work for Apple and whatever else he chooses to work on. Quite simply, Tim Cook is an incredible guy. President Donald J. Trump joining us now, Walter Piecyk, a partner at LightShed and an Apple analyst. And how did this hit you when you heard, Walter? I guess it's none of it is a total surprise. Was the timing a surprise or not so much?
I mean, the timing was a surprise to a lot of people. We called for a change last year, in the summer of last year, because of the challenges that they were having in AI and the fact that, I mean, it's true, everything the president said that, you know, he was he did an excellent job over the last 15 years. He's exactly what Apple needed. It wasn't the creativity. He had Jony Ive there, right, for a large portion of that to help with some of the more recent products, like the Watch and the AirPods. But now we're in a new AI era, right? And we needed someone to focus on product and get more involved in developing new products. There were some great products that they had in development, like an autonomous car, and that got left by the wayside. Others that they launched, you know, like the Vision Pro, that didn't that didn't do so well. So it was time. So it wasn't a surprise in that regard.
Although when we came out with that call a year ago saying that this is what should happen, everyone was insisting, no way, this is Tim Cook's life. He's going to be there for years and years, and there's no way he's going to step away from this company. So I think it is a surprise in terms of the timing and maybe the reality is that, you know, the AI continues not to go well. And there's been, you know, incremental management turnover there, particularly in the area of AI that, you know, either whether it was Cook acknowledging this himself, there was a time for a change, for new leadership to take them into the AI era.
Everything that's written about the new individuals, about hardware. Is Apple always going to be predominantly hardware, or like so many stories that we've seen in the past, if you're not nimble, you get sort of replaced by by more nimble competitors? Does it have to tack completely to software? And is this a gentleman that could get that done, in addition to what Apple is really good at, the ecosystem, hardware and everything else?
It feels like I've been hearing them having to, you know, get away from the exposure to the iPhone for a decade. And it's still, you know, half the half the revenue of the company, even the services which has grown is directly tied to the phone. Right. $20 billion they're getting from Google to be the search engine. You know, all of the services that are on there driven by the iPhone. In fact, every time you buy an iPhone, they're allocating a portion of that revenue into that services line. So this is still an iPhone-driven company. But, you know, to continue to grow rather than having this cyclicality where some years are down, other years, you know, you've got this mouse going through the snake where people need to upgrade their phones. You have a couple quarters of growth. They're going to have to find a new category. And when you're a company that's generating $400 billion of revenue, that's not easy to find.
In terms of the software, you know, and it's like, look, I get the notion where, hey, I'm a, I'm an equipment person or whatever. But like, I think what AI has shown us is like, do you have to be a software expert to, you know, to succeed in AI? It's the exact opposite. Like AI is actually trying to help you, but you need someone that maybe can change a culture at at Apple that needs changing. I think going into this AI era, I'm not sure what their, you know, back-to-work schedule is in terms of number of days they're spending at the company or how involved Cook has been in some of these product developments. But I think Ternus will offer an opportunity to maybe, you know, help that culture to execute on figuring out, you know, what their role is in AI. And obviously, they can play a very important one. It's in everyone's hand, right? So they have the opportunity to succeed, but AI is not going to wait for them to figure it out. It's going to move on. And as we approach this agentic era, right, that that is going to, you know, create a new risk for Apple that has not existed before.
