Product1 publisher2 min readPublished
Apple's new CEO answers the AI question with a camera feature
As Apple's new CEO, John Ternus talked about AI as a source of new product capability and named Smart Take on the iPhone Duo as what it already does. Everything else he said about the roadmap stayed general.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- John Ternus, a 25-year Apple veteran who came to the CEO job directly from running hardware operations, sat for a podcast interview with TechRadar and Tom's Guide alongside marketing chief Greg Joswiak.
- The one AI feature he named was Smart Take on the iPhone Duo, which works out that the user wants a photo without being explicitly told.
- Joswiak said nobody in the industry is close to Apple on product quality, and credited an acceleration to Ternus's period leading the hardware organisation.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- capability Smart Take gives a product team one Apple AI surface it can actually evaluate, by watching whether Duo owners abandon the shutter button after a few weeks of use.
- constraint With no model, Siri timetable or developer path mentioned, anyone building against Apple's AI for next year still has nothing dated to schedule work around.
- precedent A CEO who says the stylus position was never a rule has weakened every past Apple refusal as a predictor of what the company will ship.
The test for a camera that decides when to fire is not whether reviewers like the demo. Over three weeks of ownership, either the owner stops reaching for the shutter button or the implicit capture sits unused next to the tap they already trust [6]. That is a usage-depth question, answerable on the device.
Two columns are enough to read an interview like this for planning input. One holds named features that arrive on hardware a customer has to buy. The other holds platform commitments with dates, the kind an engineering lead or an IT manager can schedule against. Ternus put one entry in the first column and nothing in the second [1].
The general AI talk was warm and unbounded. "[This is] the most exciting time in my career to be building product because AI presents all these new opportunities," Ternus said [3], adding that you cannot develop AI without being "really thoughtful about and deliberate about" it [4]. He also said, "You can see what we're able to do now in our products that we were never able to do before" [5]. TechRadar's headline reads that as AI being the key to future Apple innovation [18]. What the transcript carries is narrower: a photo feature on a new phone, and a door open to "new kinds of products" [7].
The Pencil answer is the more useful signal, because it concerns a decision already made. Apple put stylus support on an iPhone [9], years after Steve Jobs dismissed the idea in 2008, a verdict the TechRadar interviewer recalls as "Yuck" [10]. "I've never really thought of it as a rule," Ternus said. "We started with iPad. There was no Apple Pencil, right?" [11] He said Apple had proved a touch interface on iPad could be capable and productive, then saw what a pencil could add on a larger screen: "And I think we saw that opportunity here" [12].
That is a hardware executive describing a hardware decision. Ternus is a 25-year Apple veteran who came to the job directly from leading hardware operations [1], and Joswiak, sitting beside him, said of product quality that "there's nobody in the industry close to what we have", crediting an acceleration to Ternus's time running that organisation [13]. No defect, repair or return figure came with the claim [2].
So the forcing function, for anyone who has to turn a CEO interview into a plan: features you could write a test plan for, and commitments you could put on a schedule. This one yields one of the first and none of the second [1].
What to watch
- A dated Apple commitment on Siri, models or developer APIs would fill the empty second column.
- Whether Smart Take style implicit capture reaches phones people already own, or stays a Duo exclusive.
- Post-launch usage data on whether Duo owners keep pressing the shutter button.