the display is just remarkable. It's just amazing that it didn't commoditize fast. What are you guys using here? I see. We're mostly studios. We don't have a lot of XDRs, but we have been eyeing that new Dell monitor that Michael Dell has been rapaciously pumping on X.com.

It's amazing. He's so enthusiastic about that thing. I'm sure you've answered this 100 times, and I'm sorry, but why would they never do a TV? Is it just commodity space? Commodity, margin, differentiator. You don't think people would happily spend... They're going to buy a Pixar lamp before they buy.

at TV, you walk in. Oh, you got the Apple TV? I've heard that's good. As somebody who's like, you know, been an Apple. I can't describe myself as an Apple fanboy anymore, but as a kid, as a kid, I was, right? What the hell happened? The photos.

The Photos app. It's just like, you know, a 20-year relationship just over. But I do think there's enough people out in the world that if you made it 10, if you made the $10,000 TV, that they would buy it. You know, the... Because when I'm buying a computer, a TV, sure, it's different,

but when I'm buying a computer, it's not... The upgrade cycle. Look at the premium on the Samsung frame TVs. Those are flying off the shelves, and they're not better than an LG. So my TV in my living room, I bought in 18. Yeah. What are we in 26 now?

Eight years. Yeah, but Apple would figure out a way to deprecate the hardware. It's what they do. They're the best in the world out. Well, if they did, they would do it. Yeah. They were, they were, they're like, Tim's like, where's my TV?

He's like, sir, we haven't found a way to deprecate the hardware in 18 months. They got pretty down the road on TV about 10 years ago. And then they killed that thing. They had teams working on it. It was a big deal. But then they went off and did a car and went off and did a Vision Pro. Like if you think about like their two big moonshots over the last decade, they were both utter failures. The car obviously is just like your quintessential failure.

Yeah, pretty much. But, you know, they did get some good stuff out of it, right? Like, I would say the saving grace for Apple's AI, and you've said this a few times now, has been the AI chip and the AI hardware. The only reason they have an AI chip, the neural engine they launched in 2017, was because of the Apple car.

That was designed to power the AI needed for a self-driving car, and they shrunk it down for the phone. So if the Apple Car project didn't get ignited, you know, back in 2014-15, they would be even further behind an AI than they are today. And so give a shout out to the Apple Car team.

Legend. And you know, I'm still pulling for an Apple car with a naturally aspirated V-12. Can you imagine? It would be crazy. Real-wheel drive. Gated manual.

Gated manual. I think they would have just destroyed Tesla if they just didn't set their bar so high when we talk about over-engineering. Can you imagine like a Model Y or a Model 3 or even an S, whatever, just like with that Apple interior and the Apple ecosystem and the Apple interface?

Like, why did they have to go bananas, Remove the steering wheel, remove the pedals, and everyone facing each other. Like, why'd they have to go told, they overshot it? Why'd they have to go like all Apple on us? Yep. Right?

Like, why couldn't they just do, just do a car? Yeah. Just be a luxury brand. Just be a luxury brand. Would have been amazing. Yeah, and we got a sock instead. Got a sock instead.

Those were the two choices. The sock project shipped, okay? So you got to give enough. It did. And you know what? That was a success. Yes. Sold out.

Got people talking. Yeah. You know, we did a review of the sock on Bloomberg. Yeah. And people. ate that thing up? People love it. They subscribed? That's great.

Where's your song? Smash it down the I've got socks. I've got, you know what I have? I've got sushi socks on right now. Oh no way. He's a sushi fan. No, not from Apple. No, no, your favorite restaurant in the Valley. No, no, these are from my mother-in-law. That's fantastic. We kept you

Yeah, we kept you much longer, but thank you so much. This is so much fun. I'm so glad you're in L.A. Do I get to do the gong? Of course. Hit the gong. Give us a number. How long you've been writing? How long you've been following Apple. Writing since 2009. O'9. There we go. Hit the gaw. There you go. Boom. With authority. For the Germinator. Live on TV. Yeah. Thank you so much.

Have a great rest of your day. Let's do this again soon. We'll be following your coverage tomorrow. Yes, tomorrow.