The succession everyone called for years just happened, and it's the most revealing personnel decision in tech this year. Apple is the company most behind in AI: Siri delayed three times, Apple Intelligence launched with hallucinated news headlines, and the upgraded assistant is reportedly going to be powered by Google Gemini under the hood. The obvious move was to put a software or AI executive in the CEO seat. Instead the board picked the guy who runs hardware engineering. Ternus has been at Apple 25 years. He's a mechanical engineer. He's never run software, services, or AI. His resume is iPhone, iPad, Mac, AirPods, Apple Watch, Vision Pro, and the M-series silicon transition. He is the silicon-and-systems candidate. Cook leaves with the receipts. Market cap from $350B to $4T, a 10x in 14 years. Revenue from $108B to $416B, nearly quadrupled. Services from a footnote to a $100B business. He inherited a hardware company and built a recurring-revenue platform on top of it. The market said thanks by selling AAPL down 1% after hours. The Ternus pick tells you what Apple's board actually believes about the next decade. The AI race won't be won at the model layer where Apple is hopeless and renting from Google. It'll be won at the silicon layer (on-device inference, custom NPUs, thermal envelope, battery), the form factor layer (glasses, wearables, ambient computing), and the integration layer (the chip talking to the OS talking to the model). All hardware-adjacent problems. All Ternus problems. The bear case is straightforward. Apple just promoted the executive least connected to the technology that's eating the world, at the exact moment software-native companies (OpenAI with Jony Ive's device, Meta with Ray-Ban, Google with Gemini-everything) are coming for the iPhone's distribution. A mechanical engineer running the most valuable consumer software platform in history. That's a real bet. The bull case is the same fact framed differently. Every competitor is converging on the realization that AI hardware (the device the model lives on) is the next platform, and Apple has spent 25 years building exactly that. Ternus shipped Apple Silicon, the only credible non-Nvidia AI chip in a consumer device. He runs Vision Pro. He inherited the robotics team in the April reorg. The boring read is succession planned years in advance, no surprise. The interesting read is that Apple just told you it doesn't think the AI race ends with the best chatbot. It thinks it ends with the best device. And it picked the person who builds devices.

Google is now asking PM candidates to open Cursor and build a working prototype in 45 minutes. Not engineers. Product managers. Figma does it. Perplexity does it. v0 does it. It's been confirmed on Blind and I've had candidates come back from these rounds stunned because nothing in their prep covered it. The round doesn't test whether you can code. It tests whether you can think through a product problem and make it real while someone watches. Scoping, trade-offs, what to build first, what to skip, how you handle the moment something breaks. All the product judgment that used to happen in a whiteboard case now happens in a live IDE. No framework saves you here. CIRCLES doesn't help. A product sense structure doesn't help. You either have reps in these tools or you freeze for 45 minutes while the interviewer writes their notes. Google removed the standalone technical interview for PMs entirely. They replaced it with this. The bar moved from "can you talk about technology" to "can you build with it while we watch." The candidates practicing behavioral answers and product cases are preparing for 4 out of 5 rounds. This is the round they don't know exists yet. And it's the one with a zero percent recovery rate. A mediocre behavioral answer still passes. A blank screen doesn't.