ZDNETZDNET’s key takeaways
- Tim Cook leaves Apple with a hard act to follow.
- AI could change how people reach their digital lives.
- The Mac may become Apple’s next AI power play.
Every year, as summer turns to fall, the world’s tech faithful turn their attention to Cupertino. This year’s September Apple event marks a two-part turning point for the company.
After 15 years at Apple’s helm, Tim Cook is handing the reins to former hardware boss John Ternus. When Cook took over from Steve Jobs, Apple’s market value was $302 billion. Now, it’s $4.6 trillion. That’s a huge growth rate for Ternus to beat.
Also: Apple event 2026 live updates: The first foldable iPhone and more in real time
The second turning point is the looming threat of AI. Apple is, at least in its user-facing products, woefully behind in quality AI offerings. Sure, the company can rely on iPhone revenues. But in a world of AI agents, will slabs with screens still be relevant? Probably not, but Apple has another trick up its sleeve. Let’s look forward by first looking backward.
Just before Cook took over Apple, I wrote a fairly scathing retrospective about the Apple of 2011 compared to the Apple of 1991.
ZDNETIn 1991, Apple was all Macintosh, all the time. The iPod was still 10 years away. By 2011, Apple was becoming the iPhone company. That device fueled its market value growth into the trillion-dollar club.
Although there have definitely been bumps in the road, Apple ultimately adapted well to our changing times. But will AI change all that?
Bits of history
In 1991, PCs (running Windows 3.0) ruled the roost. In terms of market share, Macs were a rounding error, and Macs were all Apple had.
But Apple had a unique strength: the ability to combine hardware and software into a smoothly running system, one that let creative individuals do work that previously required specialized tools, equipment, and skills.
Apple didn’t have most computer users. But it had a tight hold on the people who produced the content and materials everyone else consumed. By combining the Mac, the wildly expensive LaserWriter, PageMaker, and later Photoshop, along with HyperCard, Apple had a cultural importance that distorted reality.
Also: How to watch Apple’s iPhone 2026 event – and 4 surprises we might see today
By 2011, the company was very different. Instead of a narrow market at the intersection of traditional computer buyers, creative professionals, and those with the budget to pay a premium, Apple put iPods and then iPhones into the pockets of mainstream consumers. That’s the part of the business that added the big “T” to Apple’s valuation.
More than just hardware
Just about everyone will agree that Apple makes nice hardware. But so did Nokia and BlackBerry. Apple perfected the slab-phone interface, which became the way a billion-plus people interact with their digital world.
Through its tightly integrated ecosystem, Apple controls something of extreme value: the point of contact between a person and the digital services and applications they use constantly throughout the day.
Also: I used my iPhone 17 Pro without a case for a year – here’s how it looks now
Despite the prevalence of other companies in its ecosystem, Apple still owns device engineering, the operating system, interfaces, and distribution network. For the past 20 years or so, Apple customers have accessed their digital lives through Apple’s ecosystem and its interfaces.
Now, the rise of AI threatens this status.
Hijacking the destination
In just three years, AI has taught people a new way of interacting with technology. Instead of searching for a web page or opening an app and figuring out how to operate it, you tell the machine what you want.
AI agents take this shift further. I’ve written entire Apple applications (deep, complex, powerful ones) without touching a line of code. Now, sure, they need my management and design skills, but I’m not doing lots of the work anymore.
Also: 5 ways I actually use ChatGPT Work in my small business to save time and money
Think about search. Google has long been the initial point of contact for internet users. You’d visit Google, enter your search string, review the results, and click a website. Google was the point of contact, but the destination was the site itself.
In the past year, though, since Google added AI Overviews and put Gemini at the top of the search results, traffic to sites coming from search has declined tremendously. Google’s AI has essentially hijacked all that traffic.
With AI, the traditional human-computer interaction is changing. In this new era, the iPhone won’t disappear, nor will the Mac become irrelevant. Instead, their importance to how users interact with technology might be substantially genericized behind Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or some other agent of choice.
Also: After the vibe-coding rush comes the debugging hangover
The risk to Apple is that AI could displace its historic position as the interface and ecosystem of our digital lives.
Apple is far behind in the consumer AI race. Yes, iOS 27 and its siblings are an improvement. But nobody thinks of Siri as “my AI.” Sure, people will still choose Apple devices for their hardware benefits, but the center point of interaction is rapidly becoming AI.
This transformation is strategically risky for Apple. Going back to the BlackBerry and Nokia examples, even at the end, nobody would have said that either company’s hardware was subpar. Instead, those interaction methods became obsolete. When the interface becomes obsolete, users go elsewhere.
The AI pivot
Now, Apple’s past strength might once again become its future force. I’m talking about Macs, because Apple’s Apple Silicon processors, designed for an entirely different class of work, have turned out to be almost perfectly optimized for AI. The current Mac architecture, down to the $899 Mac mini, is ideal for running local AI processing.
My current configuration runs a home lab based on an old M1 Apple Silicon Mac Studio. This setup is running a fairly powerful large language model locally, doing some 24/7 AI processing for me. That six-year-old, previously retired Mac, with its 64GB of unified RAM, can process larger workloads than GPUs costing $5,000 and more.
So here we are, now in the closing days of 2026. Apple is about to release its annual iPhone offerings, with the usual nuggets of innovation. Apple Intelligence appears to be improved, but it’s unlikely to keep pace with OpenAI and Anthropic’s offerings.
Also: Apple’s M5 Ultra is its most powerful chip ever – with 4x faster AI performance than M3 Ultra
But perhaps the most significant category of innovation is Macs. Apple introduced, for example, new headless Macs last month. And given the rise of AI, it’s no coincidence Apple is focusing on Macs with a new fervor. The resurgence of this moribund product category is one of the biggest turnarounds in tech platform history.
I’ll be curious to see how Apple handles this move. Will Macs be the interface people turn to for their digital lives? Will AI companies have an impact? For example, former Apple chief designer Jony Ive is now partnering with OpenAI.
Or will we still gravitate to our iPhones, but instead of using Safari or Google, will we talk to ChatGPT or Claude? And will Apple leverage the Apple Silicon architecture for more of a hardware-centric push, possibly encroaching into data centers or, even more interesting, pulling some of the AI work out of data centers and back into the desks and cheap Home Depot shelving units of people and companies who prefer to keep their AI processing local and in-house?
Also: The iPad Pro M5 has the best battery life based on our lab testing, and it’s on sale
During a time of logistics transformation and the rise of offshore production, Apple chose a logistics guru to lead the company. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Apple’s former hardware chief, a guy who was instrumental in cultivating the new Apple Silicon architecture to fruition, is now the company’s new leader.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments below.
You can follow my day-to-day project updates on social media. Be sure to subscribe to my weekly update newsletter, and follow me on Twitter/X at @DavidGewirtz, on Facebook at Facebook.com/DavidGewirtz, on Instagram at Instagram.com/DavidGewirtz, on Bluesky at @DavidGewirtz.com, and on YouTube at YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV.
