La Mente Que Hizo Posible el Nuevo iPhone: Entrevista Exclusiva con John Ternus

Nice to see you. Thanks for coming.

Senior vice president of hardware engineering.

Okay, good.

That's been such a consistent response is like every time a person picks it up for the first time, it's just like whoa.

Well, I mean it was packing it all in there, right? I think this product represents the culmination of many, many, many years of work as we've been developing more and more core technologies internally. When you think about Apple Silicon and the focus on efficiency that Johnny's team has, and of course we've been doing that for the SoC, and then we added this now in this case the C1X modem and we've got N1. By building that and really optimizing efficiency, it enables a completely new kind of product, right? And then of course we've got this plateau on the top and the ceramic shield, and we had to make the product the way we wanted it, we had to figure out how much could we cram into there, right? And so we have the most densely packed main logic board we've ever had on a phone. We've got the cameras up there. We had to repackage the cameras so that they could fit up there, all that Apple Silicon, which then leaves all that extra space for battery, and it has great battery life. And so I think it's all of these things coming together. Took years and years of work and kind of learning and growth across generations of phones to finally have the building blocks to be able to make a product like this.

Yeah. I mean it's a key part of it. What's interesting is it's actually machined out. It's precision milled on the inside as well. So it's actually a hollow plateau. It's not just an extra thick piece of ceramic shield. And that allowed us to kind of put more of the components in there. So, if you saw in the picture, there's just a huge battery that runs almost the rest of the length of the phone.

Yeah, it's funny. I never think of it as being a clash between the hardware team and the design team. I think it's because it's one of the things that makes Apple special is that everyone here has a deep appreciation for design and how important it is and how much value it brings to our products and how much it brightens people's lives. And so, we go into it together with the studio from the very beginning. We're thinking about the product together, the engineering side and the design side and ideas going back and forth and how do we optimize this and how do we push on this and is there any way we could make this a little bit thinner or is there any way we could make this a little different. And it's a very collaborative process that feels really good because in the end if you just left engineers to themselves they would build something very functional but maybe not beautiful. It's very special when you can build something that's so capable and so beautiful.

That's what good design does.

I don't think so. I mean, like you said, design is always, there's always opinions on design, which is a wonderful thing, but I think we try to approach things with what is the best material for the job. What is the best material for the application? And it was really obvious from the very beginning that aluminum was the right material to use for this product. And you touched on kind of the two key reasons. One of them is as we created this new product category with iPhone Air, we wanted to make the Pro even more pro. We wanted to push on it. And one way to do that is to make it even more performant, right? And so if you want more performance, you got to have great thermals. And our custom alloy for aluminum, it has 20 times the thermal conductivity as the titanium we're using. So that's a really, really big enabler, right? Significant. And as you mentioned, aluminum has a lower density than titanium. So in the same form factor, it ends up being quite a bit lighter. And when you make it lighter, well then that allows us to, hey, let's push some more battery in there and things like that. So I don't think this product would have been possible. I know this product wouldn't have been possible the way it is if we had tried to use titanium. We think aluminum is absolutely the best option.

Yes, it's my personal favorite as well. I've been waiting for orange forever. So, to finally get it, it's awesome.

Thank you.

Just wait till you try it.

I mean honestly that's I mean there's many challenges in building great AirPods but that's one of the biggest ones because everybody's ears are different. Ears are like fingerprints. Like no two ears are the same. And if you look at all the data, the variation between the biggest ears and the smallest ears is huge. And so it's a really hard problem to try to design a product to cover that much range, right? And so we put in a lot of work as you heard in the keynote, we do 3D scans of thousands upon thousands of ears. So we just have a huge library of different ear shapes and sizes and all of that. We do a ton of user studies. So, a lot of as we're building models, we're trying them with a lot of people and, you know, we learned some things from all that data, making them a little bit smaller, as Kate said in the keynote. Also, there's a change in the angle of the ear tip that actually kind of better matches the broader distribution of people's actual ear geometry, right? And so when all those things come together, what we've achieved is something that has the broadest fit coverage that we've had for AirPods Pro, which is really great. And the stability is really good. Like that's been one of the most common points of feedback in our testing is how stable they feel in the ears for, you know, people like to exercise with them and they really lock in. So I think people are going to be really happy with them.

That was the goal. It was like take every single thing that everyone loves about this product and make it better. And I think we've achieved that.

Well, yeah. So we've always had silicone ear tips, which are really good from a fit and comfort standpoint. Foam offers good passive attenuation, but if you just use foam by itself, they tend to break down really quickly if you just kind of have exposed foam. So, what we did is we actually injected foam inside the silicone tips. So, the part that touches your ears is still silicone, but there's foam embedded kind of behind it. And so that brings down the passive attenuation, the amount of noise that's coming through just by them being in your ears. So that combined with the algorithmic improvements and the kind of other design improvements led to this huge leap forward in ANC.

I try not to pick favorites, but I think this moment of being able to introduce a completely new iPhone lineup, right? Something we've been thinking about for a while, which has allowed us, like I said, the existence of the iPhone Air and our ability to make that has allowed us to push the iPhone Pro to be even more pro. And I think just being able to do that thing as we've been thinking about for a while, obviously, we work on these for a long time. And I think it's been really exciting today to see people's reaction and see, you know, some people are like, 'That's the one I want.' Other people are like, 'No, I want that one.' And that's great. Like, there's something for everybody.

It's hard to say. Every product has its own challenges, right? You know, we talked about AirPods and the fit and finding the fit for as many people as possible is a huge challenge. Obviously, packing all that capability into iPhone Air was a huge challenge. And then just pushing the limit on iPhone Pro, there are just so many challenges you face along the way, but that's why we do what we do and we love doing it, right? Because you finish, you get something you're really proud of and you're already thinking about how can we make it better next time.

Never know.

100%. Yeah. I think it's interesting. It's both a huge opportunity, but it's also a huge responsibility. Exactly. Because we are building products that billions of people use. And honestly, so much of what you hear about when we talk about our environmental work in Apple 2030 and every little bit we can improve in terms of how much recycled material we're using. You know, every individual in the world can do good things for the planet and have an impact by recycling or maybe not using as much, but it's pretty small. Right. The amazing thing about being here is engineers can have a massive impact, right? If they can come up with an idea that saves 10% of the material here or uses less energy there, that can have a really profound impact. So, it's like I said, it's a really fun and exciting thing, but it's also, in a way, it's like, yes, this is our responsibility to take this seriously.

Thank you.

Sadly, I don't.

I do not.

Hola Mexico to my guys down in Mexico.