This past week, Apple took the wraps off the new iPhone Pro and the brand-new iPhone Duo. It’s a big deal, and a lot of ink has already been spilled over it. But something else happened that I’d like to shed more light on.
John Ternus gave his first keynote as Apple CEO. And his opening remarks in that job carry real weight. He chose to use that moment to make his case for Apple’s place in AI. (Yes, he called it AI.) It starts at the 3:32 mark in Apple’s YouTube keynote and it was the clearest statement of intent we’ve heard from Apple on the subject.
His words:
AI makes entirely new kinds of experiences possible. And AI can become even more useful when it brings together your life with the apps, services, and products you use every day. And this means the product at the center of your experiences becomes even more essential. What I like to think of as an intelligent personal hub.
It’s the intersection of broad new capability and a deep understanding of your personal context that makes this idea so powerful.
There’s no product in the world better designed to be your intelligent personal hub than iPhone.
As your personal hub, your iPhone can do so much more for you because it understands your context. This includes your calendar, your relationships, your routines, the most private details of your daily life.
It’s personal intelligence that’s actually personal.
He described the iPhone as an “intelligent personal hub.” His argument was pretty straightforward. If you were building the ideal device for personal AI, you’d want something you carry everywhere, with enough processing power to run models locally and a connection to more capable models when needed. You’d want cameras and microphones so it could understand what’s going on around you. And you’d want a screen. There are still plenty of things I’d rather look at than have a robot read to me.
You’d end up with something a lot like an iPhone.
The other half of his argument was about context. A capable model gets much more useful when it knows something about you. Your calendar, your relationships, and your routines are already on your phone. With your permission, that information could help it do things that a chatbot starting from scratch can’t.
Of course, that’s also the information you’d be least comfortable handing over to some company’s servers. Ternus tied Apple’s approach directly to that concern. Run the models on the device whenever possible. Use Private Cloud Compute when the job needs more power. His promise was “personal intelligence that’s actually personal.”
For lack of a better term, I’m calling this the Ternus Doctrine.
I’ve been making versions of this argument for a while. Apple’s access to local context has always seemed like a big advantage to me. But hearing Ternus put it together at the opening of the keynote (his first as CEO) felt different. This was the position he chose to stake out before getting to the new hardware.
Apple has often seemed reluctant to get serious about AI. I know they’ve been working on it, and I’ve written before about why their approach could work. But there’s a limit to how long I can be excited about what Siri might eventually do. At some point, I need it to do the thing.
If we start doing more of our computing by asking an assistant to do work for us, whoever makes that assistant will have a lot of influence over how we use our devices. If I spend my day working through somebody else’s AI, Apple still gets to sell me a phone. But somebody else is deciding how much of that phone I use and which services I reach for.
I don’t think Apple wants that future.
Ternus’s argument gives Apple a different path. Make the intelligence built into the phone useful enough that it’s the one we reach for. Give it the context it needs, while letting us control what it can access. And make it work across the devices and apps we already use.
If he follows through, I’d expect more attention to what Apple silicon can run locally. I’d also expect Apple to keep building out Private Cloud Compute. Those are the parts of the plan where Apple controls the hardware and can keep improving it.
Siri is the harder test. I’m on the betas and the new Siri AI is light-years ahead of the old Siri. But it’s still unclear how far Apple is willing to take this. If they want Siri to become the brain of our private contextual AI assistant, they need to keep the gas down. They also need developer buy-in. Apps need to plug into it.
I’m speculating about where Ternus takes this. An opening speech doesn’t tell us how he’ll assign people or spend money, and Apple has given us plenty of reasons to be skeptical of AI promises.
I liked hearing Ternus explain where he thinks Apple belongs. Now I’d like to be able to ask my iPhone to do something complicated and trust it to finish the job.
The post The Ternus Doctrine appeared first on MacSparky.
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