John Ternus is officially Apple’s next CEO, iPhone 18 colors, iOS 27 rumors

Mayo, I don't think this news necessarily caught me by surprise, but I think the timing of it caught me by surprise. So Monday, about 4.30 Eastern Time, my time, Apple publishes two press releases. One is saying that Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down and he is becoming executive chairman. And John Ternus is set to take over as part of a transition that will culminate on September 1st. Then a second ancillary press release that we'll talk about in a bit about Johnny Surugi becoming Apple's chief hardware officer. From a meta perspective, I think this newsroom story is interesting because at first, when you just see the top headline, it is just Tim Cook to become executive chairman. And your first reaction is, okay, step one in the process is kicking into gear, but they're not actually announcing a CEO transition. But the subheading is John Ternus to become Apple CEO. It's like the most Cookian way to say, I'm not dead yet, Wall Street. Don't freak out. I'm still here. But also, I'm elevating this new guy. It's funny, by the way, the Apple Newsroom does have like a dedicated subheading component in its normal formatting. But for this one, they didn't use it, I think, because they wanted to give both equal weighting. So the second line is just like the title with a paragraph spacing in it. So it's like the same label, but with like a new line inserted into it. So both the Ternus and the Tim Cook have like equal font, equal sizing, which is quite funny. Yeah, this is incredibly well choreographed, right? like perfection i think like the culmination of the tim cook era is him just at least so far just nailing the exit plan yeah i mean this has been in the works for a while clearly right like oh and it really goes back to that podcast interview he did with what jua lipa where he was like do you do you see yourself absolutely 10 years he's like 10 years is a long time so no like he he he choreographed it all the way back then i don't know if back then he knew exactly that he was going to retire on like the 20th of april 2026 but the cogs were in motion the prominence of turnus in media in public eye over you know mark graham's reported recently that he took full control over even more divisions of the company right in the last six months or so so they've been leading up to this and it's so poetic that like tim cook's gonna retire almost exactly at age 65 and it's almost exactly 15 years of his tenure because he started in around august 2011 and it's going to be like september 2026 when he steps down so it kind of worked out perfectly in the end i'm sure the dates weren't that set in stone the 10-year time frame was like a i'm going sometime this decade and we're going to wait for the right moment i think to kind of pull it off and is it any surprise that it's turnus not really you know german's had this on tap for literally years i was going back on some of his older press release some of his older newsroom newsletters and he's like floating turnus as the next ceo as a proposition back in like 2021 when he's starting to talk about like succession in the future and then as soon as jeff williams retired or about a year ago now that was like the last knock there's nobody else on the leadership page who fits the mold of ceo and also is younger like you could probably argue that you know q Federighi and Joswiak are like capable but they're just too old like there's no point moving the reins over to them when they're only like three or four years younger. Ternus is like around 50 years old like a like dead on 50 maybe 51 this year he's like perfect run for another 15 years right and then he could retire at 65 and there'd be another clean 15 year run as CEO. There's nobody else on that page who's going to step up to the mark they were never going to hire from outside. they were never going to bring in tony fidel i mean tony fidel tweeted that he'd wanted the job so i thought that might be possible i don't think they're gonna like they have enough issues bringing in people from the outside as like vps and svps right yeah in terms of staying with the company and turning over and culture clash they're not going to do that for ceo i don't know when exactly turners knew that he was going to get the job but it must have been what five years ago like for you know at least he was in high consideration many many years ago i mean look just look back at the history of how prominent he's been in keynotes and stuff. I mean, I think one of his big breakout roles was the Mac roundtable around like 2017. That's when he really started having a prominence. And I'm sure back in 2017, he wasn't set up to be the CEO. But, you know, by 2020, 2021, he's increasingly there at product launches. He's presenting things. The most recent event they had with the MacBook Neo, obviously, it was like a video event, but he was presenting and leading all of it like they were leading up to this there is no surprises here investors reacted about as you'd expect which was like non-plussed you know it ticks over i think the exact timing is interesting because the financial times what like near the end of last year said that apple was setting up for a an announcement that like a succession was intensifying succession planning was intensifying and they could see an announcement and basically around january february time after the next round of earnings calls in say after the holiday earnings call in january and you know that came and went and that didn't happen and enough time passed that it was like just on the cusp of oh well maybe the financial times is just talking rubbish and they don't know what they're on about like it was like just far enough away from that and then boom here it is here's the announcement what is it it's a clean two weeks basically from the next earnings call where uh for the next quarter of the earnings results it's just gone the holiday quarter that they announced is like a record for the company so the business is firing on all cylinders there's no currently you know touch wood there's no fires for them to put out there's no big tariff war going on you know the interrelations there's a lot of world wars going on but none of them really impact apple at the moment you know like the china situation is calm at the current time all of the business divisions are doing well if you do it now you can kind of set up for you know i think it's interesting whether tim cook will have a major role at wwdc in terms of presenting i mean he hasn't in years though that's the thing is he'll do yeah but he does like the intro right do the intro yeah yeah will he do even do the intro at june or will this already be part of the transition they'll just have turners do it all but clearly by september you know he's moving in september the first the iphone event is not gonna have tim cook presence no on screen at all he will be there right and he'll do the hands on and he'll be in the you know he'll be in the crowd and maybe they'll even do some press where he's like talking about oh how you know apple's gonna set himself up returns and whatever but The primary focus will be on the iPhone. And they're going to launch the iPhone Fold in the next big product category. They're also going to launch iOS 27, which will hopefully resolve at least some of the AI doubt, right, with Siri. And that will let turners have a great starting, you know, off the blocks. They're going to launch a new product category in the Fold. And they're going to, you know, revamp Siri. So it sets them up for a good time. And I also think the Suruji point is a factor here. So like maybe Cook wanted to leave closer to the end of the deco rather than like the middle of it. But Suruji was, you know, getting restless. And, you know, there was a report again last year that Suruji had spoken to Cook about maybe retiring or leaving Apple off going for a different role. Gurman says that he communicated that he was feeling a bit burnt out and he wanted to change. And, you know, he's one of the head honchos of the senior executive team. Like so many of their products depend on Apple Silicon being strong. And he is essentially the father of Apple Silicon, right? And their own custom chip designs. And he deserves much credit because his work and his team's work has basically given the iPhone an industry-leading advantage for a good decade. Ever since they started doing the A7, which is the first 60-volt bit chip, they kind of wowed the industry with that. And then every year, year on year, massive improvements. They've had the fastest single-call performance for what feels like forever now, but it's probably at least five years in a row. And obviously, then they translated that success to the Mac, to the iPad. and now you know they're even doing modems the modem division they've launched this their own in-house modems for the iphone to basically no drama at all right which has got to be a big praise and the modems they'll launch this full should basically compete with the highest spec of the coolcom modems and so serigi's in a great place maybe he was just fed up or bored or whatever but cook clearly wanted to retain him and this machination has allowed it to happen because you know if cook announces retirement now that gives turnus the move to ceo and then the hardware engineering role is left vacant seruji has now you know got himself in a place where he has a new title but he has control over hardware technologies and hardware engineering in his new you know chief c-suite role so i think the seruji element of this is actually quite i mean we'll never know for sure exactly why you know why was it april the 20th of 2026 versus any other time but i kind of feel like at a high level cook saw stability in the business it was a period of calm for apple and the suruji element was like maybe i was going to wait a little bit longer but you know i see a way to keep suruji around and this is how we're going to do it so that kind of is why it happened in that way and they probably just waited like we'll let the apple 50 celebrations calm down and then we'll drop it just before investor calls so they can chill out a bit i'm sure tim cook will be on that call maybe turn us to have a little chit chat and like welcome in the new the new era and then by September when the iPhones are out, it can be a clean break with Turner's leading the charge. I think the Suruji part of the announcement is really interesting because as far as I know, or I can remember, this is the first time there's ever been a chief hardware officer role at Apple, right? Like we had chief design officer with Johnny Ives, but elevating a hardware guy to the CEO position and then another hardware guy to a C-suite level position. That's a pretty strong indication of what presumably what turnus thinks the focus of the company is going forward right because him and suruji have been leading separate teams hardware technologies and hardware engineering but they've been working super closely like turnus himself was like credited with shepherding in the apple silicon rollout which products which chips go in like he played a key role in that even though it's with suruji's team actually making the chips yeah so to put two hardware guys in the c-suite level now for people who want apple to be led by product people then this is as good of an indication as any that you can get yeah i don't think they've they've given them a chief title previously but if you go back all the way to like the bob's mansfield era which is going back a long way like 2012 2013 at that time apple only had like one svp of hardware there's technologies yeah yeah and that basically encompassed both seruji and turnis's role today if you see what i mean so like kind of the chief hardware role was what bubs manfield used to do um but then as they were like you know pushing more into custom silicon and stuff they split the roles out a bit and i don't know like clearly having a chief nomenclature in your title must matter because otherwise they wouldn't bother doing it and so yeah like it but basically what it means is seruji now has control of hardware engineering hardware technologies under a big umbrella i do question like if he if it is true that he was feeling a bit burned out you know how much runway does this really give you like what's the commitment like surely cook wouldn't have done this switch around if seruji hadn't said well i'm gonna sign on for another you know good few years or something but like seruji's approaching his retirement age right and he's done a solid 15 years at the company as well if not longer he joined in 2008 when they acquired his startup so you know that's getting on so i don't know how stable that is it gives turnus a good start and it stops it being a situation where like let's say suruji didn't get a new title um like the new ceo comes in and suruji midi leaves it's not a great look right so i presume they've cleared the decks now and nobody on the top section of the apple leadership page is going anywhere immediately but these people it doesn't like one of the big issues with anyone taking over the company is the talent situation at the top because yeah ceo choices were sparse but also executive vp choices are sparse because anyone they bring in from the outside doesn't stay very long and all the people they've currently got the top goman keeps using this phrase it's run like a family business like the family's getting old right and people are going to move away and i don't think it's you know you've got what maybe five years in five years i would not be surprised if suruji q and federigia gone right yeah it's heading in that direction just as a function of age um and so that'll be something for turnus to tackle obviously as he settles in but i think short term as in like the next one or two years, I presume Cook's done the groundwork to give him a stable foundation. Because when there's a leadership change of any kind, and especially a leadership change of this magnitude, there's a lot of internal reshuffling that we might not even know about, or we might not even think about where. So Johnny Saruji gets promoted. Somebody gets, Tom Marib is his name, I think. He was VP of product integrity, but he's now becoming Apple's hardware engineering chief who will report to Ternus. So there were multiple people vying for that promotion. Those people now probably feel slighted there's all kinds of just inner level inner office dynamics that come into play when something like this happens right like yeah there's infighting both in a bad way but also just a level of competitiveness where everybody wants to get promoted everybody thinks they deserve the next job up not the person next to them yeah and team dynamics change and like sway changes i mean you if you want to give an example from the last era the scott forstall nonsense it's a perfect case right like under jobs scott forstall was you know his same personality but he could be controlled and managed and then uh as you know when jobs was no longer here his ego got the better of him and there was big fallouts and you know it only seems to have come down to like an eye versus forstall fight and tim cook chose i've and forstall got pushed out that might happen here but i do think that part of the thing that tim cook's aiming for is the smoothest transition possible and so you would assume that you know q federighi and the rest of them have been well aware that it going to be Turner taking over And so if there was a time to drop out I think they might have already gone for it Like, that's how I feel like Cook would set this up. And, you know, like, for instance, the Jeff Williams departure, right? Make sure he's, you know, he's retired on good terms for all intents and purposes. But you don't want it to time such that, like, Turner takes over and then Williams retires, like, in the January, right? Like, that's just not a good look. So with all the executive changeover that's been announced in recent months, you know, we had Lisa Jackson step down not so long ago. I hope that they're in a position now where like nobody's going anytime soon. I mean, you know, you can always have a surprise out on the field, but I think that's how it's been set up. Like Steve Jobs had this quote where I think this is in the Isaacson biography that obviously at the time when he was around, there had never been a graceful transition of Apple CEO. because the checkered history of the company at that time was you know obviously jobs got pushed out people got fired the company was floundering it was just like you know when jobs came back he wasn't even meant to be the ceo that's why he was called like the interim ceo and like it just kind of fell into him being the job because they couldn't find anybody else and then obviously he took the company new heights so he's kind of set it up that tim cook would take over gracefully in 2011 unfortunately you know ill health kind of scuppered some of those plans and the transition period where jobs would be executive chairman and cook would be ceo was a lot shorter than obviously he wanted it to be and you know jobs passed away tim cook had to like get some stuff happening i think one of the goals clearly by how this has been orchestrated is that the the graceful transition of ceo should now actually happen for apple for the first time ever cook is giving turnus what he never had which is the that exact graceful transition that exact still having somebody to turn to when you need guidance or you have a question or you don't know what to do And in Cook's role as executive chairman, Apple's press release straight up mentions that Cook will continue handling policy, working with policymakers and with governments around the world. And I think what's interesting about that is that it's what we all expected. But then it's still Cook is still there to insulate Ternus from the worst parts of the job. Yeah, he's a buffer, right? And it'll be interesting. One of the, like what I'm most interested to see is how perception of Ternus changes because he'll be insulated from that side of the business for a while. As long as Cook wants to remain executive chairman, which seems like he wants to be in that role for many years to come. But right now he doesn't get any criticism from anybody because he leads hardware and everybody loves Apple's hardware. Apple's hardware is the best it's ever been. But once you become CEO, other parts of the company start reflecting on you. You're taking responsibility for all of the ugly things too. like if turnus i think there's a naive belief among some people that turnus is going to step in the ceo role and then apple's going to open the app store up they're going to drop all this litigation they're going to stop fighting the eu and things are going to change that won't happen and then all of that starts reflecting on turnus is he now the quote-unquote bean counter stifling app development stifling the app economy is he now the reason apple is behind on ai is he the reason the company is still cozying up to Donald Trump. It thrusts him into a position where everything reflects on him. And it's something that I know I've said throughout the Tim Cook era where the buck stops and stopped with Tim Cook. But not everything is a decision that he made, if that makes sense. You can't place singular blame on the CEO for everything. Yeah, especially when Cook is known for being a man of consensus, right? And getting opinions and having a meeting, a committee of decision-making beneath him like he is not the steve jobs character who you know when steve jobs run the company even the most minute decisions about how like icons looked and laid out were like taken up to the top and you know like the the multitasking transition this is a great story in the um kinkashenda book uh creative selection where he was working on on like remember that when the ipad first came out it was like the home button was the only way to navigate and they were trying to upgrade it and improve the productivity so it was like ios 4.3 i think it added the kind of four finger multi-touch gestures where you could like swipe between apps by swiping with four fingers and like he in that in that era of apple around like the 2010 2011 the interaction the animation of those gestures was not getting signed off and like until you had the demo with with at the top and like he got the demo with jobs and then it was like our jobs is too ill to actually do this anymore or like you know he did it for the multi-touching gestures and then when it was next time to do it again for the next feature no longer did it go all the way to top because jobs was too and he couldn't do it that era of apple it died with jobs like cook took over he became much more delegating the people below him took charge he believed obviously he contributed opinions and you know ran the company and forced some things through that he specifically believed in but other parts of the company he was very concessionary or let let people run the company and he was less Meglia maniac founder energy. With Ternus in charge, I hope the company is returning to some of that top-level decision-making because Ternus is a product engineer at the end of the day. Parts of the iPhone 17 Pro characteristics feature set, its choices, are because Ternus wanted them to happen. He's not the only voice, but he was a voice. And I think he's much more of a product voice than Cook ever was, right? And so it'll be great to be back in a situation where responsibility for the products actually does land at the top job, right? Because I think Apple worked great under jobs and you're never going to recreate Steve Jobs, but you can, you know, at least be more in a product role if you have a product CEO, which I think Cook would admit he never was, right? And so I'm looking forward to that era, but that doesn't mean the entire structure and makeup of everything Apple has handled itself is going to change with Turnitz in charge. Does he agree with everything that Apple does? Well, probably not, but the vast balance of it, he must be on board with, right? And they are not, At a company the size of Apple is not changing some of those values or roles or decisions because the CEO changes. Turnus will be on board with the broad swath of the current portfolio of hardware, software and services. He will have his ideas and his own priorities that he will push for. And it'll be interesting to see how that rolls out. But if you're expecting like the policy of the App Store to completely be just dropped on the floor come September the 1st, it's just not going to happen. It's just not going to happen. like the app store makes Apple too much money they can't they can't drop it now even if they wanted to like let's say Turner's really hated the app store right and he really hates the model of the 30 commission he wants to make it free and open for everybody if he did that he would be ousted as CEO the next weekend like it doesn't matter that Tim Cook stood around the board would kick you out at that point because you'd be dropping 100 billion dollars of free money on the floor like it's just not going to happen it guides the future yeah and future direction and there's been plenty reporting how like turnus wasn't really um keen on the car project and he wasn't really keen on the headset project so maybe if turns to be ceo 10 years ago those things wouldn't have happened and apple invested that money in other things right so it's not like the person at the top doesn't have any power but it's like the contours of the edges rather than rather than the core if you know what i mean and i think that having an operations expert as ceo obviously has a ton of benefits. Tim Cook has been able to navigate Apple through pandemics and world dynamics and supply shortages and scale the iPhone to just a massive level. People don't realize just how much in terms of unit sales the iPhone has grown under Tim Cook's leadership. And that's great for business, but he also perfectly executed all of the supply chain aspect of that. My thinking is that will there become a time when John Ternus is CEO, where they hit a roadblock or they stumble or they make a mistake that might make us take a step back and say, huh, that was one of the nice things about having somebody like Tim Cook in charge. I mean, you have to hope that the underlings in the operation division are equally capable, right? Right. But right now you have Cook and Sabi Khan as COO. I just Googled it, by the way. Yes. In 2010, right? How many iPhones did Apple sell in a year? Rough guess. That was the iPhone 4 year. 7, 8 million. 40 million the entire year oh jesus okay okay 2011 72 million right yep fast forward to today they do like 90 million in one quarter right it's like the scale of the iphone business you needed someone like they were apple almost had the perfect person in charge to navigate that and make that happen yep fast forward to today maybe the future product direction um would benefit from somebody else having the top like you maybe you want to return to a bit more of like the inspiration or the invention at the top and operations can be handled further down because the supply chain is sorted out. Obviously, it evolves and the China dependency is a problem and they are diversifying, but that stuff takes time. But they've kind of nailed that. So it's kind of nice for me that there isn't continuity in the exact makeup of the person in charge. And I love how even Tim Cook acknowledges this in the letter that he published to everybody. He's like, a new person will be stepping in, that leader is John Ternus, a brilliant engineer and thinker. Like Cook would never describe himself as a brilliant engineering thinker. It just shows that there is change. For as much as they orchestrated this to try and keep it, you know, quote unquote boring, even to the point of like the headline photo in the newsroom being Tim Cook and John Turner's looking at each other in very similar clothes. It's the same person in different fonts. Yeah, exactly. There is change at the top. So I'm excited to see the impact of that and the ramifications. but I think that will be a very gradual, very slow, less exciting than some people think it's going to be process. The last thing I'll say is that in Tim Cook's letter, I think it's the most open and honest and personable we've seen him in a long time. I'm struggling to think of a moment where he kind of wrote from this really heartfelt first person perspective to the public when he came out in 2014. Yeah, that was similar. But it's rare. because he purposely kept a very private personality. But I think we do give some credit for Tim Cook for choosing now to step down. He's 65 years old, but in a lot of companies, you get ego at the top and that person wants to stay CEO and stay in charge until the very, very, the bitter end of their life. And Tim Cook could have done that. And some of the reaction I've seen from people just in the real world to this news is surprised that he's stepping down at quote unquote only 65. I think he could have gotten away with being CEO for another decade if he really wanted to. But he's stepping down from a position of strength, not weakness. Yes. Like, I don't care what anybody says. The AI situation is nowhere near enough to destabilize confidence in him as leader. Like, the company has exploded. Everyone loves to quote the, you know, from 350 billion in market cap to 4 trillion. All the tech companies have exploded over the last decade. So, you know, it's beyond that. but like the handling and the aptitude at which cook ran the company is almost unparalleled was he perfect did he make some mistakes did they invest in some things that didn't pan out of course he did like you know you'd be crazy if you never made a mistake but overall he really really did well and the company like people said the exact same thing when like when jobs died it was like well apple's done for they're never going to do anything new or cool or they're going to become irrelevant at back in those days it was android's going to eat iphone's lunch right like that was that was the narrative of the time and it didn't happen the iphone got better and better they expand in the iphone as inevitably they were always going to have to to different markets different price points you know appeal to people i think there's a definitely a future where if jobs are still a company he would have made products that he liked and nothing else and then you know stuff like the iphone 6 would never have happened and the iphone wouldn't have exploded in the way that it did. Like there's, there's so many, you know, counterfactuals to this idea that like, oh, Tim Cook, it's time to go because, you know, Apple doesn't have a compelling area story right now. It's just a terrible situation. It's just a terrible read on the reality of it. I'm excited to cover the John Ternus era. I'm excited to see, even though not a lot's going to change, like you said, right off the bat, but it's one of the biggest stories in Apple's history the transition the first ever smooth coordinated transition for a four trillion dollar company that we could talk about like i'm excited just for something different do you think he's going to bring back in-person events no i don't think i don't i want them to but i just don't think the thing you could point out as maybe a sign is what they did for the macbook neo where yep us members of the press in new york city did get a five six minute spiel from john turnus about the MacBook Neo, introducing it. He said the name before they played any sort of video. Like, I kind of feel that was his putting his mark on it. Like, yeah, that gave me confidence. Like before that event in March, I was like, it's never happening. And then that happened. I'm like, hmm. Now we see, yeah, we can tell Josie we had to shut up and we're doing an in-person event. He just doesn't strike me as having the showmanship that, I don't know, like a Steve Jobs would have. We don't know a lot about the guy. like yeah but you can still like hand off to different people yeah and like that's true and i don't even think it has to be like the whole event doesn't have to be live and in person but like you could have like a live intro and you know at the kind of six seven minute start they did on that and then move to the video to tell you more or like you know have an have an in person like go to the steve jobs theater where you bring all the press in like you always do in september start it for real like you know make a first impression live and then go and here's the iphone and tell you more it's blah like do you know what i mean like i think there's ways they can bring it back in it doesn't have to be a complete end to end video but would I would I bet on it happening no but if there a time for it to happen it it now like wouldn that be such a cool statement if like yeah turn has become CEO on September 1st and like the iPhone events on what like the 12th and then bang you see him live on stream like i think that would be pretty huge there so many possible implications um and i sure over the course of the next six months we hear a lot more about the machinations how stuff's getting moved around um and i'm looking forward to it happy hour this week is sponsored by copilot money check them out at www.copilot.money slash 9to5Mac using promo code 9to5Mac for two months free. 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And you said, no, HomeKit zones are different. So why don't you explain how you use them? Yeah, so you have access in the HomeKit model is you have accessories. Accessories are grouped into rooms and rooms are grouped into a home, right? And you can have multiple homes, you can multiple rooms, you can multiple accessories. But, and that's what's very clearly presented to you in the home app, right? You have like a menu where you can choose what room you're in. And then you can clearly see the accessories that are in it. and you can switch home if you happen to be rich enough to have like a vacation home and a real home but journey people have one home and they have multiple rooms but there's actually a concept called zones that home kit supports ever since the beginning it's just not very well presented had no idea and what a zone is is it's a collection of rooms so in a in a kind of way how a scene is like a collection of accessory states a zone is just a collection of rooms and it that means that you can group rooms together into kind of like subgroups rather than just having to address your whole home in one go so what i use zones for and i think was their intent was for like floors of your house so you can have like upstairs and downstairs so i have my downstairs um rooms like my kitchen or my living room um or my hallway they're grouped into a zone called downstairs and likewise for the upstairs accessories they get upstairs and so what that means is if you just want to address all of your downstairs lights you don't have to go one by one through every room you just say turn off all my lights downstairs and it knows and it figures it out it works out the label and it matches and it lets you do really natural language voice queries to your assistant and it just gets what you mean you can only put like there are limitations obviously it doesn't like you have to be a bit careful what you call these things because if you call them too vague a noun, Siri will get confused and it won't understand. But for things like upstairs and downstairs, it seems to work very reliably. I've done this for absolutely years. And it's so good when I'm like going to bed, as I'm walking upstairs, I literally say, turn off everything downstairs. All my lights turned off. It turns off the TV and the Apple TV in one go. It will turn off the thermostats for you if you want as well. Like if you just want to heat upstairs or downstairs, you can address that individually and only target the thermostats in that zone. like you don't and you don't have to say in the zone called blah you can just say the name of the label and it just lets it flow very fluidly it's a great feature very buried in the home app you know you struggle to find it you have to like click edit room and then like one of the options in the room panel is like what zone it's in and by default it's in no zone so people just scroll past it but you have to like click in there you can make a new zone and you can add other things to it at the same time but if you never used it before you should really check it out because it just takes the smart home stuff to another level with home kit because it just gives you another access to address stuff by and you don't have to fiddle around setting up like scenes and stuff so like a lot of people get around this if they don't know zones exist they'll make like a scene to turn all their downstairs lights on or off and they'll call the scene like you know downstairs lights or whatever yep um and it does work but it's a bit uglier and and you have to like be more careful in saying the exact name of the scene there's less less scope for you to say you know like a whole different um different formulations of the same query the scene's a bit more prescriptive than what you have to say and you then have to make scenes for like every different accessory types you gotta make like you know downstairs lights downstairs tv downstairs thermostats if you do it in a zone all of that stuff comes for free um because it just works and it like a zone's almost like a a synthetic room that just includes all the accessories from multiple rooms in one go and that's how you can address it in home kit so all of the commands that you can do to the voice assistant that are like do this in this room they also apply to do this in this zone so it just unlocks a lot of power for you with if you find the the right the right menu in the home kit to set it up then you do it once and you never have to touch it again i'm not new to home kit like this house isn't the first time i've used home kit i've used home kit for probably like a decade at this point and i had no idea zones were a thing so you really did blow my mind and i was thinking through ways that i can use this throughout my house and i think the one that comes to mind right away is inside and outside lights so create a zone of all the lights outside so i can say turn off the outside lights or turn on the inside lights you know like because it's like again you can do it all with scenes but this is so much more natural because there's so many times i'm like sitting on the couch and i just want to turn all of the lights inside off i don't want to know what's do you try to remember what scene does what i want all the lights inside off but I want like the lights on the front porch and the garage to stay on. So inside, outside, perfect zones. This is just a classic example of the home app being bad. Like I think so much of the home app has gotten better. And like, I think the main view where you can control and favorite accessories and see your rooms, like that's pretty good. Like you can generally get what you want to get done, done without too much trouble. But when you want to do more, when you want to create, like the interface for creating scenes is still wonky i think especially when you mix and match between different types of accessories creating automations and how automations can also interact with shortcuts like that whole system is a mess it's a complicated problem but they definitely could do better at it yeah with the zones like because because a room can be in multiple zones so you can always have like treat them like tags and make multiple combinations of them but you kind of want i think in the home app at some point to be like some way to visualize all of the things in a particular zones like maybe like for instance for for like upstairs and downstairs like what i have it'd be nice if i could see all my lights visually that are upstairs right but there's just no there's no view for it in the home app it only shows you by room you can't like show more than one room at a time um unless you do favorites on the home screen so like the zones don't really have any purpose in the home app they're only useful for siri interactions some third-party home kit apps do expose zones as like a view and you can navigate to them and see all the accessories that are in the zone. But I don't use any of them. The home app's great generally for like accessory control. But when it comes to zones, it just doesn't really have any UI for it. We talked last week and I think the week before about the ongoing saga of Mac Studio availability, Mac Mini availability, and then of course, the looming update to the MacBook Pro. In his Power On newsletter last weekend, Mark Gurman shared some more details. And there's bad news for people waiting for the new MacBook Pro overall, like you are, man. He says that because of supply shortages throughout the overall supply chain, this revamped OLED touchscreen thinner MacBook Pro that was expected to ship as soon as the end of this year probably won't come until early 2027 instead. Is that March? Is that January? Unclear. Unclear. If I was putting money on it, I would say we're looking at March. I just think so much of this is out of Apple's control. at this point. Like Mark says that from a software perspective, with all of the new software accommodations for the touch interface, like we've talked about how the menu bar will adapt when it detects you've pressed it with your finger, how controls will try to surface relevant options when you're using the touchscreen, all of that will be ready as part of macOS 27. So it is purely just taking the hardware needed for this thing and putting it all together. And I think that's just going to be an example of Apple having to wait like a lot of other companies looking to launch new products yeah and to be honest the news is bad if you're waiting for macbook pro but it's even worse if you're waiting for the next mac studio because i think the recent supply chain shortages and like the currently unavailable things had set people up to think like the m5 mac studio revision is close right like why are these things 12 weeks delayed or currently unavailable well they're going to rev them within 12 weeks that was like the going theory and so maybe in like june wwc they'd have a mac studio update but german says well you know if you're think in the macbook pro maybe you've gone from like october november to january february march the mac studio has gone from like may june to october so that's all like five months away um so if you're if you're out there waiting for a big mac studio overhaul which will probably be m5 ultra right because yeah that's kind of what they signaled they didn't do an m4 ultra but the implication was they're going to do like an m5 ultra then that's not going to come until october now apparently purely because of supply chain charges when they were when engineers um was previously targeting middle of the year update so do you think what do you think about the mac mini because german doesn't really say anything does that mean a mac mini is coming sooner rather than later like is that does that get priority over the mac studio do you think it probably gets priority over the mac studio but i think anything that isn't that isn't a laptop isn't getting prioritized and even with the laptops we're seeing the macbook pro high-end model getting pushed back a bit so i wouldn't make any claims about the state of the mac right now i just think the only thing that mac mini has going for it is that it's just like the most basic chip the m5 right like yeah mac studio is getting higher end configs like the max and the ultra which obviously you know have lower yields they're just less of them produced the m5 is produced on mass because it's like you know it goes in the ipad it goes in the base macbook pro goes in the macbook air um and so maybe they just have more of them around and maybe we'll see it come out but you won't be able to get higher end ram options for a while or something but yeah so that's the only thing the mac mini has going for it the mac studio is just way more niche because of the chips that it requires and the macbook pro by the way this touchscreen one is meant to be m6 yes so it's not just oh you know we'll take the m5 max and m5 pro out the current things and put them in this and give it oled screen it's like no we're also getting a chip bump as well as the touchscreen as well as the oled and you're planning to buy one of those whenever it does ship right yep that is the next upgrade you're not going to chicken out of that like you chickened out of the studio display update that you know because there's a difference yes the maverick pro i've been ready for them to do the oled update there's no going to be no downside the studio display problem is the poor situation and the fact that the studio display update was a bit naff like the base studio display barely changed a maverick pro that's got oled and a touchscreen on it is like a big update regardless what else they do i mean the fact that it's also going to be the m6 generation is even gravy on the top you know I would buy it if it was still M5, so I not really worried about the Mavit Pro being a disappointment It going to be expensive but it not going to be disappointing Then also in Power On Mark explained that the artwork for WWDC 26 which is that black background, kind of silver text, and the 26 in the wordmark is glowing, like from the back kind of. He says that this is actually a direct hint at the new Siri interface that is coming as part of iOS 27. So he says the design currently being tested includes a Siri interface that sits within the dynamic island. When it's triggered, the island expands with a prompt that reads search or ask, accompanied by a glowing cursor that looks similar to the 26 in the WWDC 26 artwork. This, to me, is just so stupid. Because they nailed the design of Apple Intelligence as part of iOS 18. And I know that there's like some negative connotations. Stigma, yeah. I know that that's there. but to go from that really nice and i love the colors of that how it glows in the rainbow glows in from the edges of the home screen like it looks so good and that they are going to just go and throw that out in favor of this glowing black and white color like it removes a little bit of the the whimsy i think yeah because mark even says that it looks best in dark mode which is why the wdcr is also done on dark background you see a bit more of the kind of like the glowing animation if you look at the greg joss work tweet because it has like it's not just like black and white glow there's like chromatic aberration to it right so i think it'll be a bit fancier than maybe what the headline picture shows um but it does sound less vibrant than the current design with the edge lighting rainbow the changes the dynamic island also support just the fact that the you're going to have more of a back and forth conversation so when it expands you'll get like the conversation thread right whereas the edge lighting version is kind of set up that some requests don't even present follow-up ui at all the you know it just does the action and the the rainbow disappears yeah like if you do some home kit requests on the phone sometimes you don't even know if it's heard you because like it the rainbow lights up and then if it reacts quickly the rainbow just disappears and that's that's all that happens you don't always get like a visual affirmative ui um i think with this 27 revamp they're going to push a bit more on the you know the chatbot look of it so there's going to be like the that's why you've got the dynamic island expanding thing um which is something that the current design didn't have to accommodate the big the big mistake here which we talked about at the time was why did they ship a siri visual redesign without the new siri stuff i mean yeah that's that was the stupid part yeah they burned a whole design i mean i i guess you can argue back then they didn't think it would take two years for them to bring it out but they should just wait if back then they thought it was only gonna take three months they should just wait the three months because it's it set people up they burned a design that was cool they've attracted negativity to a rainbow appearance which looks cool they've misled people for two years because if you're a if you're a if you're a lay person just a random customer you don't know all the details about it but if you see that series suddenly looks different you're probably fairly reasonably going to assume that it also works differently and it just doesn't so they just screwed up expectations they burnt goodwill they should just kept it on the old design then at least all of the negativity about Siri could have been thrown at the orb design instead of pretending like they've got a new Siri when they really didn't. So that was the root cause of this. And this is the fallout. Now they're going to have to do in a radically different direction. I wonder how much of the interface will be controlled entirely through the dynamic island. You start a prompt with Apple's, with the voice assistant. You type something or you say something. Then do you get taken into a standalone Siri app? Does it just stay there floating like the type to Siri does now? It's like this sounds very much like the interface for brief interactions. The way I kind of was imagining it is that it will be like starting the island. It will like expand to a bigger bubble. Right. And then if you want to carry on, you can like swipe on it and it will like go to full screen. Yeah. So like it like expires like a couple intermediate states where, you know, the quick the quick actions kind of stuff that you do with Siri today. it'll like you know the the dynamic island will glow and wake up and then maybe get a bit bigger to give you the result um and then if you want to like have a persistent conversation you can like pull down on it or something and it will go full screen um that's kind of how i was imagining it this week happy hour is also brought to you by shopify check them out at shopify.com slash happy hour i know whenever i'm building a new app for instance there's so much anxiety involved in the run-up to launch do i have all the press kit materials is the website live Are people going to like it when the app's finally out there to download? There's just so many unknowns involved. Starting a small business, whatever it is, is an intimidating affair. But that's why you need a partner like Shopify to help you get your new business off the ground. 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That's shopify.com slash happy hour. Thanks to Shopify for sponsoring the show. We've got some rumors about the iPhone 18 Pro colors. So this comes from Macworld, and they say that Apple is developing the iPhone 18 Pro models in four colors. So light blue, which they describe as similar to the current mist blue color of the base iPhone 17. Then dark cherry that they describe as deep wine like red, not a bright fruit punch style red. Then we have silver described as being similar to the iPhone 17 Pro's silver and white design. And then a dark gray that looks like a proper space gray or space black color. the most interesting part about this is that this dark cherry does not look anything like what mark german and others have said it's a deep red yeah i mean unless i am just totally off base about what i think deep red looks like this is purple this is not red deep red is more like what some of the product red iphones were like in my head now see i expected darker than that like i expected kind of a crimson yeah i mean obviously when you say product red iphones someone were lighter than others but they were quite dark ones um like maybe the iphone 7 product red was quite dark i'm remembering but yeah this is not this is in the the family of purples i would say i mean it looks nice i'll give i'll give it that but it's not red which i assume of these you like the space black dark gray oh you've got that dead on i'm so happy they're going back to a black color but you i guess you think the midnight's too blue because you don't like any of the iphone 17 pro colors no and that's one of the reasons you went with the iphone ear definitely one of the reasons the the blue is the color i'd buy if i was getting the pro but i think it looks more blue than midnight like some of the midnight on like um home pods or laptops and stuff is more neutral i think on the iphone i think it's pretty blue i think of these four colors for the iphone 18 pro i would probably be most inclined to go black just because i don't like the purple the blue is fine but it's not for me the silver is okay i think it's going to depend a lot on the color of the glass because you know right now it's very there's a stark contrast between the silver of the aluminum and then the white of the glass yeah so maybe silver but probably the dark gray you don't like the blue like the lighter blue i like it i just don't think it's for me you know like yeah a bit too bright like i love the orange don't get me wrong i love the orange but i love the orange because it's different you know it's flashy and it's fun and it's just weird to have an orange phone the blue is nice but it's like they've basically done a blue like this before too yeah right the pacific well both on the base iphone 17 and then it was the pacific blue iphone 12 pro i think is what it was yeah so none of these stand out to me as being as cool as the cosmic orange none of them are as bold as the orange no so i can't wait for the pushback people like i'm not upgrading this year because they're not doing orange but they're going for different colors and maybe maybe i mean maybe the dark cherry looks really good in person and appeals to um other people more i don't hate it from the from the pictures but it's definitely not as striking as the orange was the thing that was most interesting in this mac gold report was that it said there's going to be a smaller gap between the glass cutout on the back and the camera bump yes might make it look because i don't really like the back of the phones this this generation i don't the two-tone cutout thing it looks a bit jigsaw puzzle piece kind of slapped in there if you know what i mean like so maybe if the gap shorter it would look less silly i don't really understand why the kind of glass section isn't like a full width element like it's kind of weird how it's like framed by the aluminium and so it kind of looks like a bit stuck in the in the middle of it like a sticker yeah but a shorter gap doesn't sound like full width glass it just sounds like the the top of it will be closer to where the camera bump is maybe which almost sounds kind of weird from a spacing perspective yeah it sounds worse yeah from the top of the camera bump to the top of the phone and then have a smaller gap between the bottom of the camera bump and the glass that it almost sounds worse i don't know it's one of those things we have to see it to fully know what they're describing yeah i mean if they made the bevel on the camera bump less thick sharp it might make it smooth a bit more so then there's like there's less distance visually and so that's why they can bump it up a little bit but yeah it's definitely something we'll have to see to really interpret properly then the report also says that smaller dynamic island is still in the works that's been back and forth a lot between like the weibo leakers and everything yeah now now it's it's like the islands get smaller it's a debate about how much smaller how much smaller yeah yeah is one of the face eddie components going to be under the screen or not or are they just shrinking it while still keeping them above the screen is like currently the debate hasn't really been resolved one way or the other the current state of the iphone 18 pro rumors strike me as a more aggressive form of like the the annual the rumors start out with the most ambitious thing and then slowly you know as supply chain rumors evolve like you come back towards the mean of what the current iphone looks like and i think that's kind of what we're seeing with these iphone 18 pro rumors like it seems like the focus is going to be on the fold and then any sort of noticeable change to the main pro design is not going to happen and we'll have to wait until the glass wing phone next year to really see that yeah i mean shocker the year after they do a big redesign it's an intuitive update on the design like they do that playbook so often well they're good it's good that they're replacing the ceo with somebody who can innovate yeah the affordable could never be done under tim cook you know never that's the thing with the the smile display is going to come out in september as well it's like whoa a whole new product category um it's very easy that's the thing with the the road maps are so long as it will take a while for that yeah um but yeah the i with the iphone the best predictor of what an iphone looks like is the iphone from the year before and so i think the pro phones will look mostly the same as last year's pro phones they're just doing the different color lineup i'm glad they're going to four colors rather than three just to give a bit more variety and i'm glad the extra color is a very neutral black because i think that'll look good but i still love the air too much to to switch away from the pro phone and i'm not buying a folder board i think then finally this week uh rumor again from weibo about device support for the for iOS 27. So you'll remember that with iOS 26, Apple dropped support for the iPhone 10s generation. Now this rumor says that for iOS 27, Apple will drop support for the iPhone 11 generation. So that's the 11, the 11 Pro and the 11 Pro Max, which were released in 2019 and the iPhone SE2 that was released in 2020. Sounds reasonable. Yeah, it sounds totally reasonable, especially when you also remember that the biggest ios 27 features are going to be apple intelligence related so you'll need an iphone 15 pro to use those anyway so i feel like nowadays your phone being supported or not supported by that year's big update means less and less yeah i mean for a long time it's always been like well the support goes back six years but the older phones don't get all the features right like that's happened a lot but it's more acute recently when apple intelligence hangs off so much and you need like basically you need 15 pro or newer to get like all the new stuff and i did see someone funny comment on the siri article the design thing where it's like oh does that mean the iphone se third generation or fourth generation won't get support because it doesn't have a dynamic island yeah i'm like no they'll just do a different design for that one same way live activities they're best on phones with dynamic islands but if you don't they just show them on the lock screen you know so they'll make it work but yeah we're one year further on and they're just cutting off the next generation of oldest phone like last year they did the 10s then next year this year they're doing the 11 you get lucky some years where they keep support for all phones that supported the previous version but doesn't surprise me in the slightest that they're moving they're just bumping along by one the the kind of window of support moves forward all right i think that does it for this week you can find us on apple podcasts where you can leave a rating and review. Find an ad-free version of the show at 9to5mac.com slash join for $5 a month or $50 a year. Send us feedback, happyhour at 9to5mac.com. I am on threads and elsewhere at Chance H. Miller. And Mayo, what about you? At BZMAI. All right. Thanks, Mayo. Bye-bye.