The Tim Cook Era Officially Ends & Why MapQuest Soars to No. 1 App

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0:28Toby:Good morning, Bridge Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Tim Cook signs off at Apple for the last time. Then MapQuest has made an unexpected surge to the top of the App Store. It's Tuesday, September 1st. Let's ride.

0:50Toby:It is the first of September, the time of year you typically start swapping out your iced coffee for pumpkin spice lattes. But maybe not this season. There are indications that the king of fall might be losing its crown to fast-charging competitors. Google Trends data shows that the PSL-led searches in only three states last week, falling behind chai and matcha. At this point last year, it led in 32 states and in 2024, 48 states. Food trend experts say it's not that we haven't fallen out of love with pumpkin spice, just that so many more options are available that give you that same cozy autumn feeling.

1:28Toby:Miso caramel, brown butter, honey, smoked butterscotch, banana, coffee, syrup. Toby, is this the end of a spice dynasty? No. And I'll tell you why. It is just moved into the classic Pantheon. Like you don't need to search for pumpkin spice latte anymore. That being said, miso caramel has my attention. That sounds quite savory and delicious. The fact that banana coffee syrup though has surpassed pumpkin spice coffee syrup in most Google Trends rating, that is where I draw the line. Disgusting. How are we back on bananas? I thought banana bread was like a pandemic era thing. No, pumpkin spice is here to stay.

2:08It's like LeBron. It just has a little longevity at this point. It's not getting passed by yet, even though I will be indulging in some miso caramel this fall season. And now a word from our sponsor, American Express. Neil, I am all go. You're what? I'm up the wall. I'm nonstop. I am busy, which is why I appreciate the American Express business platinum card because it's backed by a membership that's designed to support businesses whenever opportunity shows up.

2:37Toby:With award-winning customer service, statement credits for key business solutions, and premium travel benefits, the Business Platinum Card gives you support that's there when you need it most. So while you're focusing on running your business, the Business Platinum Card and American Express membership are built to back you every step of the way. Learn more at go.amex slash morningbrew and find out your welcome offer, which could be as high as 300 ,000 membership rewards points. That's go.amex slash morningbrew. Offers and benefit terms apply. At Apple, Tim Cook's watch has ended. The John Ternus era is about to begin.

3:15Toby:Yesterday marked the final day for Cook as Apple CEO, the role he's held since 2011 when he replaced visionary co-founder Steve Jobs at the helm of tech's most innovative hardware company. Many thought those shoes were too big to fill for a soft-spoken supply chain geek like Cook to succeed Jobs. It's like asking someone to perform on stage after Zara Larson. But now that his tenure is over, it's clear to everyone that Tim absolutely cooked. In his 15 years in charge, Apple stock soared more than 2 ,000 % to become the second most valuable company in the world, boasting a market cap of nearly$5 trillion.

3:51Toby:Revenue and profits quadrupled. The year Cook became CEO, Apple sold 72 million iPhones. This year, estimates suggest it'll sell$255 million. Warren Buffett, a major Apple shareholder, famously said he was somewhat embarrassed to admit that Tim Cook made him more money than he himself ever did. There were missteps, Apple's Vision Pro, the company's splashy foray into virtual reality. So far, a massive flop. Others didn't cook for lack in the long-term vision and creative juice that animated jobs. And now, in the thick of the AI revolution, Apple has been slower than peers to roll out features, with Siri becoming an afterthought compared to ChatGPT and Claude.

4:30Toby:That's a problem for John Turnus, Apple's hardware boss and Cook's hand-picked successor. Once again, there will be big shoes to fill. Let's step back into the kitchen one last time to give Cook his flowers. The big question was, are you going to become Steve Jobs 2.0? That's an impossible question. You could not fill those shoes. But what Tim Cook really did, his big innovation was making the iPhone incredibly useful everywhere in your daily life. We take for granted the fact that your iPhone can now do things like buy stuff. Like payments was a big thing that Cook pushed into music and entertainment, fitness, wearables and accessories.

5:09All of this were big innovations, not necessarily in the way that Steve Jobs innovated, but in the way that Cook innovated. He created this idea of a connected ecosystem, the wall garden that makes Apple so valuable. The more products you add into your ecosystem, the more valuable it becomes, which is why an Apple Watch is fine. But an Apple Watch plus an iPhone is even better. and then an Apple Watch plus an iPhone plus the subscription to all of Apple's services. That is the coup de grace. So again, he wasn't, you know, this visionary product leader. But if you look down into what he did, he made that connected ecosystem that's made Apple so valuable.

5:46Toby:Some of those products were very successful that rolled out during Cook's watch. One of them is the Apple Watch. Now Apple sells more watches annually than the entire country of Switzerland does. AirPods were another thing that were kind of lambasted when they first came out. You remember when they first introduced and people were like, what the heck is going on? They were extremely ugly. But now AirPods are as big as Major League Baseball by sales. Those are the hardware things that came from Cook. And then there was this services business that he built up. A lot of folks were wondering why Apple is launching a TV streaming service.

6:21Toby:But that, at least in the past few years, has not necessarily become a huge profit center, but a huge brand play for Apple as well. The other thing that Cook is very good at is being a diplomat, essentially. When you're a CEO of a company this large, specifically when your crucial relationships you have to maintain are one with the US and the other with China, which is where all your supply chain rides, you have to basically become an international diplomat. And he was uniquely good at being a so-called Trump whisperer when it comes to top tech CEOs. During Trump's first term, Trump basically noted that Cook was one of the only CEOs who would personally call him.

7:00And that seemed to go a long way. The fact that he's been able to maintain a relationship with these two frenemies of geopolitical powerhouses just shows how astute he was at being a diplomat as well as a tech CEO.

7:16Toby:Some more, some final Cook lore. So he held this this goodbye dinner on August 23rd in Cupertino with some of his colleagues. And he had his favorite band play at his dinner. That band, One Republic. He was loving the good life. It checks out. And then finally, what is it going to do in retirement? Well, here are some clues. Apple posted a new job listing. It was looking for an executive bodyguard who must be able to hike, quote, several miles at a time in austere environments. So it looks like the man is going to be out into nature. Meanwhile, we haven't even talked about John Ternus. He has a big event coming up.

7:58Toby:This is going to be trial by fire on September 9th. Next week, Apple is going to be launching its iPhone 18. The iPhone 17 was a big hit. But the thing about the iPhone 18, which is accompanying it, is a foldable iPhone, the first ever. So we'll hear from Ternus in not too long, in just a few days. Let's move on. It's been a week since President Trump issued an executive order renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America amid an escalating trade war with Canada, and yet open different map apps and you'll see different labels as each tech company decides whether to abide by the change or not. So far in Lake America's corner, there's Google Maps, who updates its software to match official government sources.

8:38But Lake Ontario has an unexpected champion, MapQuest. Yep, the OG mapping service is not only still around, but rocketing up the app store rankings after its stubbornness led to a massive surge in downloads. Yesterday, it leapfogged none other than Google Maps to become the number one navigation app in the US, and as of this morning, reached the number one app on the overall charts. The reason it was well-positioned to capitalize on the moment is because it's been here before. Last year, during the Gulf of America naming controversy. It one, reaffirmed that it would keep the name Gulf of Mexico, and two, launched a tool that let consumers rename the body of water anything that they wanted.

9:18It's running back that same playbook for Lake Ontario to even bigger success. Its post reading, we're not changing it on X, reached over 100 ,000 likes. Doug Berger, MapQuest's general manager, insists the company didn't initially see this as some grand political statement. I wouldn't call it a stance. I would call it a well-timed joke, but he went on, people clearly want to hang on to the names of bodies of water that they recognize. Neil, I have such vivid memories of printing out MapQuest directions to go to soccer tournaments growing up, but it took a trade war for me and millions of other people to realize that this thing is still alive and kicking.

9:55Toby:The download numbers are kind of mind-boggling. On Sunday, the MapQuest app saw 80 ,000 iOS downloads compared to the daily average of 500 in early August. I don't know what the percentage gain there, but there's a lot of zeros. And then on Google Play, downloads were 20 ,000 over the weekend from a daily average of about 1 ,000. So, I mean, you said it was alive and kicking. It was alive. I don't know if it was kicking before this particular tweet, this particular decision. his reasoning behind this, Doug Berger said, we want to give people an app that keeps the names they're familiar with. And this is a big contrast from Google, which both of these companies had had to deal with what happened last year with Gulf of America and Gulf of Mexico.

10:42Toby:Google Maps has had this policy that they changed the name to reflect official government sources. So in the United States, now that official government sources are using Lake America after President Trump's executive order. That will, in America, in the United States, you will see Lake America. In Canada, you will still see Lake Ontario because that's what they want to keep calling it. Outside of the U.S. or Canada, you're going to see both names like we see with Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of America. You see Lake Ontario and then in parentheses Lake America. And that just maybe did not sit well with a lot of people.

11:17Let's go back in history though and just give you what MapQuest has been up to remember it launched back in 1996 that was well before gps's were even really a thing smartphones were definitely not a thing so you had to enter two locations where you started where you wanted to go and then it would give you turn by turn directions i remember which you had to print out i remember being in charge of it sometimes in the back seat and you know your parents are driving to a soccer game like where's the turn do i go right or left here and it was so stressful but that is how things were in you know the late 90s it reached a peak valuation of 1.1 billion dollars when it sold to aol in december of 1999 that is roughly 2.2 billion dollars in today's dollars and yet from there it was kind of downhill uh verizon actually acquired map quest as part of its 2015 purchase of aol and yet the sale price was so oh and actually then they went on to sell it one more time to this platform system one and the reported sale price was so small that Verizon didn't file public paperwork recording the transaction.

12:25So quite a fall from grace, but again, it is still around. You were on it this morning. Give us your quick review.

12:31Toby:Not great. Uh, yeah, I was hoping they were doing something fun in the background and making this a very cool app, but no, it's basically like Google maps light. And I put in my home address from here at our office to see how it would work out that navigation. And it didn't even give me an option for transit, which is how people would get actually home and around here in New York City. And then all of the actual commercial establishments, whereas on Google, you would get a pretty robust review system where you got the stars and all the reviews and the photos and all that. It just directs you to Yelp, which I don't think a lot of people use anymore.

13:08Toby:So it wasn't great. I don't know how many people of the new people that they see now are going to stick with the app, but they are getting their 15 seconds of fame. I think the whole, obviously now we have to see what Apple is going to do. They haven't really put out a statement. They've been reached out to by a bunch of media outlets and they haven't said what they're going to do about this particular name change. But I think the funniest part about this whole mess is Lake Ontario wasn't even named after Ontario, Canada. It's not even Canadian. This was named by indigenous people before Canada was a thing, before the United States was a thing 400 years ago.

13:46Toby:It comes from a Wendat word, meaning the lake is beautiful, the lake is big. So not exactly sticking it to Canada because it's the little, yeah, nailed the name, except it is the smallest of the Great Lakes. It's not even Canadian. All right, moving on. Syracuse University may be known as the Orange, but these days it's feeling blue. According to the Wall Street Journal, enrollment has fallen short this year, leading to a budget deficit, a sign that the financial pain hitting smaller colleges is spreading to larger, far more established and iconic ones like CUSE. For years, higher education has been bracing for a devastating enrollment cliff when lower birth rates manifest in a declining number of college students, pitting universities against each other for the fewer students that remain.

14:31Toby:That enrollment cliff appears to be hitting now. The fall of 2025 marked the largest number of Americans born in a single year coming to campus. But by 2041, college enrollments are forecast to fall by 13%. Syracuse is a prime example of what happens when you're a chihuahua in a dog-eat-dog world. The location does it no favors. In a mid-tier city in upstate New York, where the winters are brutal in a trend we've been following for a while, many high school kids in the Northeast are venturing south where you can party in the sunshine all year round. As a somewhat selective but still expensive private school, Syracuse also doesn't offer a clear value proposition to students who want to get more bang for their buck when it comes to college.

15:13Toby:The total cost of attendance there is over$98 ,000. Not trying to pick on Syracuse, big Jerry McNamara fan, but the key point is it could be the canary in the coal mine for other schools. It is brutal. It's the messy middle of the college landscape because you're not quite prestigious enough to command whatever price that you want. And yet you are still a lot more expensive than a public universities, former Syracuse director of international student services. Juan Tavares had this brutal assessment. The problem with Syracuse is that the school thinks of itself as like an Ivy, but it's not. And that's kind of the problem right there in of itself.

15:51I feel so bad picking on the Syracuse, but you are right. We are just using it as emblematic of what is happening in the broader college landscape. The other thing that's happening too is that students are applying to tons of colleges. They know that they're supposed to go to college. So the average student applies to three times as many colleges as 25 years ago. And what that does to the colleges that they are potentially accepted to is you can't actually think that that student is going to arrive on campus if they are accepted. It used to be like, oh they got into Syracuse they're coming to Syracuse no they probably got into 12 other places and will make their decision later in the process which makes planning for these universities much more difficult because you're not sure how many people are actually going to show up which

16:34Toby:is why Syracuse did something pretty crazy this reeks of desperation they don't do it anymore but the Wall Street Journal interviewed one student who had committed to Cal Poly and she also got into Syracuse, but Syracuse facing this enrollment deficit, reached out to her with an offer of $20 ,000 a year after decision day saying here is literally$20 ,000. She didn't make up her mind. And then they send her another$20 ,000 on the spot saying, please come. So this was a very desperate move. Syracuse says it doesn't do this anymore, but it is in deep financial pain. One of the big reasons is there's been a huge decline in international enrollment thanks to Trump's visa crackdown.

17:21Toby:Syracuse international enrollment was down by half for undergrads and graduate students. That is really bad financially because those students pay full price. And when you're looking at the broader scope of these middle tier Northeastern private colleges, Syracuse is falling behind Northeastern, BU, and NYU. Those three enroll 40 % or more of undergraduates who pay the full price at Syracuse. It's just 21%. And this is manifesting in the academics too. Back in the spring, Syracuse announced that it would be cutting 20 % of academic programs, closing or halting enrollment in them. 93 of the 460 academic programs at the school is going to be closed or paused.

18:06Toby:So if you wanted to major in classical civilization, classics, German, Italian, Middle Eastern studies, and modern Jewish studies, or ceramics, or jewelry, and metalsmithing, all things you can major in at Syracuse, those things are no longer available because of this budget pain. I'm so sorry for that whole segment, Syracuse alumni. I'm sure it is a wonderful place and at least used to have a great basketball team. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's Trends right after this. Neil, do you know where AI actually creates an advantage when it comes to deals? Finding coupons?

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20:31Granola, Fireflies, Circleback, Whisper, Calendly. These names pop up more frequently in Zoom meetings than some of my actual co-workers. A trend I want to talk about on today's edition of Toby's Trends. Our society is moving to a state of East Germany. Eric Bond, a VC out of San Francisco, told the Wall Street Journal. Bond describes how meetings with founders have started to feel like a post-game press conference, with microphones inching towards him to pick up on his every word. People used to ask if the intrusion was okay, but now Bond simply assumes every conversation he has in the Bay Area is being recorded.

21:06Some, like startup founder Emmy Chang, have taken it a step further. She uses AI to record every work conversation, but also first dates. Afterwards, she feeds the transcript into claw to see if she could be more engaging and what percent she spent talking versus her date. Of course, the modern panopticon of digital recording devices we find ourselves tangled in brings with it a plethora of legal issues. California, for instance, is an all-party consent state, which means everyone involved in a private conversation must agree to the recording. But oftentimes, AI note-takers don't automatically inform guests that their words are being transcribed.

21:44granola one of the most popular note-taking softwares doesn't announce itself by default leaving the responsibility of disclosing to the person using it neil i'm a little surprised it took us this long to talk about note-takers because i see them literally everywhere these

21:58Toby:days yeah and the fault lines are emerging you have on one hand the granola maxers like the woman that you talked about it takes on your first dates but also there's michelle lim who's the ceo of a small AI startup, told the Wall Street Journal, in the office, we actually get really bummed when we realize we're having a conversation and we forgot to turn on granola. I wish there was a granola in every room. They have it enabled by default for all internal meetings and even when employees are just catching up at their desks. So, hey, how was your weekend? Maybe we'll talk about work. That is being captured by granola at this company.

22:34Toby:On the other hand, you have the folks who are worried about privacy, about being watched and recorded at all times. There's a VC in New York named Jeremy Levine. He told the Wall Street Journal that he changed his name on Zoom from Jeremy Levine to, quote, Jeremy Levine, I do not consent to transcribing or recording. It is really fascinating when you think about what this might do to conversation and canon conversation going forward, because if you enter every conversation with the thought that maybe this will live on well past what I intended it to. Does that change how you interact with people?

23:08And a lot of people note that over time, social norms and laws evolve right alongside technology. But right now we're clearly at kind of a crux in this debate. Is it going to be that everyone is just recording you and you're just, that's simply acceptable in broader society or are laws going to start cracking down? Are people going to push back against it? We've talked about it with meta glasses in those recording devices, this is just another version of that. So fascinating too, as hardware gets more discreet, it's not just going to be glasses. Like sometimes there are little recording pins that happen in everyday conversation.