As Tim Cook hands the reins to hardware engineering chief John Ternus in September 2026, the company faces its biggest leadership transition in 15 years. While Cook’s tenure delivered massive revenue growth and operational excellence, many former employees and analysts say Apple has lost the product-first, risk-taking design culture that defined the Jobs years. Fortune explores whether Ternus can shift the company from steady iteration back to true innovation.

Sebastian Herrera for Fortune:
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Matthew Rogers remembers Apple’s scrappy days when, as an engineer fresh out of college, he could debate ideas directly with Steve Jobs… “I was 23, 24 years old, and I interacted with Steve Jobs. That’s crazy, right? But that’s the organization he ran,” Rogers told Fortune from his Silicon Valley office (he now runs food-recycling startup Mill).

Back then, Apple’s hierarchy was much flatter. What made Apple special, he said, is that Jobs surrounded himself with consumer-minded product leaders who were expected to argue. The mandate was to build “the best thing out there” and take real risks. Some of Apple’s most iconic products came out of a skunkworks team across the street from the main office.

That much-mythologized era continues to shape — and perhaps burden — Apple as it navigates its biggest leadership transition in 15 years. Somewhere along the way, Apple lost a part of its design and product magic, Rogers and several former design and hardware employees, investors, and analysts said. The September handoff from Tim Cook to incoming chief executive John Ternus, who currently leads hardware engineering, has Rogers and other longtime Apple watchers wondering: Can the company reclaim its product-first soul?

Rogers, who also cocreated smart home company Nest with former Apple executive Tony Fadell, said Ternus now faces a defining test. “I’ll put it this way,” he said. “He has a tall task, but a big opportunity.”

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MacDailyNews Take: As we posted on X just yesterday:

Under Tim Cook, Apple systematically strayed from Steve Jobs’ core vision. Product Design, the very soul of the company Jobs rebuilt, was demoted, sidelined, and subordinated to operations, supply-chain efficiency, and services revenue. The result? Fifteen long years of polished, but profoundly boring iteration: thinner bezels, faster chips, incremental camera bumps, and endless “Pro” variants that rarely moved the industry forward the way the original iPhone, iPad, or even the aluminum unibody MacBooks once did.

Jobs put Design at the absolute top of the food chain. Jony Ive’s group wasn’t a service department; it was the engine. Cook flipped the hierarchy. Hardware engineering, operations, and finance called the shots (poorly; witness Luca Maestri famously rejecting calls to invest in AI early on which is why he’s now sidelined). Design became reactive instead of directive. The Vision Pro launched as an impressive, but overpriced, underbaked curiosity. After billions spent, the Apple Car evaporated. True category-defining leaps simply did not happen.

Now comes John Ternus, a product person, a hardware guy who has spent his career shipping actual devices rather than optimizing margins. Early signals are encouraging: bringing trusted hardware lieutenants back into the fold and already embedding himself with the industrial design group. That is exactly the right instinct.

If Ternus moves quickly to restore Design to its rightful place at the apex of Apple’s decision-making, the company might finally escape the long, comfortable, lucrative mediocrity of the Cook era. Apple doesn’t need another fifteen years of safer, prettier, or just different iterations. It needs the return of products that make people stop, stare, and rethink what a computer in their pocket, on their wrist, or on their face can be.

The hardware engineer is about to become CEO. The question is whether he has the will — and the authority with Cook looming as Executive Chairman — to put Design back on top where Jobs left it. The next few years will tell us if Apple can innovate again… or if the iteration treadmill simply continues under a new CEO.

Fingers crossed!

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The post Can new CEO John Ternus bring back Apple’s design mojo? appeared first on MacDailyNews.

Siri Wolfram Alpha integration helped create one of the defining moments in the early history of consumer artificial intelligence. When Apple introduced Siri with iPhone 4S in October 2011, users were not merely given another form of voice control. They could ask a spoken question and receive a calculated answer rather than a page of search results.

Questions involving mathematics, measurements, dates, nutrition, astronomy and factual comparisons could be routed to Wolfram Alpha, a computational knowledge engine launched in 2009. Siri handled the conversation, while Wolfram Alpha supplied structured information and calculations behind many of the responses.

The experience could feel remarkably advanced for its time. Asking how many days remained before a holiday, comparing the populations of two cities or converting miles into kilometers no longer required opening Safari, entering a query and selecting a website.

That direct path from natural language to a useful answer established an expectation that continues shaping AI products today.

Siri Began as an Action-Oriented Assistant

Siri did not begin inside Apple.

Its technological roots extend to research conducted at SRI International, including work associated with the DARPA-funded CALO project. The objective was to develop systems capable of learning, organizing information and helping people complete everyday tasks.

SRI later spun the technology into Siri Inc., founded by a team including Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Tom Gruber. The company released a standalone Siri app for iPhone in early 2010.

The original product was designed around actions rather than ordinary web search. A user could ask for a restaurant reservation, request a taxi, check entertainment listings or search for local services. Siri attempted to understand the intent and connect the request with an appropriate online provider.

This approach was ambitious because the assistant needed to coordinate several different systems. Speech had to be converted into text, the request had to be interpreted, context had to be considered and an external service had to return something useful.

Apple acquired Siri in April 2010. Steve Jobs had personally recognized the potential of moving beyond a collection of apps toward a conversational layer capable of reaching them on behalf of the user.

When the assistant returned as an integrated feature of iPhone 4S, Apple had narrowed some aspects of the original startup vision while making the technology accessible to a much larger audience.

Siri could send messages, create reminders, place calls, manage calendar events, check weather conditions and answer questions. Apple initially labeled the feature as a beta, an unusual decision for a prominent part of a new iPhone launch.

The beta label acknowledged that natural-language interaction remained unpredictable. Accents, ambiguous phrasing, network conditions and external data providers could all influence whether a request succeeded.

Siri Wolfram Alpha Made Answers Feel Immediate

Siri Wolfram Alpha became especially memorable because it showed the difference between retrieving information and computing an answer.

A conventional search engine could locate pages containing a formula. Wolfram Alpha could apply that formula to the values supplied by the user. It could interpret units, compare quantities, calculate probabilities and organize factual data into a structured response.

That distinction allowed Siri to appear more knowledgeable than a voice interface simply reading search results aloud.

A request such as “What is 15% of $86?” could return the calculation directly. A question about the distance between planets could produce a value without requiring the user to inspect several websites. Wolfram Alpha could also answer unusually specific requests, including information about aircraft flying overhead when the necessary location and aviation data were available.

The system was not a large language model. It did not generate open-ended prose in the way current AI assistants do. Wolfram Alpha relied on curated data, symbolic computation, algorithms and formal representations of knowledge.

That structure provided an advantage that remains relevant: many answers could be calculated and traced through defined information rather than improvised statistically.

Early Siri combined several specialized capabilities instead of depending on one system to do everything. One provider might supply restaurant information, another could handle maps and Wolfram Alpha could process computational questions.

The assistant acted as the conversational coordinator.

This architecture made Siri seem like one intelligence even though the response could come from a network of separate services. Modern AI platforms have returned to a similar idea through tools, agents and external data connections. A language model may manage the conversation while calling a calculator, calendar, search engine or business system when a task requires reliable external action.

Siri demonstrated that model on a consumer smartphone more than a decade earlier.

A Small Integration Created a Large Expectation

The Wolfram Alpha partnership influenced how people began judging digital assistants.

Before Siri, voice features on phones were commonly associated with rigid commands such as calling a contact or selecting music. Siri invited users to speak more naturally and attempt questions that would previously have been typed into a browser.

The results were inconsistent, but successful interactions changed perceptions immediately. The iPhone appeared capable of understanding intent, reaching into a knowledge system and returning a concise answer through one conversational interface.

That apparent simplicity concealed substantial infrastructure. Speech recognition, language interpretation, location, personal context and external databases all had to work together quickly enough to preserve the feeling of a conversation.

Wolfram Alpha also gave Apple access to expertise that would have taken years to reproduce internally. Stephen Wolfram had spent decades building Mathematica and computational systems before launching the public knowledge engine.

Following the Siri announcement, Wolfram described the integration as a characteristically direct Steve Jobs decision: users wanted access to knowledge and actions without unnecessary intermediate steps.

That idea became more influential than any individual answer Siri provided.

The assistant did not need to show how many services had participated. It needed to understand the request and return the result.

Early Siri Also Revealed the Limits of the Model

The first version of Siri could feel futuristic one moment and frustrating the next.

Some questions reached Wolfram Alpha correctly, while similar wording could trigger a web search or an unrelated response. Siri occasionally struggled to determine whether the user wanted a calculation, a local result or an action inside the phone.

Wolfram Alpha responses were also better suited to some subjects than others. Mathematical and scientific questions matched its computational structure, while casual conversation, current events and subjective requests required different sources.

Network dependence created another weakness. Early Siri processing relied heavily on remote servers, so delays or outages could make a basic request fail even when the iPhone itself was functioning normally.

Those limitations foreshadowed the central challenge surrounding modern assistants. A convincing interface encourages people to ask almost anything, but no single technical system performs equally well across every type of request.

Current generative AI can produce more natural language and handle a wider range of topics. It can also create confident errors when factual grounding is weak. The computational approach represented by Wolfram Alpha remains valuable precisely because some questions require verified data and exact calculation rather than fluent speculation.

The story behind the first Siri steps is therefore not only about an old iPhone feature. It shows that a powerful assistant needs more than a conversational personality. It requires access to dependable tools, structured knowledge and the ability to recognize when another system should provide the answer.

Siri Wolfram Alpha offered that lesson in 2011, long before AI assistants became capable of writing essays, interpreting screens and acting across apps.

The post Siri Wolfram Alpha Defined the First AI Assistant appeared first on AppleMagazine.