Everything Is Changing at Apple - DTNS 5147

0:02This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, November 17th, 2025. Happy birthday to my niece. We tell you what you need to know, give you the important context and help each other understand. And today, by the end of 2026, Apple will be a lot different if you believe the sources. And the sources are reliable in this case. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Rob Dunwood. Let's start with what you need to know with that big story. Now, it's Monday, so we always like to check in on what Bloomberg's Mark Gurman put in his power on newsletter on Sunday. But we also have the Financial Times bombshell weekend story.

0:40They put it out late on Friday that succession planning for Apple CEO Tim Cook has gotten serious. So with both these together, it looks like a lot of stuff is going to change at Apple. Let's start with what Gurman said. He tied together and expanded on a lot of previous leaks, some of them from Bloomberg, some of them from the information, some of them from elsewhere, that Apple is going to change the iPhone release schedule. Now, if you don't follow Apple faithfully, you might not realize that since 2011, we have gotten new iPhones in the autumn. They used to come in the summer. And then in 2011, they started coming in the autumn.

1:16And then occasionally you'll get the lower priced iPhone SE in the spring. But most of the time you get iPhones in October. Well, starting in the autumn of next year, 2026, German says we're going to get the first foldable iPhone and new iPhone 18 Pro models as usual. but the base model won't be announced until spring 2027, along with a new iPhone Air, and that that will become the new pattern for Apple. In fact, Gurman says the Air has always been part of this move. So the reports that it was delayed due to sales figures don't really wash out. Gurman says from what he's heard from people inside Apple, they never expected big sales from the Air.

1:56It was sort of a technical exercise on the way to making a foldable. You got to make thin phones you know if you're going to make a foldable uh anyway this change is meant to spread revenue out throughout the year that makes it easier on suppliers it makes it easier on the marketing team and german also says apple has not been developing a new mac pro bad news for mac pro fans uh apparently apple sees the mac studio which is kind of that beefy mac mini version uh as the heir to the mac pro slot in the lineup before we get to the cook succession stuff uh rob What do you think of all this? It makes sense because one of the things that if you have followed Apple stock for, I don't know, since the iPhone came out, Q1 after the, it comes out in the fall.

2:45And then usually Q1, you know, that's when the numbers just skyrocket. And it's been like that. But then there's a fall off until the next iPhone comes out. So you have these up and down. It's, you know, it's not, I wouldn't say it's exactly cyclical, but you can, you can see things that it's time to buy Apple stock because the price is going to skyrocket after these phones, if they do well come out. I think the Apple buys themselves a little bit of, of things just kind of staying level with, you know, stuff coming out twice a year where you just don't have that one big peak. And then everything else kind of turns down for the rest of the year.

3:21Yeah, I mean, in 2011, they moved to the autumn because of an iOS delay, honestly. But it turned out to be fortuitous for the holiday shopping season. But the Apple lineup was a lot different. The iPhone didn't make as big of a chunk of its sales as it does now. It didn't have multiple models like it has now. So yeah, that all makes sense to me. And having the foldable be in the pro announcement in October and moving the base models to the spring when you might have an SE model, that all makes sense to me as well. Here's the bigger disruption to Apple's outlook for 2026. The Financial Times say in Friday, and I'm just going to quote them here, Apple is stepping up its succession planning efforts as it prepares for Tim Cook to step down as chief executive as soon as next year.

4:11So the news is they're getting serious about succession planning, which you do when you know somebody is going to leave. It sounds like the earliest it would happen would be next year. So this could happen soon, but that's not the same as saying it's going to happen next year. According to the Financial Times, the heir apparent is senior VP of hardware engineering, Sean Ternus. That would put it more in the hardware camp versus Cook, which was more supply chain and logistics. And if a change were to be announced, you would not hear it before the January earnings report. You might hear it during the January earnings report, or you might not.

4:47You would probably want to have it come out before WWDC in June, so the new CEO could show up there. Cook is 65, and he has been the CEO of Apple since 2011. So he's not super old, as CEOs go these days, but he's been in the job for a while. A lot of folks think that this leak to the Financial Times was meant to test the market reaction, both the idea of Cook stepping down and the idea of John Ternus as the heir apparent. I think it absolutely showcases that. Apple is a ginormous company, and it's one of those companies. It really started with Microsoft when Bill Gates became just the most popular CEO of a company that we've ever seen before.

5:34I mean, there were others back in the, you know, in the early 1900s, but, you know, from like the 50s on. Henry Ford types, Rockefellers. But yeah, Gates got into that level. Jobs got into that level. I wouldn't say that the current CEO is at that level, but it's still, it's Apple. People know who he is because he runs Apple. So if he's going to step down, that could move markets. So it makes perfect sense that, well, let's tease this, see how the market reacts. And if it's okay with it, then we'll actually go ahead and put a succession plan in place. Yeah, Financial Times pointing out too that Cook took over from Steve Jobs when Apple was worth a paltry few hundred billion and it's now worth four trillion.

6:19So I think you would call Cook's time at Apple a success, but you are hearing a lot of people nitpick around the edges of Apple saying their hardware releases aren't as solid as they used to be. Their strategy is a little more muddied than it used to be. This is the way jobs would do it. It has always been something people say, but you hear it said a little more often these days, especially with liquid glass and stuff like that. So I do wonder if that is part of this as well, to say like, hey, let's put a hardware guy in charge and really get serious about the hardware. I don't know what that means for the decade-long pivot to services that Apple has been undergoing.

6:58and I'm curious what that means if a hardware guy is in charge. But I guess a lot of people are going to look at this as a positive. What do you think? Here's another part of it as well. As you said, Tim Cook is 65 years old. That's not old by any stretch of the imagination, but he's been doing this for 14 years. And it might just be the point he's like, hey, you know what? I took us from a multi-hundred billion-dollar company to a$4 trillion company. We are the we are we're playing with first, second or third for the last decade and a half as far as how big Apple has gotten. I just want to do other stuff.

7:35He might he might just want to go do other stuff. It really could just be simple, simple as that. So is what we need to put a hardware guy in there. Everybody's going to make assumptions about what's going to happen. But it could literally be that the guy that's 65 and is like, hey, I have I have fewer sunrises in front of me than I have behind me. I might want to go do something else. And that's really the reason why we're talking about this today. Yeah, very, very, very possibly curious what you guys think, too. If you're cool with Ternus taking over, if you're thinking, you know, who really should run Apple is this person.

8:09Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. dtns is made possible by you the listener thanks to brad kevin morgan paul theason and our new patrons ab khd plus jc and jason coming in on the annual donation yay good to see that thank you patrons for being there for us all right there's more we need to know today let's get to the briefs one way confirmed the new mate 80 series of phones will launch in china on november 25th along with the Mate X7. Pre-orders are now open. The line includes the Mate 80, the Mate 80 Pro, the Mate 80 Pro Max, and the Mate 80 RS Ultimate Design. It has a circular rear camera module with 12 to 16 gigabytes of RAM and up to one terabyte in storage.

8:53The RS design version uses an octagon design for the rear camera module and can get up to 20 gigabytes of RAM. Yeah, man. At one point, I was among those who thought Huawei may not make it through, especially when they spun off Honor. I thought, ah, that's their dying move. They're spinning off Honor to save it while they go down. It turns out that was wrong. I was definitely wrong to think that. Huawei coming strong. The Mate 80, in a world where people are always talking about whether, you know, can you really innovate in phone design? I mean, this isn't the craziest phone design ever, but those are nice looking phones, especially that RS Ultimate.

9:32They're nice looking phones, but the thing gets me 20 gigs of RAM in a phone? That is crazy. Tommy, you and I are old enough to remember when we talked about RAM in megabytes. We talked about gigabytes of RAM in a phone. In a phone, too, right? We're not even talking about a desktop. That's wild. Google DeepMind released Weather Next 2, which improves two-week forecasts of temperature, pressure, and wind also improves on its already well-regarded tropical storm tracker. DeepMind says it should be as accurate three days before a storm arrives as the current model is two days before. So you get more accurate a little farther out, gives you more time to prepare.

10:14WeatherNext2 also eight times faster than the previous weather model. If you're using this in an industrial sense, maybe for energy predictions, that's incredibly important. It also now does hourly forecasts instead of the previous 12-hour increments. It still has some trouble with outlier rain and snow events. It says that part of the reason for that is they just don't have as much data on those outlier events. So it's harder to train the model to predict them. And the previous method adapted models meant for image and video generation. So they are turning to training these models specifically on weather data now before they had to be processed multiple times because you were using models that weren't really designed for that.

10:54The new model only needs to be processed once. That's going to save you cost and energy as well. Tom, we talk about the negative sides of AI all the time, just because people are kind of pre-designed to pay attention to negative things more so than positive things. But I love to see what Google DeepMind is doing here with weather, because this is the kind of thing where AI can literally save lives. It can, you know, when you have very, very accurate weather predictions, you can give people advance notice of when you think a really bad storm is coming, when you think really bad rain is coming or whatever the case is.

11:27And that ultimately saves lives. So I love to see where AI is absolutely beneficial to people and weather prediction is one of those places. Yeah. And that doesn't mean there aren't places for concern, like you say. But it's good to look at this and realize, you know, all those eggs aren't in the same basket here, even within the same company like Google. The U.S.-based Freedom House issued its annual elevation of Internet freedom and found a decline for the 15th year. 27 of the 72 countries looked at showed a decline. China and Myanmar tied for the least free Internet. Kenya had the largest decline.

12:03Bangladesh improved the most. And Iceland topped the chart as the most free. From the report, half of the 18 countries with an internet freedom status of free suffered score declines during the coverage period while only two received improvements. Georgia, Germany, and the U.S. in that order experienced the steepest declines among those countries. Yeah. Part of me looks at this and thinks that's going to inevitably happen when something gets older, right? The internet was at its freest when it was new and nobody knew it was there, right? Right. So some of this is to be expected. And then there's a large part of it when you read through this report that has to do with the fact that we are in a period of regimes cracking down on freedoms more broadly.

12:50In Germany, it has to do with freedom of expression, with memes and things. In the United States, it has to do with moderation, going after technical platforms for how they moderate content. In Georgia, it has to do with governmental organizations and organizing protests and things like that. So it's all different in different places, but you are seeing a couple of pressures, just sort of the traditional bureaucratization of anything over time, along with the political stance as well. If you're wondering, well, who is Freedom House? They are generally considered to be a somewhat on the left, not in the way the U.S.

13:34means on the left, but on the left as far as liberal interpretations of what democracy is. If there's a criticism of them, it's usually that they tend to prioritize liberties over actual freedoms to do things, right? Do you have a liberty to do something versus like, well, there's rules, but you're still free to do it? Yeah, I was going to say not center left like politics, center left in the sense that it is better to literally be able to vote than it is to be told who is your leader. Those type of things. And then you hit the nail right on the head. The internet is not a baby anymore. So when it first came out, when it first started blowing up in the late 90s into the early 2000s, we didn't know what to regulate.

14:16Today, we kind of figure some things out. We don't like that. Let's regulate it. We don't like that. Let's regulate that. So just those type of things, even in what you would consider to be free economies, tends to take away from the freedom that you had on the Internet because you can't do what you used to be able to do. Now, that said, I think this is important to pay attention to because as that pendulum swings that direction, it becomes more important to guard against the wrong kinds of restrictions. Right. And I think that's one of the things that Freedom House is trying to call attention to here is, hey, as we are locking down the Internet, that doesn't always mean it's a good thing.

14:54Right. Freedom House, like I said, very libertarian in its look, small L way. But it is highlighting some things where you may go, well, I actually thought we needed more rules, but maybe not those rules. And so it becomes time to be more vigilant about what's actually being restricted. Yeah. In countries where we have freedom of speech, it shouldn't be things like the leaders of said country saying it should be illegal to talk poorly about me. Those kind of things you don't necessarily want. yeah that's going to knock your score down if it is the leader of a country saying those kind of things hearst network has commissioned the uk's particle six to make a tv series and you may say tom why is this on daily tech news show well it's because particle six is that studio that made the news recently for claiming its virtual actor tilly norwood uh would be able to pick an agent to represent it soon now no news on that part but hearst has commissioned particle six to make a 10 episode short form series for the history channel netherlands called streets of the past and it specifically wants them to use generative models to make the environments that the host is going to travel back in time to so you'll have a human host you'll have human editors and human producers but you'll be creating environments and even some background characters and such i don't know if they're going to interview background characters but you're going to create the world of the past using generative models to do it.

16:16They're going to visit some of the Netherlands most famous streets, their big squares, canals, that sort of thing. And the show is set to air this January. This is one of the advancements that's going to be made in productions like this that you kind of say, I get that. That's not bad, but it's not going to stop there. It's just going to keep happening. So there probably are some people who are upset about, well, we used to pay people to do this and you know to generate it and to actually draw it now you're having a computer do it and the computer probably can do a very very good job at that so i just say this to say this we've talked about this a lot on this show ai is coming into tv and movie making it's it's already here and we're going to see more of it so i'm just wondering how we're going to react to it and how we're going to ultimately learn to exist with it yeah uh it's also that that that That journalistic cycle of like freak out over the thing that is least real, which is Tilly Norwood, and then undercover the actual thing that's like, oh, they're really using generative models to make the backgrounds.

17:22I'm curious how well that's going to work. And it could work great. It could be really bad. And if it's really bad, it's like, oh, well, that's the signpost on the road to it eventually getting good, but we're not there yet. So I'm going to be curious to take a look at this in January once it's out there to see what it looks like. finally some quick headlines uh these are good to know sort of things to to keep in your mind if you want to understand stories in the future former amazon ceo jeff bezos and former google life scientist executive vic bejal will be co-ceos for a startup called project prometheus developing generative models and products for engineering and manufacturing ah bezos back in the ceo role that's uh interesting to see several subsea cables uh met us to africa google backed blue ramen uh that's raman not not ramen like the noodles india europe express see me we six and africa one have been delayed because of difficulties navigating political tensions in the red sea region and then the fallout from this could be you see a slowdown or or you don't see a speed up is probably a better way to put it, in the kinds of internet businesses that need this in that region, in that Africa region.

18:40OpenAI posted on threads that chat GPT will now be better at not using M-dashes when you tell it not to and include an example of custom instructions. Better at. Not perfect, but better at. The public interest research group tested three toys that They use OpenAI's GPT-40 and Mistral models to talk to kids who play with them and found, they said, inappropriate and sometimes dangerous things when the group focused on making them do so. One of the toy makers, Folotoy, has paused sales of its Kuma toy while it investigates these findings. We're going to keep trying to make these things be gentle.

19:19They just are showing us they're not necessarily when it comes to kids. The all-purpose model, probably not the best for this situation. Probably not. The European Commission announced plans to begin a probe into cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, to see if they should be subject to the EU's Digital Markets Act, including interoperability and data portability. Now, they would be not subject because they're enterprise, but I think everyone's mad about the cloud outages. So the EU is going to be like, let's look. Let's take a look. Let's take a look. Closing arguments in the remedy portion of the U.S.

19:54antitrust case against Google's ad exchange behavior has been delayed until November 21st. So if you were thinking we might get the news on that this week, is Google going to have to spin out its ad division? We're not going to even get a hint of that until next week. Samsung raised contract prices for 32 gigabytes of DDR5 modules from$149 to$239 and 16 gigabyte and 128 gigabyte DDR5 modules also rose by about 50 % to 135 and 1194 respectively. Yeah. RAM going up. That's the short version. Going up a lot. The RAM is too high. The RAM is too high. The RAM is too high. Security researcher Cody Kosiemba found that first-generation Nest thermostats are still sending event logs to Google servers, at least if they're connected to the internet, despite Google no longer allowing cloud control or even offering support for the devices.

20:51They're just supposed to be used locally. I feel some kind of way about this because I have a Gen 2 Nest that no longer works. I can't talk to my device and say, hey, keyword, turn the heat up. I can't turn it down. I can't even use the app to change it. I have to physically get up and walk to my thermostat. This is so 2009 for me. So yeah, I have a problem with this one. Boing Boing reports on a group of people organized in Discord that are creating community-based service for Sony's doomed Concord game, though Sony has issued DMCA notices against gameplay recordings. Yeah, don't show our failure being used to be played by a community.

21:32But I thought that was pretty cool. You know what else is cool? We've got all kinds of new stuff at the dailytechnewshow.com slash store location. Len Peralta made us some great new holiday art. It's Techie Santa using drones to pull a sleigh and delivering laptops and Apple watches and all kinds of stuff to the children of the world. We also got a DTNS pint glass in there. uh rw and ash is going to be road testing that just as soon as it arrives i'm going to get one two a dial one of those two uh and my new ebook synced know a little more about tech uh is available as well along with holiday cards postcards t-shirts hoodies it's all there at dailytechnewsshow.com slash store

22:16we in every episode of dt nests with some shared perspectives today we have two from anon jr and R.W. Nash. Yeah. First one, Anon Jr. writing in response to our discussion of Google testing data centers in space, Anon Jr. said, I fear for the day that the data center crashed means something very, very different. Yeah. Let's make sure we know how to keep those up there. Although they might burn up in re-entry. That's still not good. I would hope. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then R.W. Nash says, well, this is very timely and informative. What is he talking about? Sarah Lane interviewed Stephanie Humphrey over the weekend about how to identify AI slop, how to tell if something's AI, what you can do to reduce your exposure to it, all that kind of stuff.

23:05RW Nash says, filing this under news you can use. However, I have a feeling that an update will be needed as slop will continue to get worse. It's not going to get any better. The easier these tools are to make it, the more people that are going to make it. Therefore, the more of it that will exist. That's just what we signed up for. We're going to be a few years before we hit peak slop. Yeah. Well, folks, we want to know what you're thinking about. So if you've got some insights into a story, share it with us at feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Yeah, big thanks to Adon Jr. and R.W. Nash for contributing to today's show.

23:40You can contribute as well. Send us an email, feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com, or post on our Patreon like they did. You keep us in business if you're a patron. You can sign up at patreon.com slash DTNS.

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