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John Ternus wants Apple shipping new products all year with a smaller staff
John Ternus wants Apple releasing products year-round, beyond its fall and spring events, with a leaner staff, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports. Developers and accessory makers who plan around those two dates face a looser calendar and new categories that may not last.
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What happened
- According to Gurman's sources, Ternus wants Apple to become "more experimental" and to bring out new products more quickly.
- Apple has begun dismissing engineering program managers, and several teams have been scaled back or reassigned in small-scale layoffs.
- A plan to replace about 5,000 AppleCare support staff with AI agents is on hold, and Apple is not currently pursuing it, Gurman reports.
- Ternus is also looking for more revenue from existing customers as services growth slows and App Store revenue faces scrutiny worldwide.
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Why it matters
- constraint Accessory makers who time products to Apple's fall and spring events would lose their two fixed planning dates if releases spread across the year.
- decision Committing to smart glasses, camera AirPods or the home hub now means pricing in the chance Apple drops the category, the risk Macworld raised about experimental products.
- constraint Macworld ties next year's launch list to long-rumored products reaching completion, so those launches will say little about whether Ternus's faster pace holds.
- exposure Subscription apps sold through the App Store would compete for the same customer spending as any new or pricier Apple services.
Apple's Vision Pro group is one of the teams cut back in recent weeks, along with Siri, some AI-related software engineering and Fitness+ [7]. Macworld says some of those cuts reflect employee performance and others reflect changes in direction for the products. It does not say which is which [7].
Macworld's account of Gurman's report [1] sticks to the product plan. Anyone outside Apple has to work out from that plan what it means for developer tools, beta schedules and accessory programs. The next year looks like the test of whether Ternus's faster pace is real. Macworld lists five launches due within 12 months [1]: touchscreen MacBooks, AirPods with cameras, smart glasses, a new smart home hub and a 20th Anniversary iPhone, on top of the regular iPhone, iPad and Mac updates [4]. Macworld also says the list is long because long-rumored products are close to finished, not necessarily because of the new CEO [5]. Gurman's report cautions that many of Apple's long-established development practices could take years to change, according to Macworld [14].
The plan also asks fewer people to ship those products. Ternus is said to have "explored how artificial intelligence could accelerate product development and perform work currently handled by employees" [8]. Budget and staffing increases that had been planned have been held flat or reduced [10]. Macworld called doing more, faster, with fewer people "usually a recipe for lower quality" [15]. It also allowed that a leaner Apple with less middle management could make faster progress [16].
New categories carry a separate risk. Macworld wrote that "nobody wants to buy an Apple product that gets abandoned after a couple of years because it didn't take off" [13].
Macworld expects the revenue goal, the other risk here, to show up as new Apple services, higher prices for current ones, or ads in Apple Maps [12].
For most teams, I'd stay on the regular lines. Treat new-category work as an experiment you can write off until Apple ships a second generation. The cost is giving up an early position if smart glasses or camera AirPods catch on [4].
To apply that to your own roadmap, sort the work on two axes. The first is what you build on: a line Apple updates on a regular schedule, such as iPhone, iPad or Mac [4], or one of the new categories. The second is when your money goes out: before launch, as with accessory inventory, or after launch, as with software you can patch.
- Regular line, money spent after launch: a year-round calendar mostly means more compatibility testing. - Regular line, money spent before launch: the calendar is the main exposure, so keep inventory commitments short enough to react to a release outside the fall and spring events [3]. - New category, money spent after launch: keep the build small and reusable on iPhone. - New category, money spent before launch: the abandonment risk sits here, and the Vision Pro reductions are the case to compare against [7].
What to watch
- Any Apple hardware launch announced outside the fall and spring events, and whether developer tools ship at the same time.
- Whether the smart glasses and camera AirPods open to third-party apps and accessories in their first year.
- Price increases on existing Apple services, or new Apple services that overlap with third-party subscription apps.