Why Apple Is Heading Into a Pivotal Moment

23 Jul 2026 · 49 min · 28 chapters

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In short

Odd Lots episode focused on why Apple is entering a “pivotal moment,” tying together iPhone price hikes, Apple’s AI strategy (on-device vs LLMs), and leadership/product roadmap changes, with major implications for China and future device form factors.

Guests

Mark Gurman, managing editor of Consumer Tech at Bloomberg; author of the Power On newsletter.

Guest backgrounds

Gurman is a long-time Apple reporter and newsletter writer (Bloomberg colleague of hosts), known for detailed Apple sourcing and coverage.

Key claims

  • Apple’s recent price increases are “95%” driven by real memory/component shortages, not a conspiracy.
  • Apple missed the AI “boat” after hiring an AI leader (John Giannandrea) who was reportedly a skeptic and under-resourced the effort.
  • Apple’s AI approach emphasizes edge/on-device processing and product integration rather than building frontier LLMs.
  • Siri AI is powered by Apple Foundation Models rebuilt with Google Gemini underpinnings; in China, Siri uses Baidu plus Alibaba as a “censorship engine.”
  • Apple’s next CEO transition is imminent: John Ternus (hardware engineering leader) is positioned as the long-term successor.

Notable examples

  • iPhone color strategy in China (gold in 2013 to “break into China”; “Cosmic Orange” for Pro models; shifting to red tied to Chinese dragon symbolism).
  • Apple’s Neural Engine traces back to the canceled Apple car project (spent $10B+; canceled Feb 2024).
  • Allegations of OpenAI poaching Apple hardware talent and a theft claim involving engineer Chang Liu.
  • Upcoming products: “iPhone Ultra” foldable; AirPods/pendant/smart glasses; smart home security camera system and a desk “command center” device.

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

Tap a time to open that second in VO

Apple's Product Evolution and Market Position

0:00 to 1:24

Discussion on the state of Apple products and their market impact.

“So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises.”

Apple's Product Evolution and Market Position

3:02 to 6:27

Discussion on the state of Apple products and their market impact.

“Tracy, do you know what iPhone you have and what iOS you're currently on?”

The Significance of iPhone Color Choices

6:27 to 7:30

Exploring the cultural and marketing significance of iPhone colors.

“Because you think like the story in consumer tech for decades now has been deflation, right?”

Tim Cook's Leadership and Future Changes

7:30 to 8:28

Insights on Tim Cook's leadership and the upcoming CEO transition.

“The ultimate Apple watcher, not Apple watch, it's an Apple watch, the ultimate Apple observer knower for years and years.”

The Future of Apple's Product Strategy

8:28 to 14:00

Discussion on Apple's need for innovation in product design.

“There is something special about it beyond just being one of the Apple colors that they've always had.”

Apple's Leadership and Product Future

14:00 to 18:06

Discusses John Ternus's role and the future of Apple's product lineup.

“its hardware, its product genes coming out with innovative new things.”

Apple's Leadership and Product Future

18:16 to 19:24

Discusses John Ternus's role and the future of Apple's product lineup.

“Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA and SIPC.”

Competition and Innovation in Smartphones

19:29 to 21:52

Explores the current smartphone landscape and how Apple compares to competitors.

“So we obviously have to talk about the next three years, what these products are.”

Apple's Foldable Phone Future

21:53 to 22:50

Speculates on the anticipated iPhone Ultra and its potential success in China.

“But if you want to talk about the product roadmap, I can dive into that.”

Apple's Challenges with AI

22:51 to 27:42

Analyzes Apple's struggles in the AI sector and past decisions affecting its current standing.

“But like, why does it seem that Apple has in large part, I guess, missed the boat on AI.”
Show all 28 chapters

The Accidental Success of Apple's AI

27:43 to 28:01

Discusses how past projects, like the Apple car, influenced Apple's current AI capabilities.

“some of the more sophisticated ai hardware on device processing in their phones and computers and what have you is because of the Apple car project 12 years ago.”

Apple's AI Strategy: Luck or Intent?

28:01 to 28:39

Explore whether Apple's approach to AI is based on luck or strategic intent.

“But it seems like that was kind of accidental, right?”

The Evolution of Siri AI

28:40 to 29:28

Learn about the advancements in Siri's AI capabilities and their implications.

“And we can talk about that with the price hikes later.”

Siri vs. ChatGPT: Competence Comparison

29:29 to 31:42

Understand how new Siri AI compares to ChatGPT in functionality and user experience.

“A bunch of them went to Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, you name it.”

Siri vs. ChatGPT: Competence Comparison

31:43 to 32:45

Understand how new Siri AI compares to ChatGPT in functionality and user experience.

“Probably catch yourself repeating the same actions.”

Apple's Pricing Strategy Explained

32:55 to 33:41

Analyze the reasons behind Apple's recent price hikes and their broader implications.

“Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., Member FINRA and SIPC.”

Apple's AI Research Direction

33:42 to 34:02

Delve into Apple's vision for AI and their unique approach to model processing.

“Alright, we're going to need a plan here.”

Apple's AI Research Direction

34:06 to 36:22

Delve into Apple's vision for AI and their unique approach to model processing.

“Well, let's talk about the price hikes because this was a pretty big sea change both for Apple, the company, and I guess in a macroeconomic sense, right?”

Siri's Censorship Challenges in China

36:23 to 37:42

Learn about the complexities of Siri's integration and censorship in China.

“not this whole hyperscaler situation with NVIDIA that you're seeing from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, you name it.”

The Apple-OpenAI Rivalry

37:43 to 39:41

Investigate the competitive dynamics between Apple and OpenAI in AI development.

“Does that create issues for China in terms of using Siri in China?”

The Legal Battle: Apple vs. OpenAI

39:42 to 42:00

Explore the ongoing legal issues between Apple and OpenAI regarding employee poaching.

“Basically, if you ask Siri something that Siri doesn't know the answer to, it'll fall back to ChatGPT and grab the answer from there.”

Apple's Legal Troubles with OpenAI

42:00 to 43:25

Discussion on the allegations against Apple engineers and OpenAI.

“Reversed the beginning of this year, Apple finally had what they think is a smoking gun, an engineer named Chang Liu.”

Cultural Challenges of New Technology

43:25 to 46:28

Exploration of societal acceptance for new technology like smart glasses.

“And the Google glasses like 15 years ago and people hated them.”

Future Apple Products: Exciting Innovations

46:28 to 48:26

Overview of upcoming Apple products, including foldable phones and AR glasses.

“Serious privacy questions that are being raised here.”

The Evolution of Augmented Reality

48:26 to 50:29

Discussion on the advancements in AR technology and its market potential.

“So if you use the Vision Pro, I would encourage you to borrow mine or you can go to an Apple store.”

Apple's Market Position and Strategy

50:29 to 54:42

Analyzing Apple's position in the tech market and their strategy moving forward.

“I mean, to some extent, you can say, okay, they missed the boat on AI.”

Apple's Market Position and Strategy

56:38 to 57:21

Analyzing Apple's position in the tech market and their strategy moving forward.

“Policies provided by Hartford Fire Insurance Company and its property and casualty affiliates, Hartford, Connecticut.”

M&M's Popped Caramel Discussion

57:21 to 57:49

A lighthearted conversation about the sound and appeal of M&M's Popped Caramel.

“M &M's Popped Caramel do sound different.”
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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now, a global workforce of 300 ,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94 % of common questions. Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. When you're running a business, the best days are the ones where priorities stay on track. For midsize and large companies, that isn't always easy.

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1:14And when losses do happen, the Hartford can pair that risk control work with insurance coverage grounded in underwriting, risk engineering, and claims experience developed over time. Learn more at thehartford.com slash risk mitigation. Support for the show comes from public.com. If you're actively involved in your portfolio, you probably catch yourself repeating the same actions, buying the dip, manually sweeping idle cash, putting on a hedge. On public, you can now create AI agents that handle all these tasks on your behalf. Just describe what you want to do in plain English. Like if the VIX hits 25, buy a put option on the S &P 500.

1:51Or if my cash balance goes above$20 ,000, move the excess into my direct index. You approve of the workflow and your agent handles the rest. Monitoring the market, watching for your conditions, and executing your strategies exactly as defined. An investing platform driven by your intent, not just your clicks. You can also get full read and write access to your account via the public API. Go to public.com slash market and fund your account in five minutes or less. That's public.com slash market.

2:55Tracy Alloway:Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy, do you know what iPhone you have and what iOS you're currently on? No, I have no idea. I will say, I think it might be like an iPhone 11. It is definitely on its last legs because in the past two days, I can only charge it when it's standing up and plugged in like that. And so I've been creating elaborate like jerry-rigged systems at my desk to actually get this thing to charge. So I got to get a new one. So you know what? You don't have to get a new one. If you go to like any one of these like little random like sort of Apple fix-it shops, they can like take care of that in 10 minutes.

3:37Wait, I have the right to repair my iPhone? Is that true?

3:40Tracy Alloway:They put a little vacuum cleaner in there? That's what the issue always is? I don't think that's it because I tried it already. I think the battery is like legitimately dying. I've had it for like eight years. Well, I've had my – okay. So I think I have no idea what iPhone I'm on. I think I've had it for about four years. I have no like – I don't know anything. But there was a point in my life in which I could have answered. You just said you don't know anything. I don't know anything about my phone. But there was a point where I could have answered, right? Yeah, sure. If at some point in the early 2010s for sure, if someone would say like what iPhone do you have?

4:15Tracy Alloway:You're like, oh, I got the iPhone 4. I got the iPhone 5. Whatever it is. and that was just part of like I would say pop culture like knowing like what generation is and it's been so long you know those Apple presentations everybody would like tune in like it's a World Cup game or something like that like it's been so long since like these were like top of mind things for people you know. So I have never been an Apple watcher as evidenced by the state of my phone but I think part of the issue is also like the the products got pretty good right To the point where you don't need to replace them literally every two years for the latest upgrade.

4:52Or maybe it's just Apple can't think of the enticing upgrades that people need to see in order to buy.

4:58Tracy Alloway:Something that I had forgotten about until someone, I think, pointed out recently. There was a period in which it was very common to see people with very cracked iPhone screens, right? Yes. That was just like, oh, and it was just like really looked, but they were still usable. When was the last time you saw like a badly cracked iPhone screen? Yeah, they never – and like you could drop them now and they're very likely to survive. Do you remember I dropped this phone from the stands at the Jackson Hole Rodeo? Oh, yeah. You were there, I think. Did it fall underneath the – It fell all the way down.

5:28And it was fine, right? And it was fine. Yeah. It was probably like 15 feet or something.

5:32Tracy Alloway:They work really well. Anyway, I think setting aside the fact that, okay, Apple is still a huge successful company. But we should talk about Apple because it is actually one of these things that it's at the intersection of so much that we're interested in right now. It's at the intersection of the future of manufacturing China. It's at the intersection of memory costs and the degree to which that's bleeding into consumer prices. It's the primary way so many people interact with computers and the Internet. and yet it's not a major player in like building AI models. So like how will AI change our relationship to just like either like computing or the internet?

6:17Tracy Alloway:It sits like at the center of so many like important topics right now. And so I sort of want to know like what's going on with Apple. The thing I'm really interested in are the recent price increases. Because you think like the story in consumer tech for decades now has been deflation, right? Things get cheaper to buy. And at the same time, it becomes more expensive to live because food prices go up and health care and child care or whatever. But the story in tech is that prices have been going down. And suddenly we have this sea change announced by Apple, I guess, a few weeks ago or a couple weeks ago now, saying that actually they're going to raise prices pretty much for the first time ever on a bunch of their products.

6:57Tracy Alloway:It's really wild. We think that there should just be some mechanical law that if it's like a gadget, it goes down in price. And for years, I mean, it was just a thing. And so it's extraordinary to see this actually reversing. So I don't know. I want to know what's up with Apple. It's a good time to talk about Apple. Well, I'm very excited to say we do literally have the perfect guest. Someone outside of probably Tim Cook. There's probably no person in the world, including employees at Apple. There is probably no person outside of Tim Cook that knows the company better. The ultimate Apple watcher, not Apple watch, it's an Apple watch, the ultimate Apple observer knower for years and years.

7:43Tracy Alloway:Literally the man who watches Apple and he is a colleague of ours at Bloomberg. I don't think we've ever had him on the podcast before, which is a shame. But we are now going to be speaking with Mark Gurman. He is the managing editor of Consumer Tech at Bloomberg. He's the author of the Power On newsletter, which everyone should subscribe to. So, Mark, thank you so much for coming on OddLots. Yeah, thank you both for having me. Really appreciate it. Good to be here. I noticed you have the orange iPhone. Yeah, and it's a tank. It's what? It's a tank. It's a tank. But can you explain, like, what is it about the orange iPhone specifically?

8:17Tracy Alloway:Is this a thing? Yeah, it is. It is a thing because I noticed that like, you know, in the old days, you get lots of colors. But all the cool people and all the people who like actually like have like regularly refreshed their phones, they all have that orange iPhone. There is something special about it beyond just being one of the Apple colors that they've always had. So here's the backstory, right? For years, the iPhones, they came in black or white. And then back in 2013, they added gold for the iPhone 5S. Why did they do that? they were trying to break into China. Everyone knows gold is a hot color in China.

8:51They were trying to break into China. That's what my one is. It's gold. Right. Right. And then over time, they started coming out with new variations of the iPhones, the cheaper phones. You had the 5C, you had the XR. Now the base phones, like the 14, 15, 16, those had a lot of fun colors, bright colors. You had yellow, you had green, you had blue, purple, pink, whatever. But the people who bought the top end phones, the pro phones, these are the thousand,$1 ,500 phones. They were like I'm kind of getting tired of just black every year or white every year, gold every year or silver, these muted colors.

9:22And so people had started complaining to Apple, we want more colors. And Apple said, what can we do unique for the iPhone pros? And it just so happens that for the pro phones, right, the 17 Pro and Pro Max series, they needed to move to a new material. So the big deal with the iPhone 15 back in 2023 was they moved to titanium. And they started this ad campaign around titanium that your phone is using the same materials that they use on outer space. They always come up with some interesting marketing material. But the problem with titanium, and they only seem to realize this was such a big deal after the phone shipped, was that titanium doesn't dissipate heat well.

10:01It dissipates heat about a tenth as well as aluminum. And Apple obviously was famous for aluminum products for many years. And so for the 17 series, they ditched titanium went back to aluminum aluminum not only dissipates heat much better but you're able to get color to stick to it much better than you can on titanium and so they wanted to do a bunch of fun colors for this first generation aluminum pro phone and so they've got orange they have classic silver which i think actually looks really hot and then you have a dark blue got it but orange it's the hot color it's in all their marketing materials everyone wants to show, hey, I have the new one.

10:40The easiest way to know you have the new one is to get this bold orange phone. They call it Cosmic Orange. And then in China, the orange in particular has been a hot seller. The word on the street is that's because the orange is kind of like Hermes orange. To my eyes, I'm a little colorblind. I don't think this orange looks anything like Hermes orange, but it's close enough. It's close enough. It's close enough. And then this year, they're moving to a red, from orange to red, or like a dark wine color. And why is red important? In China, the dragon, right? Obviously very popular there. So in other words, I think they know what they're doing when it comes to color.

11:15Tracy Alloway:Wow. The Hermes orange iPhone sparks Apple comeback in China, according to a random post on Reddit. Well, OK, since we're talking about China and pop culture to some extent, the other big piece of Apple news recently is that Tim Cook got a World Cup libubu from the Pop Mart CEO. Have you seen this? I saw that. I saw that this morning. Tim Cook's not going to have too many more of those opportunities to have people come visit him at Apple Park and take pictures with him. It's all about John Ternus, his successor very soon. We're just a few weeks away from the new CEO taking over. And this is something, obviously, I'm watching very closely.

11:51If you had me on your podcast two and a half years ago, I could have told you this was the guy. No one else other than me saw it coming, but did a big - You did write some profile pieces that definitely hinted at it. Yeah. Well, tried to do more than hint, but wrote a few about him the last couple of years because I knew he was the guy. And I think it's going to be an interesting time at Apple over the next three years.

12:09Tracy Alloway:Well, this is another way that things have changed, which is that Steve Jobs was a pop culture figure. Tim Cook became a pop culture figure after taking on the mantle of CEO. And I suspect that if you went around and asked 100 people who is the person that they named as the replacement, they wouldn't... I am curious. If you went onto the streets of Manhattan, and you asked 100 people who's the next CEO of Apple, how many would know? One? That seems high to me. One seems high? Yeah. Maybe you ran into me. If I ran into you. Okay, well, maybe this is a good, because obviously, Frame is like, what is the Apple that he is inheriting?

12:49Tracy Alloway:But before we get to that, what is it about him that either you recognized two and a half years ago, and then the board and the company decided, like, this is the man to take Apple into its next era? Oh, it's actually quite simple. believe it or not, two factors. Factor one is the products. When you're doing your, not monologue, but your speech at the beginning of the show, Tracy, you remarked that you don't know which phone you have. You stopped counting which number you're at. But I think the big difference is that there's nothing remarkable about the new numbers anymore. The iPhone looked identical for six years up until this big change with the orange phones and what have you, right?

13:29So I think the board recognized, certainly consumers recognized, people in the company recognized that the product is just lacking in, I would say, sexiness, right? For lack of a better term. Lack of interesting. Victim of its own success. But remember in the Steve Jobs days, right? In the early Tim Cook days, every other year you were getting this breakthrough new phone. Like when was the last time you went and picked up a new Apple product and you were like, holy crap, this thing is totally different, totally amazing. It's been a while. And so I think Apple needed to resuscitate its product design, its hardware, its product genes coming out with innovative new things.

14:07And John Ternus, he was the senior vice president of hardware engineering. He was the guy actually in charge of product development. And so for a company looking to shake itself out of a product lull, putting your new, he's quite new in his senior VP role, your new product person in charge of things, that makes a lot of sense. You don't want another operational person. You don't want a marketing person. You don't want another finance person. We've went down that road now with Tim Cook for 15 years, hugely successful, time for a new era. The simpler answer is that John Ternus is 50, 51 years old.

14:42Every other person on the Apple executive team who could have theoretically replaced Tim Cook with their experience, 60 plus, okay? Some of them 65 plus. And Apple, the way they're run is they're run for the long term. They wanted to avoid Bob Iger to Bob J. Picks situation where you're putting someone in who you know is going to fail or you know is going to retire in three to five years. The Verizon hiring Dan Schulman at 67 years old to be their new CEO, that's a one to three year thing. Apple does not operate in the short term. They operate in the long term. So who's the person we can appoint that's going to be CEO for the next 15, 20 years, John Ternus, the only option.

15:23I'm not saying that he's the perfect choice in the world, but he's the perfect choice for Apple because he really was the only choice. And maybe they fell backwards into him being the only choice. Maybe they didn't. Maybe this was all calculated years ago. I don't think it was. But long story short, I think this is the man for the job at the right time. Well, so I don't know anything about John Ternus other than what you just said and some of your pieces that I've read before, but do we have any evidence that in terms of product design, like he can be quite creative and he can come up with the sexy new features that might get people interested in iPhones again?

15:58Because if he's been doing it for a while, then I would say maybe not. He's not particularly known as an innovator or hasn't been particularly known as an innovator inside Apple. Some people call him a treadmill runner, doing the same thing over and over again. But he also has the awareness to know that Apple needs to do things differently. And he has the credibility and charisma to let Apple do things differently. And quietly, the last three to four to maybe five years, Apple has been working on its most impressive and packed product lineup, product overhaul in its history. The next three years are going to be the biggest three product years in Apple's history.

16:40There is so much stuff coming. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it and I've already removed my credit card from my wallet and put it in my drawer, locked it, and threw the key out the window. Not really. I'm going to get all of it. But point being, there's a lot coming. If you're an Apple fanboy like myself, I'll admit it. If you are a tech enthusiast like myself, this is so freaking exciting.

17:19Support for the show comes from Public.com. If you're actively involved in your portfolio, you probably catch yourself repeating the same actions. Buying the dip, manually sweeping idle cash, putting on a hedge. On Public, you can now create AI agents that handle all these tasks on your behalf. Just describe what you want to do in plain English. Like, if the VIX hits 25, buy a put option on the S &P 500. Or if my cash balance goes above$20 ,000, move the excess into my direct index. You approve of the workflow and your agent handles the risk. Monitoring the market, watching for your conditions, and executing your strategies exactly as defined.

17:58An investing platform driven by your intent, not just your clicks. You can also get full read and write access to your account via the public API. Go to public.com slash market and fund your account in five minutes or less. That's public.com slash market. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor.

18:25Tracy Alloway:Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now, a global workforce of 300 ,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94 % of common questions. Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. IBM. Wait! I came in for two things. How is this$47? Alright, we're going to need a plan here.

19:06Just start simple with Bank of America Advantage Safe Balance Banking. No overdraft item fees, no monthly maintenance fee if you're under 25. Plus, as a new checking customer, you can earn$100 when you open an account and make qualifying Zeller debit transactions. Oh, that's actually really simple. Safe balance banking. One less thing to figure out. Learn more at bofa.com slash earn100. Terms and conditions apply. Bank of America and a member FDIC. All right.

19:29Tracy Alloway:So we obviously have to talk about the next three years, what these products are. But just one quick question before we get into that conversation. You know, there was a time when I think everyone agreed that from a smartphone perspective, the iPhone was unambiguously the best product in the world, that there were other phones that like maybe on a price adjusted standpoint, maybe were better deals or whatever, etc. There are really good phones now being made by other companies, including Chinese manufacturers who, like, I saw the foldable phones and things like that. They're actually really cool and they're good.

20:07Tracy Alloway:And I think in some cases, maybe the camera quality is better for some of these others, though I'm not sure. If you buy the most expensive iPhone that you can buy right now, is it unambiguously the best smartphone in the world? And what is the gap between that and the next biggest best? In the Western world, the iPhone is unambiguously the best smartphone when you factor it in totality. But they're not the most creative phone. They don't have the best form factors. They don't have the best screen technology. I would probably give that to Samsung by a small margin. Don't forget Samsung designs and develops all those components, right?

20:48From a camera perspective in the Western world, you're talking about Google. Google identified a decade ago that the magic to making a better camera isn't necessarily the sensors and the hardware, it's the AI. And Apple, as we've undoubtedly know, has not been exactly a leader in the AI space. But when you're talking about the combination of design, hardware, accessibility, right, like a product that people understand how to use, ecosystem, customer service, the whole nine yards, Apple is certainly in the lead. You go to China, it's a whole different world. I don't think people understand that China is just literally a different planet when it comes to technology.

21:28They have foldables. They have trifolds. They have this. They have that. They have glasses. They have bigger tablets. They have these tabletop robotic devices on people's desks. The cameras on the phones in China, you're talking about Vivo, you're talking about Xiaomi, Huawei, they will destroy Apple head to head. It's a big, big difference. And so Apple needs to step it up in China when it comes to hardware. I think the iPhone Air and the iPhone 17 Pro Max were good steps in that direction. But if you want to talk about the product roadmap, I can dive into that. I think the foldable phone, I'm calling it the iPhone Ultra, Apple's coming out with it in September, October timeframe, is going to be really hot, really successful in China.

22:13It's going to be a status symbol. People are driven to status symbols in China. It's going to be$2 ,500 roughly. And so I think it's going to be a big seller there, given how popular foldables are there. I'm certainly going to be first in line because I have been waiting for a foldable iPhone for a number of years. Samsung, absolutely the pioneer in the category. They've been working on them for a long time now. They finally got really suitable for daily use a year or two ago. Apple will be there from day one. I would just not want a non iOS phone if I'm being honest with you. Yeah, right.

22:43Tracy Alloway:That's still a huge thing. I'm going to save the rest of the product launches for the end of the podcast. So we entice people to listen all the way through. But you mentioned Apple and AI. So I think we should talk about this. But like, why does it seem that Apple has in large part, I guess, missed the boat on AI. Tim Cook, his worst decision in his history at Apple was who he hired to manage artificial intelligence at Apple. Bless his soul, perfectly nice guy. Bless his heart. Yes. Yes. He's that bad. John, Andrea, by all accounts, a thought leader in artificial intelligence, but also a skeptic of AI.

Read the full transcript

23:22And so John G, JG, as he goes as inside of Apple. He was the senior VP of AI at Apple. He was hired in 2018. This was the guy who was supposed to make sure that Apple became dominant in AI, in generative AI, totally missed the boat, apparently didn't see it coming or if he saw it coming, did not put the right staff and resources on it. So clearly that was a big miss and Apple should still be embarrassed about it.

23:47Tracy Alloway:I think it's worth noting, by the way here, Apple is trading at an all-time high. And actually some of the other, So the companies that are among the really big tech companies that have invested more in AI and are doing quite better are not necessarily. Yeah, but Apple, I would be happy for them if this was a strategy. No, no, no. They fell ass backwards into it. I totally get it. But what I'm saying is that the market has not really penalized them for the fact that they're not really a player in AI. whereas you have these companies that are very serious players in AI, and I'm thinking like Google and Microsoft, and they're like, the market has not rewarded them for having technology that is near the AI frontier.

24:35Tracy Alloway:Now, when we talk about AI at Apple, I think there's sort of like two different things that we could be talking about. So one of them is what we'd say like edge-based AI, is there AI that's like on the chip that can make a photo render much better than say like a traditional camera architecture? That's like one kind of way we talk about AI. It does a better job of like capturing what the user wants to capture using artificial intelligence. And then there is this other question of like, well, is the company building something that we call a large language model, which is a very separate conversation.

25:16Tracy Alloway:And it's a different way of like understanding what we're talking about with AI. Right here, right now, 2026. So it's like, okay, inside Apple, we want to correct our past 10 years of like missing out on AI. What do they want to achieve with AI? Well, there's a lot here. And I think I'll take it back to why Apple's at an all-time high. I think investors are smart and they actually have a good understanding of what kind of company Apple is. And Apple is not an AI company. It's not a hardware company. It's not a software company. It's a product company. The magic of Apple, and this was Steve's big thing, is bringing it all together in one package.

25:56Apple may not have the best phone in terms of the technology or the camera, but the complete package, unambiguously the best. I think consumers realize that AI is going to shift into products, and products that combine hardware, software, services, and AI. And you're going to see some great stuff from them coming in the future. We'll get back to it in the roadmap section in the podcast. But I think that's their goal, to create products that merge all these things together, where the AI disappears into the background. Now, I want to go back 12 years ago.

26:27Tracy Alloway:Okay. 12 years ago, Apple started this big project. The idea was to compete with Tesla and build an autonomous car. I remember that. And that project was canceled in February of 2024, so two and a half years ago. So they spent well over 10 billion on it, hired thousands of people, reorganized the company around it. And closing a project of this magnitude is not something that has a comparison in Apple history. This was unprecedented. It was a complete disaster, a huge failure. But there was one piece of the pie there that is actually really interesting. It's called the Apple Neural Engine. And so in order to do self-driving cars, you need to process a ton of data at very high speeds in real time.

27:12See the world around you, process it, and so the car knows where it's going. And the magic sauce that Apple was trying to create for the Apple car was the smartest onboard computer or chip in order to do level five autonomous driving. that chip they started working on around 2014 eventually got shrunk down into what they call the neural engine of the a &e and they put it in the iphone 10 in 2017 and that's what allowed features like face id and animoji and augmented reality to work so the only reason that apple has some of the more sophisticated ai hardware on device processing in their phones and computers and what have you is because of the Apple car project 12 years ago.

27:54And so that's a little secret background. If it wasn't for the Apple car, Apple would be even in a more terrible place when it came to artificial intelligence. Okay. But it seems like that was kind of accidental, right? Well, it's all accidental, right? It feels like the common theme with Apple is that they're lucking out a lot. Yeah. Okay. But would we expect that? They would say that's strategy, but I don't think so. But do we have a sense of what they actually want to achieve in AI? Like, or are they just going to experiment with some stuff and maybe it'll stick, maybe it won't, maybe it'll be useful 10 years later?

28:26You know, monetizing AI, you know, the jury is still out on how exactly you do that. I mean, you see the amount of money that OpenAI is making versus how much they're losing. It's not entirely clear yet. But I think Apple has a proven business model. It is hardware with very high margins, right? And we can talk about that with the price hikes later. But Apple wants to roll out AI hardware products, AirPods with cameras, pendant with cameras, smart glasses. AirPods with cameras? AirPods, a pendant, smart glasses.

28:55Tracy Alloway:Is that like a thing you'd put out like kind of a necklace? A necklace or put on your pocket here. Eyes and ears for your phone. AI cloud processing in order to feed context into your phone and your iCloud account to do AI tasks. Those are going to sell and those are going to make money. And so Apple has a proven business model there. The other thing is they have this new Siri AI, and what they've done is they took their artificial intelligence models. Those are called AFM or Apple Foundation models. That whole team just basically got blown up over the last year. A bunch of them went to Meta for$50 million packages.

29:29A bunch of them went to Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, you name it. So Apple opened up the hood of their models. They're paying billions of dollars to Google to have redeveloped the underpinnings of their models. And so now Siri, now Siri is competent.

29:44Tracy Alloway:Wait, wait. So this is, I mean, this is one of the ironies is that Apple was truly one of the pioneers in talking to computers in plain language. Well, they launched Siri. Yeah, they launched Siri. They launched Siri in 2011. And I was on another show here the other day and the host was telling me that he asked Siri, he's got the old Siri still, when is the next Fed meeting? I know you guys like talking about that. And Siri's response was, there are no Fed meetings in your calendar. Okay. I have the new Siri AI, and so I said, when's the next Fed meeting? The next Fed meeting gave me the date.

30:16Wait, so, sorry, what powers Siri AI's intelligence? Today, it's Apple Foundation models that have been rebuilt with Google underpinnings. It's Gemini. Okay. Okay.

30:28Tracy Alloway:Got it. Okay, so going forward, is the idea that Siri will just be a Gemini skin, as they would say? Like, is that a sense? It's more than... Just from the language, sort of the way we all talk about AI today is like a model, whatever this thing you talk to. Yeah, it's like a re-skinned Gemini that has access to your personal data. So you can ask it about your text messages, your photos, your emails. It's actually pretty nifty. You know, one thing I've been doing, people send me calendar appointments on like my work computer. I take a picture of my work screen with the phone and then it just adds it to my calendar through Siri.

31:03Oh, that's pretty nice. So, you know, how many people have that use case? I don't know. But it does work. it's extremely competent i would say you guys know video editing software okay you know iMovie yeah okay so there's like iMovie versus Final Cut Pro yeah yeah all right so before Siri AI Apple had nothing now they've got iMovie ChatGPT's Final Cut Pro got it they've got a competent product that 95 % of the world can use but they don't got that step which allows you to do hardcore research, documents, drafting, editing, etc., travel planning, everything you want to use ChatGPT for, and do all of it.

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33:57Oh, that's actually really simple. Safe balance banking. One less thing to figure out. Learn more at bfa.com slash earn100. Terms and conditions apply. Bank of America and a member FDIC. Well, let's talk about the price hikes because this was a pretty big sea change both for Apple, the company, and I guess in a macroeconomic sense, right? Right. So we're told that the increases are because of memory shortages and component shortages and competing with the hyperscalers for all these things. How much of that is true? 95 % of it. Okay. I think that the other component of this, speaking of components, is that inflation, real thing over the last, you know, five, seven years, Apple product prices really have not increased over that time as other components got expensive and as, you know, inflation has gone up.

34:44And so I'm not one of those people who think this is a conspiracy theory to finally, you know, raise prices and blame memory. Memory is a real thing. If you look at the price adjustments that they've made, it is entirely in line with how much more they're paying for memory on a product by product basis. For instance, the Vision Pro went up by$200, right? Six percent. Nobody's buying the Vision Pro. They're not going to do anything to lose one percent of their margin. And so they probably set a date on the calendar several months ago and they said, we're going to use our cash balance or whatever.

35:15We're going to use our margins to eat the additional cost of memory up until this date. The date hit, they flipped the switch, they did the price hikes. And you'll see them do more price hikes in September for these new phones.

35:26Tracy Alloway:It just occurs to me, it's on the AI component. It's like you see these huge budgets that the Alphabets and the Amazons and the Microsofts of the world are spending. If there's one company that knows about, why don't we let someone else do the big capital expenditures? It's Apple. That's what they're doing. But their core history from partnering with Foxconn is essentially, you know, there's this really expensive aspect of the process where it's very physical. Let's just get another company to do the really high capital expenditure part. You're spot on. It's straight out of that playbook. But AI is pretty darn fundamental.

36:05And I think eventually they're going to have to rebuild that AI research team and spend the money to rebuild AI. Now I'm saying you can do it without those hyperscaler expenses. Apple never wanted this. Apple's vision for AI, and they talked about this two years ago, was on-device model processing. It was about using Apple Mac chips in the cloud, not this whole hyperscaler situation with NVIDIA that you're seeing from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, you name it. And so the irony here is that this is not a world that Apple was trying to push. They want it all on the phone. And I think eventually these LLMs are going to to be able to shrink to the point where you can put them on the phone.

36:40But for right now, cloud is the game in town to make better artificial intelligence. Do they have other options for getting chips and components? I know they've been trying to source out of China, for instance. So they are testing memory from CXMT and YMTC. Those are two Chinese memory providers. There's actually, you can count on your fingers, that's the number of memory suppliers there are in the world. There's about five, right? You've got Micron, SK Hynix, Samsung, and the two Chinese companies I named. They already used the other three, the Korean one and the American ones. They're going to do this.

37:14I'm convinced that they're going to start using Chinese memory instead of Chinese iPhone SKUs. Apple already has a unique SKU for China. So being able to add the Chinese memory into that and carve that out, I think is not that big of a lift from an operational standpoint. The bigger issue for them will be the PR campaigns for Micron and Korea, trying to make Apple look bad for using Chinese memory. If you're using Chinese memory in Chinese phones, I think people in China know the deal there. I'm not really sure why it's the problem of any other country.

37:42Tracy Alloway:If Siri is re-skinned Gemini... It's a little bit more than that. Does that create issues for China in terms of using Siri in China? And are they going to have to use DeepSeek or something like that for the Chinese to use? How are they handling that? Okay. And this is actually a timely question because earlier this week, after a two-year delay, Apple finally got Chinese government approval to launch Siri in China. Now we're talking about the old school Siri, not the new Siri AI, but here's what they've done. So there's basically two components to Siri that you can break down. You've got the Apple models, and then you have integration with Google and you have integration with OpenAI.

38:21That's the situation in the United States. And so in China, you've got Apple models and then the outside partner is Baidu. They're the big Google equivalent for search. And so that makes sense to have them. instead of OpenAI in China, which both don't work in the region. But there's also one other player. It's a company you may have heard of called Alibaba. And so what Apple's doing with Alibaba is they've got Alibaba models in the system, and it serves as what I call a censorship engine. And this censorship engine is constantly calling back between Apple and the Chinese government, getting Chinese government approval on updates to the models on the phone.

39:02Yeah, because the censorship announcements get updated really, really quickly, right? And keywords are now problematic that weren't five minutes ago.

39:11Tracy Alloway:But that model from Alibaba is essentially a way of keeping the Baidu model in check. And the Apple model. Okay. And the Apple model. But yes, that is what Alibaba is there to do is a censorship engine. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. It's models on top of models. Yeah. Models all the way down. Well, that's the ultimate vision for Apple Intelligence and for Siri is to make the model interchangeable. Now, we haven't even talked about this big war between Apple and OpenAI. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I know. But the phone, as you know, it has ChatGPT baked in as a Siri extension. Basically, if you ask Siri something that Siri doesn't know the answer to, it'll fall back to ChatGPT and grab the answer from there.

39:55With the new Siri AI, it's going to know the answer to basically everything you ask. you don't really need chat gpt these current ios 27 betas have chat gpt still as part of that system but the ultimate goal and i think this is going to happen more quickly because of the lawsuit apple's going to pull the chat gpt exclusivity in my opinion and they're going to allow you to install any third-party lm onto your phone to use through siri interesting wait okay Okay, talk to us about the lawsuit because this seems dramatic. Two years ago, three years ago, a dude named Tank Tan, vice president of iPhone product design, Apple Watch product design, AirPods, acoustics, accessories, all sorts of stuff.

40:41One of the most senior executives at Apple and by all accounts, the number two under John Ternus and the hardware engineering organization comes to Ternus, comes to Apple and he says, I'm out of here. I'm going with startup. This is early December of 23. They're like, okay, well, you have your tentacles tied up in so many different areas. You can't leave immediately. So they're like, okay, stick around until February. So he sticks around until February, but in behind the scenes, he's already cooking up a new AI devices company with Johnny Ive, the former Apple design chief, and Sam Altman runs open AI, obviously at the time still does.

41:17And their whole goal is to create a new range of devices that will destroy the iPhone, combining the engineering and design prowess of some of the best people who used to work at Apple with what at the time was widely considered the best AI, lethal combo. And Tang Tan has been hiring over the last year, two years, an exceptional number of people from Apple. They've pillaged Apple's hardware engineering ranks. They have 400 former Apple employees in their hardware division at OpenAI right now. My guess is that's between 5 % and 8 % of the total OpenAI employee pool is a former Apple employee. Kind of nuts.

41:54Okay. Apple has been beside itself for two years about this. The hiring, the poaching, the fact that they're trying to compete with them using their best former people. Nothing you could really do about it. Reversed the beginning of this year, Apple finally had what they think is a smoking gun, an engineer named Chang Liu. He allegedly breaks into Apple servers and steals engineering presentations and such and gives them to OpenAI. And so Apple begins building a big case against Chang Liu and Tang Tan, who they allege was bringing Apple employees into OpenAI offices with prospective job offers and asking them to bring in Apple prototypes and other internal Apple equipment to give them a look at what's coming down the road.

42:33What's OpenAI's defense here? Because when you read the complaint, it seems pretty bad. Here's my take. Overall, the complaint is very thin. Really? Very thin. the stuff about Tang Tan very thin a lot of that is common practice in Silicon Valley for recruiting and meetings with employees that they've drummed up into a Netflix special that's my take the Chang Lu stuff if true is extremely serious and he's in trouble and that's a big problem so that is the delineation there in my head in terms of the recruiting and pillaging Apple's hardware engineering ranks I don't know how kosher that is I'm sure there was some you know funky stuff going on that strikes me as

43:13Tracy Alloway:It's just business in California. It's business in California. But we'll see where this lands. But the one thing I'll say is if you read the Apple complaint, they say so many times in that complaint, we need to do discovery to know what's going on. This is a good segue to like the new form factors that we might expect for gadgets. And the Google glasses like 15 years ago and people hated them. People still hate them. My old colleague at Business Insider, he like got beaten up or like got physically. Yeah, remember that story in California? Because someone wanted to steal them? No, he was wearing the Google Glasses and people found it, you know, is just like very upset about it.

43:52People really hate them. Yeah, because of the recording.

43:54Tracy Alloway:Yeah, everything. Well, Apple has a high bar to cross there because their next big thing is glasses. So this is what I'm getting at. And there's a lot of interest in this. And we know that Meta obviously is like really pushing on this hard, etc. etc. Setting aside like market demand for some of these new form factors, it feels to me like we are very close to crossing a deeply uncomfortable cultural threshold. Yes. With all of this stuff. Yes. Where it's like people do not want, you know, if you had a little pendant on in your pocket. You mean my body cam? Yeah, your body cam, like right now recording this.

44:31Tracy Alloway:And it's like, oh, Well, yeah, I have the, like, people would be very uneasy, to say the least. There's a high bar. So when we think about the range of, like, quote, AI gadgets, setting aside even pure market demand, are we going to be in this era where, like, we're really going to have to, like, have some serious cultural fights about what's acceptable for people to have on their person at any given time? I walked into a family member's house a couple weeks ago. I got the new metaglasses for review and they were very upset that I walked in with the metaglasses thinking that I'm recording them, right?

45:11And how are they supposed to know? I could be recording them. I wasn't. I assured them of such. But people like jailbreak the light. Yes, it's uncomfortable. You know, there are people who, yeah, use a black Sharpie to cut out the light and all sorts of stuff.

45:24Tracy Alloway:And someone will sell a phone from China that doesn't have any light or any outward indicia of it being looking... Like, they will look... There's no doubt that in the short term, there will be glasses that are absolutely indistinguishable from normal glasses. Yes, and then Metta's talking about what they call the SuperSense glasses right now, which are recording at all times versus the current ones where they record as you snap or ask it to record. Yeah. I don't know... This is coming for sure. From Apple? No, from all... There are going to be a lot of these products that are going to be recording a lot And we will not know, we will have no idea who is recording what's going on.

46:01Well, you know, Amazon's got new ones coming. Apple's got new ones coming or their first one's coming. Google is working on this. Samsung is about to launch theirs. Everyone's doing this. And so, you know, Meta has a lot of privacy baggage and they've sort of, you know, soiled the market for Apple and these other players ahead of time by making people uncomfortable with this stuff. And I think Meta gets a little bit too hard of a time, right? I think people go a little bit harder on Meta than they should. But there are serious privacy questions that are being raised here. Serious privacy questions that are being raised here.

46:33And it's going to be a very high bar for Apple to meet this moment and get people using these things despite those concerns. All right. Well, other than the glasses that everyone seems to hate, talk to us about what we should actually be saving up our money for, I guess, in terms of new product launches. Yeah. Well, this foldable phone, the Ultra, is going to be really fantastic. Open it up. It's like an iPad mini. Pretty excited about it. And it's not going to be as durable or priced as well as a pro phone or one of the low-end phones. But I think it's going to be pretty exciting. The AirPods, the pendant, the smart glasses are going to be very exciting.

47:07The smart home. So they're coming in with three different smart home products. One is an in-home security camera system tied to a new Apple security system. I think they want to compete in some fashion with ADT or some of the home security companies. Interesting. There's a landmark smart home device, which you can put on your desk, put on your wall, and you can walk up to it and it'll know who it is. It'll basically bring Siri AI to life, pull up your music, you can do video conferencing, you can do apps, smart home appliances, et cetera. It's like a smart home command center. And then there's another device.

47:38It's a robotic version. So the one I just described has a seven inch screen and there's a nine inch screen version and it's gonna be on a robotic arm so it can move around on your desk. So you can look at it, you can point it to look at people on a video conference. It's kind of nifty. I don't know how well that's gonna do, But you know what? They're trying things at least. And then tons of new Macs, new MacBook Neos, new iMacs. Augmented reality glasses is the biggie. Probably end of decade, early next decade. Taking the glasses, but being able to give you information.

48:11Tracy Alloway:Yeah, I was going to say, so people were talking about AR 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and hadn't taken off. What is going to be different that it's like, okay, now people actually like AR and find use for it? It's the visual fidelity. Okay. It's the quality. Have you used the Vision Pro? No. Okay. So if you use the Vision Pro, I would encourage you to borrow mine or you can go to an Apple store. The visual quality is amazing. It's the best movie watching experience. Once your eyes see that quality. Oh, these are the big headsets. Yeah. Yeah, I saw someone say recently they watched Citizen Kane on their Vision Pro and they said it was amazing.

48:48Yeah, it's amazing. Anyways.

48:50Tracy Alloway:It's a better experience than watching a big screen TV on your couch. If you don't have a family. Yeah, I find something so dystopian about like two people sitting on a couch with their glasses on. And they have marketing around that. And they're trying to make two people wearing a Vision Pro have better interactivity. I think it's crazy. I guess you can hold hands while you do it. But long story short, the glasses of 10 years ago and even today, the AR glasses, the visual quality is garbage, right? You can hardly see what's going on. Apple, their goal is to make a leapfrog AR product. They're not going to get anywhere near the Vision Pro quality, but they're going to get to a high quality place.

49:27Tracy Alloway:Okay, so the next three years. Anything else? So it's like foldable phones, Vision Pro. So we'll start off with the foldable phone and the 18 Pro and Pro Max this fall. You're going to get a new OLED iPad mini. I was going to ask, no one even cares about the new iPad mini. It doesn't get mentioned until now. That's what I'm excited about as an Apple Luddite. I wrote a story about it today. So you're going to get a new OLED display. So same visual clarity that you get on an iPhone. The current iPad mini is stuck on an old LCD. Next year, you're going to get some of the wearables. So you're going to get that foldable phone 2 actually in the fall.

50:00But you're also going to get the AirPods with cameras. And you're going to get the smart glasses. And then the other big one next year is the 20th anniversary iPhone. the iPhone 20 or the iPhone XX, whatever you want to call it. And that is going to be an all glass phone that meshes well with the liquid glass, the new software they rolled out last year and updated this year. The year after that, you're going to get things like the tabletop robot. I talked about the smart home appliances and what have you. So it's a big next three years for Apple and augmented reality glasses behind that. They've been playing with this big tablet, foldable tablet foldable ipad with a 20 inch screen and then that main smart home device i talked about the smart home hub that'll be in the next few months so that's an exciting one

50:44Tracy Alloway:mark german thank you so much for coming on odd lots that was great i learned quite a bit good thanks for having me this was awesome

51:02Tracy Alloway:so tracy i thought that was very interesting i needed that catch up on this company that once like occupied a little bit of my mind share and now i hardly ever think at all i do think it's interesting like as a starting point for all of the like they're not the best phones in the world especially when you bring China into it, they've been stumbling on AI for over a decade, that it's like the one big tech stock that right now today, July 16th, is at an all-time high. Well, I thought it's interesting. I mean, to some extent, you can say, okay, they missed the boat on AI. But on the other hand, they've sort of stuck true to their ethos as a product company that often, I don't want to say leeches off the technology of others, but it's very good about sourcing tech from other companies, right?

51:48Tracy Alloway:Right. I would say, you know, Mark described it's a product company, right? But the other thing is it's a supply chain integration story. Obviously, that was like, that's what Tim Cook's expertise was, etc. You know, there's an interesting episode we did. I remember with Sam D 'Amico, the Impulse Labs. Yeah, he was talking about it. And he said that term, and I guess it's actually originally an Elon term, which is that the factory is the product, right? Which is really interesting. And so you're just like, why have they been this unified experience that combines really good hardware with really good software?

52:25Tracy Alloway:The product is their ability to integrate. And it's not like that's what they're good at. That's their thing. They can integrate many different things better than anyone else. And then people really like the product. Yeah. But then on the other hand, I guess the question is if something like a camera, if the edge on a camera now comes from AI versus like the actual hardware components, then are you going to get a big AI company, a hyperscaler that starts, you know, becoming a product company? Or you just have like one of these Chinese companies where AI is like one random thing they do. And even that is 10 times better than the, you know what I'm saying?

53:01Tracy Alloway:And so I do think like pretty clearly from a pure product standpoint, there is probably a limit to your point of like how far they'll go if their core technology is just not frontier. It's so crazy to me that, like, there are years ahead of everyone else in terms of conceiving of talking to your computer with your voice, and then they just, like, completely drop the ball on that. Well, I do also think the other thing, you know, we talked about their ability to entice buyers for these new products. And a lot of the stuff, it sounds cool. A robotic arm that sits on your desk and points at people, I guess.

53:39But on the other hand, like, How much of it do people actually need? How much is it going to cost given that, as we were discussing, memory and components are in short supply at the moment? I don't know.

53:52Tracy Alloway:I also think, who knows, I guess part of it may be, you know, other companies are all going to build similar gadgets, etc. Like, again, the iPhone bringing together this entire ecosystem, like, what are the, I just like, I don't know, I guess the flip side is like, we don't care at all anymore about what iOS we're on, etc. And it hasn't hurt the company. Well, I was going to say one question we should have asked Mark and I forgot, but how much of a moat is iOS now actually? Because people will say like, oh, I don't want a non-iOS phone. But on the other hand, you don't know what iOS you're on.

54:26Tracy Alloway:No. All I know is that if I didn't have one, all my friends would make fun of me for being green text in the group chats. That's the important thing. Who's the Android person that's making the group text show up in green chat? Expose yourself. And so I don't want to be that person. All right. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand, Dash O 'Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano.

55:01Tracy Alloway:And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Odd Lots. We have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes, and you can chat about all these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash Odd Lots. And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when we provide you with Apple updates, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

55:42Thank you.

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56:48With Domino's best deal ever since they just added stuffed crust. Any pizza, any toppings, now with stuffed crust for$9.99. It's a long-term contract with no release clause.

56:58Tracy Alloway:Only$9.99? Yeah, that sounds like the move. I'm heading straight to Domino's. Price is higher for some locations. Excludes Excel and Specialty Pizzas. Select this offer from$6.15 through$7.26. Online only. Size availability varies by crust height. Max 7 toppings, 6 for man and New York style crust. Minimum purchase required for delivery. Prices, participation, delivery area, and charges may vary.

57:21Tracy Alloway:M &M's Popped Caramel do sound different. Oh no, people are going to be obsessed. What do you mean? Hmm, people hate the sound of chewing. Maybe they won't like the crunch. Maybe we're saved. Wait a minute. Yellow. Huh? Have you been eating them this whole time? Mmm, so tasty. Hands off us. M &M's Popped Caramel. It's more fun together.

From the publisher

There used to be a time when the latest product release from Apple was a huge deal. But lately, it's been kind of 'meh,' and a lot of the hype in the tech world has been directed at companies doing things with AI. For better or worse, Apple seems to have largely missed the AI boom. But there are signs things might be changing. In addition to appointing John Ternus as the new CEO to replace Tim Cook, Apple is expected to unleash a slate of new products, including AirPods with cameras and foldable phones. Meanwhile, it's also raising prices on a bunch of its devices for the first time in its history, thanks to a shortage of memory. So can Apple recapture the hype and find new products to entice customers? In this episode we speak with Mark Gurman, managing editor for consumer tech at Bloomberg and one of the world's most prominent Apple-watchers. We talk to him about Apple's AI strategy, the origins of the OpenAI and Apple legal battle, what to expect with Ternus in the CEO seat, and when and why iPhones stopped being a sexy piece of hardware.

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