The good news is that there’s a real effort to release more products. We’ve expected for some time that the first year of Ternus’ time as CEO would be packed with new products, not necessarily because of the new CEO, but just because a lot of products long rumored to be coming are finally nearing completion.
The folding iPhone Duo was just the start: There are touchscreen MacBooks, AirPods with cameras, smart glasses, a new smart home hub, and a 20th Anniversary iPhone all coming up in the next 12 months. And that’s in addition to regular updates to iPhone, iPad, and Mac product lines. However, that’s not enough for Ternus, according to Gurman’s wide-ranging report.
According to his sources, Apple’s new CEO wants the company to become “more experimental” and introduce new products more quickly. There’s definitely a double-edged sword to that philosophy: Most Apple fans want the company to take risks and big swings like iPhone Duo, but nobody wants to buy an Apple product that gets abandoned after a couple of years because it didn’t take off. Apple has always prided itself on its selectivity, so a focus on risk-taking is, in itself, risky.
Ternus also believes, according to the report, that Apple products should be released year-round, not just at a big event in the fall and the spring. That’s definitely a stance we can get behind.
The report says Ternus believes Apple can accomplish this accelerated, engineering-focused, bolder product roadmap while still becoming “leaner.” He believes Apple should hire fewer people and trim its bloated middle management. In the last couple of weeks, Gurman reports, Apple has begun dismissing engineering program managers (EPM), and multiple teams have been scaled back or reassigned as the company has carried out some small-scale layoffs.
Groups that have been reduced recently include the Siri team, Vision Pro headset, some AI-related software engineering, and Fitness+. Some of these are allegedly due to employee performance, while others are due to changes in direction for those products.
