Welcome to 9to5Mac Daily for Monday, January 12, 2026. I'm your host Chance Miller. We are sponsored this week by Stuff, the Clean and powerful to Do List app. Leading Off Today it's long been an open secret that John Ternus is a leading candidate to succeed Tim Cook as Apple CEO following more than 14 years at the helm. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman has repeatedly reinforced that expectation over the last several years. Now the New York Times adds to the narrative with a detailed profile of Ternus that positions him as a frontrunner, while also outlining several alternative internal succession paths. The report says that three other potential CEO candidates inside Apple include Eddie Q, Apple's head of services Greg Joswiak, its head of worldwide marketing and Deirdre o', Brien, its head of retail and human resources. The important thing to keep in mind here is that it would be irresponsible for Apple to not have multiple internal succession plans. The company essentially needs backup plans if something were to happen to Tarnas, or if he were to decide that he no longer wanted the job. The report also echoes what we've heard from other sources, including that Tim Cook has told senior leaders that he is tired and would like to reduce his workload. Because of this, Apple has been accelerating its succession plans for the CEO position. Finally, the report also makes the obvious contrast. Where Tim Cook is known for his supply chain and operations genius, while John Ternus is known internally as more of a product person. It remains to be seen when Apple will actually publicly detail its succession planning for the first time, but it certainly seems plausible that something might happen this year. Next up Today in a new press release, Apple is celebrating the success of its services division throughout 2025. The company says that 2025 was a record breaking year for Apple Services, with new milestones for Apple Music, Apple TV and more. Apple's Senior Vice President of services, Eddie Cue, says that Apple Music hit an all time high in both listenership and new subscribers in 2025. Apple TV, meanwhile, eclipsed all prior viewership records in December and saw an increase in total hours viewed by 36% compared to the previous year. This of course, was driven by releases including F1 the Movie, which came to Apple TV in December, as well as Pluribus. The press release also shares a handful of other metrics for Apple services. In 2025, Shazam generated over 1 billion song recognitions per month. Apple pay has eliminated well over $1 billion in fraud globally and generated more than $100 billion in incremental merchant sales globally the App Store saw unprecedented engagement with over 850 million average weekly users. Apple also says that developers selling digital goods and services have now earned more than $550 billion since 2008, when the app Store first launched. The App Store also saw a record number of visitors between Christmas Eve and New Year's Day in and customer spending on digital goods and services over this period also hit a record. You can hit the link in the Show Notes for a closer look at Apple's announcement with a few other stats and figures. We are sponsored this week by Stuff, the clean, powerful To Do List app that makes organizing long lists effortless, checking off tasks satisfying and tracking your progress simple. If you love being organized, then Stuff is for you. It's a new To Do List app for iPhone and iPad built for people who love to write things down, check them off and complete their goals. You can add tasks by typing, talking or using the camera, and it's built to intake information quickly in whatever form you think in. The magic of Stuff is that it gets exponentially more powerful the more you feed into it. Download Stuff today by going to Trystuff app or by searching Stuff in the App Store. Plus you can save 50% off your first year of extra stuff by using the code 9 to 5 at checkout. Get Stuff done and start enjoying your to do list again. Download Stuff from the App Store today. Rounding out today, Apple has confirmed that it is teaming up with Google to use Gemini models to power future Siri and Apple Intelligence features. In a statement to cnbc, Apple said, after careful evaluation, we determine that Google's technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple foundation models and we're excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for our users. End quote CNBC says that the deal between Apple and Google is a multi year partnership. Apple will use Google's Gemini models and cloud technology for future versions of its own foundation models infrastructure. The statement from Apple does not provide any details on a timeline for when it will launch the new Siri and Apple Intelligence features, but CNBC says the features will launch later this year. At WWDC 2024, Apple announced the Apple Intelligence ecosystem with features including Notification Summaries, Writing Tools, Image Playground and genmoji. As part of that, it also announced a new version of Siri with upgrades including Personal Context, in App Actions and on Screen AW awareness. While Apple shipped the majority of Apple Intelligence features it announced at WWDC that year, it delayed the launch of the revamped Siri. The company said it was taking longer than expected to deliver on those features. Those features are now what will be powered in part by Google Gemini. Today's confirmation comes after months of in depth reporting from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman on this topic. According to Garmin, Apple will pay Google around $1 billion per year for access to those Google Gemini models. Bloomberg also reported that Apple will use a 1.2 trillion parameter AI model to power this version of Siri. Parameters are a measure of an AI software's complexity. As of right now, Apple and Google haven't confirmed any of those financial or technical details of the arrangement. The expectation is that Google will power select Apple intelligence features, while Apple's own models will continue to power other features. We expect to learn more throughout the rest of this year, with the rumors being that Apple will announce its new version of Siri as part of iOS 26.4 sometime in the spring. That wraps up another episode of 9-5 Mac Daily. As always, you can find all of the latest Apple news on 9to5mac.com. Follow along with me on threads ChanceHmiller and we'll be back tomorrow for a new episode of 9-5 Mac Daily.
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