Machine Language Capabilities -- Random Look -- Apple Transition -- Tim Cook --> John Ternus -- April 21, 2026

Locator: 50578APPLE.

Tim Cook is really leaving John Ternus with a nice stable of integrated workstations, laptops, iPhones, watches, etc. Interestingly, Ternus has a huge experience with VR. I've always felt Americans were not ready for VR as marketed by META or Apple. It will be interesting if Ternus can change that. It's not that the technology is not good -- it's probably way better than needed -- it (VR) is simply something for which Americans have not found a need. 

While the emphasis has been on LLM and AI and chatbots and .... and .... Apple has pretty much managed to widen the gap between itself and the competition.  

In addition to the hardware and software, it appears Tim Cook will leave an incredibly good blueprint for AI going forward. The Google - Apple partnership was brilliant. Somewhere along the line, Tim Cook reviewed the concept of "core competencies" (raise your hand if you recall "core competencies").  

AI prompt: Apple's MR chip's Neural Engine is capable of 38 trillion operations per second. How does that compare with TPUs (or similar) in typical Dell laptop? 

Reply: 

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The MacBook Veo

AI prompt: MacBook Veo, what chip? The M4? 

Reply: 

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Core Competencies

AI prompt: What year and which companies for strategic planning took the lead in advocating for and following "core competencies"? In other words, for US publicly traded corporations, when was the concept of "core competencies" a thing and which companies address their core competencies when laying out a strategic plan? 

Reply:  

Apple had to have a consumer-facing interface for AI and that turned out to be Siri. But, trying to develop its own machine language (AI / chatbot) was way, way, way too expensive and too challenging -- and definitely not one of Apple's core competencies -- just as building automobiles with FSD (supervised or not) was not one of Apple's core competencies. In fact, even for companies whose core competency is POV/FSD, it has not been an easy road. Exhibit A: Ford. Exhibit B: even Tesla is struggling.  

So, Apple pulled the plug on POV/FSD (as far as I know) early on -- one of the best things it ever did -- making that decision. Whether under new leadership .... 

Likewise,  Apple appears to have pulled the plug on their all-in-house chatbot (Siri) and gone with a hybrid -- Siri plus partnering with Google (Gemini) That was brilliant. They learned a lot in the process but their decision to partner with Google -- very, very smart. Hopefully that's all behind them now and John Ternus can move on to bigger, better and newer things.