MacBook Neo is Just the Beginning | Apple Interview with Joz & John Ternus

Well, all right, again, you know me, Mark. Mac is what brought me here. iPod changed the trajectory of the company and iPhone changed the world. So, I'm going to have to give you three products.

Well, for me maybe I'll start. I joined in '86, right? So, I joined after the garage. Apple had it just about 10 years old. And then Apple went off the rails for a little bit, right? So, I like to tell people that even though I started in '86, what happened before '97 really kind of doesn't count for me. So, I'll start at '97, which is, you know, we were a company almost out of business, right? Literally. And Steve came back and Think different was more than just a marketing slogan, right? He had to explain to the world why did Apple need to exist? We were 3% market share, struggling to stay in business, Windows PCs dominated. And by the way, he had to explain to us Apple employees why did we need to be here? Why did we need to exist? And the reality was that the PC industry was not exactly innovative in those days. Right? It was all a matter of how do you cut a nickel here, a quarter here, a dollar here in order to make the cheapest beige box you could. Because that's what they were all competing against. And Steve wanted the world to know that Apple and let us to know Apple needed to exist because somebody had to have the courage to think different. Someone had to have the courage to do different things. And Mark, I mean, how prophetic that was in 1997 and to see what that thinking turned into. Obviously starting originally with the iMac, the Bondi blue iMac that shattered what people thought of as far as PCs were going. iPod and iTunes, which revolutionized the music industry. iPhone and the App Store, which changed the world, changed all of our daily lives. iPad, you know, magical sheet of glass that redefined a category. Apple Watch, our daily companion that, you know, for your fitness, your health, keeping you connected at just a glance. AirPods changed the way that people listen to music and cut the cords, you know, from our wireless device that why would you should you have a cord and a magical pairing and of course, you know, Apple Vision Pro, which reached into the future to show us how the digital world and the physical world could be combined and incredible services, you know, Apple Pay and iCloud and Apple TV, you know, and then leading all the way to what you said, you know, I think the MacBook Neo is a great embodiment of that because it completely rethought different, right? When John and his team is to how do you do a lower priced but incredibly high value laptop. And so, it's perfectly in keeping with again this think different idea of this company that was almost out of business. So, to me that's what it means to me.

Yeah, well, John's being very humble. He was a big part of that.

Well, and the quality of build and quality of design and construction, you know, you pick up the MacBook Neo and right away you feel the quality, right? You feel how amazing this product is. And Mark, you know the products in this space that it's competing against. They're plastic, they're little you can flex them, they're so cheap because what have they done? They just tried to like again, cut a nickel, cut a quarter, cut a dollar out of everything to try to make it cheaper and as a result, they made it cheap, right? Which is very different than making it a lower price and a high value, which was the approach we were taking.

Yeah, because it's right. A Mac I failed to mention that point. What makes a Mac? macOS makes a Mac, right? Like you get all of those things together and the macOS experience on MacBook Neo is just as great as the macOS on a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, right? It is a true Mac.

Yeah, I mean and right from the very beginning you know there was obviously some overlap. I mean that's what was the case when we introduced it. But like John said we look we want to make our Macs the best personal computer we can be. We want to make the iPad this magical sheet of glass that makes it the best that it can be and think about you I'm not going to speak for you but I'm going to guess you might have both, you know. So many of our customers do. Well think about that. So you're even choosing that you're not converging them and yet it's not one, right? You're choosing now sometimes the iPad's better for this and the Mac's better for this and it's good to have them both and we love that.

Well fortunately I don't we don't have that product. So I don't even know how I would answer that Mark.

I you know look I think we're still very much in the early innings of spatial computing. We are super excited about it. I mean the Vision Pro is an extraordinary product. As John said it's like we reached into the future and pulled it into the present. And it's continuing to like people are continuing to find exciting new use cases for it. There's a lot of compelling stuff in enterprise and medicine and other things and that's going to continue to grow. It's fun. We're at the beginning of the journey.

Yeah, I mean there's countless examples, right? Of where a digital element can augment the physical world and quite honestly vice versa. And some amazing experiences the work we've been doing with the NBA with streaming the games on Vision Pro and in immersive video is just mind-blowing. It's a completely different experience to be like wow I'm actually at this game and people have been super excited about that. So again we keep pushing and finding these new experiences and opportunities and yeah, I'm excited for the future of it.

Actually called it proactive if you remember Mark. We didn't even use machine learning or AI. We talked about how your devices could be proactive because they were learning these things. That was not my biggest marketing genius but we had a name.

Well first of all I'm not sure I'd use crossroads, right? I would use early innings. I mean this is still very early days in what is going on with intelligence and you know you've heard us give some of our thinking on it, right? We want to use intelligence meet the customers where they are to make our products and our features better. And by the way we've been doing that with intelligence for many years, right? And gen AI allows us an opportunity to do that even more, you know. So I'm excited about that but boy this is not a sprint. This is a marathon, right? We're going to be doing stuff with intelligence for decades not for months or years.

Well I like what JT said because it is about these experiences not about the technology itself. Right? And again we see it as a way to make our products and our features better. I love it when those things are happening and somebody doesn't even necessarily know that it's AI, right? It's just better and that's what I think the world expects from us, right? We make things personal, we bring humanity to things, you know, we make it so that you don't have to be a chatbot expert in order to get the most out of that technology. We want the technology to come to you, right? And just make those experiences that you live through every day better whether you know you're using AI or not.

That's exactly right. It knows your habits, it knows I love that. I mean that is a great example. That was one of the quote unquote proactives, right? That we introduced maybe gosh more than 10 years ago which was the idea that it had a pretty good idea what app you needed to use next. It wasn't just random, right? You pull down as you said from the screen and it took a bunch of things that it knew about what was going on right now, what your habits were and had a pretty good shot of offering you up the right app.

Well the App Store is alive and well. I can tell you that. We are getting lots of great submissions and lots of great apps and intelligence is certainly part of those apps. So you know I think the rumors of its death may have been greatly exaggerated.

I'll go first. Well, look, again, I've been here for 40 of the 50, which is kind of nuts. So I have more stories than you have time, Mark, but if you ever want to grab a beer or glass of wine, I'll make you cry uncle at some point. I have so much, but I obviously during this very rare time for us to be reflective because as we talked about we're way more forward looking than we are backward looking, but this is kind of a special week and a special lead up to this. So we are reflective and I can't help but think of when Steve returned to the company. And our very first meeting with Steve because here again we were struggling to say the least at that point and we had a meeting with him leaders in product marketing and leaders in engineering, our first meeting with him and I was working for Phil at the time, Phil Schiller, and you know, we weren't quite sure how to start the meeting and Phil says, 'Hey, do you want to show you our product road maps, which are, you know, our plans for the product for the next couple years?' And Steve stops and he says, 'No. Let's talk about where we're going. Because if we don't know where we're going, no map's going to get us there.' And we started to retrench our thinking and him reminding us that great companies fail because they forget about creating great products. And that we were going to put the product back at the focus of everything that we do. Right? It is and with this naive belief that if you create great products, there'll be a market for that. And again, first of all, our heads were like, 'Wow.' We'd never had a CEO who was telling us that we were going to talk about where we're going and how the products were going to be getting us there and how we were going to transform this business. And you know, talk about having us at hello. And then to see as I went through earlier to see all the different places that thinking took us, you know, and where we are today is it's been an incredible journey. I feel incredibly blessed to have spent the last 40 years of my life here and what's more exciting is all the great stuff we have in front of us because we are working on some pretty cool stuff, Mark, but I think that's what you wanted to hear from us, but we're not telling you about.

Yeah, I love that. So that's why the bottom of the MacBook Neo has the color matching feet. It's all a part of it. It's just every detail, exactly.

Thanks, Mark.