AI Summary
5 min readThe iPhone 17 Pro Max comes in a color called "cosmic orange," and it is not a coincidence. Apple needed to move away from titanium because it dissipates heat about a tenth as well as aluminum, which caused problems with the iPhone 15 series. Aluminum takes color much better than titanium, so Apple used the switch back to aluminum as an opportunity to give its premium phones a bold, recognizable color for the first time. The orange is a deliberate signal: if you see someone with that phone, you know they have the new one. In China, where orange reads as close to Hermès orange, it has been a hot seller. Next year, the flagship color shifts to a dark wine red, timed to the Year of the Dragon. This kind of granular product detail is the domain of Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who joined Odd Lots to explain why Apple is entering what he calls its most consequential three-year stretch in history — and why the company is simultaneously raising prices for the first time in years, stumbling on AI, and preparing for a CEO transition that most people cannot name.
The CEO Handoff That Almost No One Saw Coming
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:36) **Why Apple Matters Now** - The hosts frame the episode: Apple sits at the intersection of manufacturing, memory costs, AI, and consumer tech, yet has lost its pop-culture cachet.
- 2 (06:11) **Introducing the Ultimate Apple Watcher** - Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman joins to dissect Apple’s current state and future.
- 3 (10:20) **The CEO Succession: John Ternus Takes Over** - Why the hardware chief is the right (and only) choice to succeed Tim Cook.
- 4 (15:13) **The Coming Product Tsunami** - A teaser of the next three years as Apple’s most packed product cycle ever.
- 5 (19:34) **Is the iPhone Still the Best Smartphone?** - A nuanced comparison: dominant in the West, but falling behind in China and on AI-driven camera tech.
- 6 (22:01) **Apple’s AI Miss: The John Giannandrea Mistake** - Why Apple fell behind in generative AI, traced to a single hiring decision.
- 7 (25:23) **Apple’s AI Strategy: Product, Not Model** - How Apple plans to win by integrating AI into hardware, not by building a standalone LLM.
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
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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