Hi, welcome to another episode of Cold Fusion. It's August 24th, 2011. An Apple press release names its newest CEO, Tim Cook.
Compared to Steve Jobs, nobody knew who this guy was. >> Apple's chief operating officer, Tim Cook, has filled in for Jobs before with great success. But brilliant as he is, just about every analyst on the planet will tell you he's no Steve Jobs.
The next day after taking the CEO role, Cook wrote an internal email that read, quote, "Apple is not going to change. I am confident the best years lie ahead of us. " End quote.
From a financial sense, Tim was right. When he started as CEO, Apple was valued at $350 billion. That valuation has since ballooned to $4 trillion.
Even after antitrust lawsuits around the world and accusations of stifling competition, all things considered, the company is in a better position than it has been in a long time. But things are about to change. On April 21st, 2026, Apple officially confirmed what insiders have been whispering for years.
Tim Cook is stepping down as CEO. His last day is August 31st. Now, Tim Cook has served Apple's shareholders well, but his departure truly marks the end of an era.
On September 1st, a mechanical engineer from Pennsylvania, the guy who you probably know from the Apple keynotes, becomes the most powerful product executive on the planet. His name is John Turners. And whether you know it or not, he's shaped almost every device you've ever owned from Apple.
But here's the real question. Who is John Turners? And what would Apple under him look like?
Tim Cook's Apple was about supply chains, scaling, refining, and of course, printing money from software services. So, what happens when an engineer takes the wheel? Will we see more innovation, new product categories?
Will Apple get its soul back, or is this the beginning of a very slow decline? Let's get into it. >> You are watching Tool Fusion TV.
For most tech enthusiasts, they would have already likely spotted John Turners at Apple keynote events. But his role in the company is much more significant than those appearances would indicate. His fingerprints are all over Apple's devices.
Turners graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a mechanical engineering degree. Even before he got to Apple, his final university project was building a robotic feeding arm for patients with quadriplegia. It was controlled entirely by head movements.
It's a small detail, but I decided to add it because it gives a glimpse into the kind of engineer that he is. He joined Apple in 2001 and started his career in building displays. There were cinema monitors that, according to people who own them, still work perfectly.
The cinema display, meanwhile, was insanely high resolution for 2002. This is a time where most people were using CRTs. And here was the cinema display with a flat panel LCD.
A masterpiece of design. its integrated feet, clear plastic shell over aluminum enclosure, and even the riged aluminum bezels look classy and retrocool. The display quality is also phenomenal for its age.
It's bright, crisp, and the viewing angles are surprisingly good. Later, John moved to the iPad, working on it from the very first prototype. He pushed internally for iPad OS to become its own operating system.
At the time, the iPad was essentially running iPhone software, and he believed that it was holding back the hardware. As we know now, he clearly won the argument. He then oversaw the AirPods and was instrumental in the transition to Apple silicon, you know, the M series chips.
He also had massive involvement with the MacBook Neo, the $599 laptop that he personally announced in New York just last month. It's received universal acclaim with unbeatable quality at that price point. Coming from Apple, it's the strange world we live in.
Now, here's what's interesting. Turners was not a fan of the Vision Pro. According to insiders, his skepticism came from his experience.
Back in the early 1990s, he was part of the company Virtual Research Systems, and they tried to create a VI headset, and it was terrible. He was also weary of Apple's self-driving car project, which we covered in detail in this episode here. He feared that it would distract the company, drain profits, and pull away engineers from core products.
In both cases, he thought they were distractions. And in both cases, he turned out to be completely right. The car got cancelled.
The Vision Pro, although a good product based on what we've seen so far, has been a flop. But he has also made mistakes. The Touch Bar, for example, the butterfly keyboard fiasco, which led to a $50 million class action settlement.
Those happened on his watch, too. So, this isn't a flawless record. But what you see with Turners is someone who more often than not has a sharp read on what actually matters to real users.
Eventually, Turners oversaw both hardware and software design teams, linking the two most important parts of an Apple product. According to an Apple insider talking to Bloomberg, John is highly technical, quote, a real engineer, end quote, and wants to get into every little detail about the product. This is the opposite of Tim Cook.
According to this Apple insider, quote, "Tim doesn't participate in the product development. " End quote. His focus is supply chains.
A few months ago, Mark German, one of the most trusted sources when it comes to Apple News, went on the TBPN podcast and predicted that Turnis was the man. >> Is if, let's say, Tim Cook hangs out another 3 to 5 years, >> you're not going to point another CEO who's 65, 70 years old. Yeah.
>> He's the only guy. >> Mhm. Apple, they get vast majority of the revenue from hardware.
He's the hardware guy. >> Yep. >> Have they screwed up any hardware since he's been in charge?
>> No. He's a steady hand. He knows what he's doing.
He's really the only choice. >> So despite the stock falling at the announcement, the general consensus by many analysts remains positive. And to be clear, John isn't going to be completely on his own to steer Apple's massive ship.
After leaving the CEO position, Tim Cook will still be executive chairman of the board. He'll still be traveling around the world meeting with policy makers especially needed for a challenging geopolitical climate. So in being a tech company, we have to talk about the elephant in the room for Apple, at least for the shareholders, AI.
Apple needs to find their place in this new world. And the embarrassing Siri revamp, which was essentially just giving up on using Google's tech, was not the way to go. I've made an entire episode on that if you want to see it.
It's clear that the iPhone's virtual assistant needs an upgrade, but it's possible that Apple is taking a completely different approach to AI. I'll explain. Apple not moving so quickly on the AI bandwagon might have been the smart thing to do.
While other companies chase the trend to spend hundreds of billions of dollars building data centers, they failed to factor in the possibility that in the future all LLMs will be a commodity. Apple, on the other hand, seems to be going down the more local hardware route. Their Mac and MacBook Pro range offer massive amounts of unified memory, sometimes surpassing over 100 GB.
That means ever more larger language models can be run locally on your device. Importantly, without needing the internet. This massive amount of memory for the price made Mac stand out from the sea of Windows computers in this department.
It made Max the hottest item for a while for local AI hobbyists who just like tinkering with openweight models. Consider the use case of Jake from the channel Thinking Different. >> Bam.
Pause right there. Up to eight times faster AI performance. To be honest, I haven't actually used AI a whole lot due to the whole unethical training, mass surveillance, and fully autonomous weaponry thing.
Because honestly, I enjoy writing, editing, and ideulating myself. That's kind of the best part about being creative in my mind. Why would I willingly give that to a robot?
But something that has gotten my attention is vibe coding. The idea of vibe coding tools help organize running this YouTube channel is really appealing. But what isn't as appealing is paying a monthly subscription or feeding all of my data into an informationhungry corporation.
So if I could run it all locally on this MacBook, that would be awesome. After some research, I installed and set up Visual Studio Code with Klein, powered by Quen 3 Coder 30B. And I have to say, I was pretty impressed watching it take my vague request of create me a YouTube video planning dashboard and turn it into a semifunctional, albeit very basic, website for me to work with.
>> Apple sees this kind of user, the one who uses local AI, as the future. If future models could be performant yet small, this move could pay off. So, Apple's hardware is well on the way to helping achieve that.
But what's missing is the implementation. Right now, AI is being pushed down the throats of unwilling consumers. Microsoft being the worst offender.
But what if, just what if, AI just works in the background? If the implementation is done properly, the user shouldn't even notice that AI had been used to do the task. For Apple to pull this off, this requires someone who knows both hardware and software design, the integration of software and silicon.
Apple thinks that person is Turners, as a source tells Bloomberg, quote, "He's the only person on the executive team with a track record of delivering integrated hardware, software products. " End quote. So, smaller, local, and completely integrated AI and not massive data centers might be the future, and we just don't know it yet.
That being said, while Apple has built the interface software layer with MLX, the actual model intelligence is lacking. But AI is a messy situation at the moment, so the dust has to settle first. But anyway, that's just one aspect of Apple, though.
Where John Turners takes Apple as a whole in the future is what everyone is trying to guess. But there's another question. Why has Apple decided to make the move now?
There are some corners of the internet pushing the narrative that Apple is in trouble. They say this is a crisis move, but the truth is quite the opposite. When Tim Cook addressed Apple employees at an all hands meeting earlier this year, he gave three reasons why the timing was right.
Number one, the holiday quarter was the strongest Apple had ever had. North of $140 billion in a single quarter. Number two, the product road map, he said, is stronger than it's ever been.
And number three, John Turners, he said, is ready. Tim Cook, in his own words, wanted to leave on a strong note. Not when things are falling apart, but when everything was lined up.
But there's also strategic knowledge here that goes deeper than timing. Tim Cook's genius was never about the products. It was about company systems, supply chains, manufacturing deals, diplomatic relationships with governments.
He took a company built on Steve Jobs product vision and turned it into a global machine so efficient that it became one of the most profitable companies on Earth. Apple's stock rose nearly 2,000% during his tenure. Apple became the first US company to cross 1 trillion in value and then 5 trillion.
So what could Apple actually look like under the Turners era? I could summarize Apple's potential future like this. Steve Jobs was the innovation era.
Tim Cook was the expansion era and John Turnis could be the hardware era. The chess pieces have been moving for 2 years. A new CFO and new general counsel and Johnny Suji elevated to chief hardware officer.
The company is restructuring around the next era, and Turnis is already at the center of it. There's whispers of a foldable iPhone coming this year. That's the device that Turners will almost certainly announce as his first keynote as CEO.
It's been in development for years, and you can think of the thin iPhone Air as basically an experiment to see how to make half of that foldable. An Apple foldable will be interesting to watch because for Samsung, foldables have only made up a fraction of their total phone sales. So, if Turners can make it a hit for Apple, that would be impressive.
John has also been experimenting at Apple. There's a nearly 20-in foldable iPad in the pipeline, something that blurs the line between tablet and laptop entirely. Whether it actually gets released remains to be seen.
He's also been tinkering with a new AI powered home device, wearables with cameras, smart glasses, and even a pendant with computer vision elements. That last pendant idea is giving me PTSD. But the point is Turnis has been leading the work on some experimental products.
It's the kind of product roadmap that an engineer like Turnis will actually understand in his bones and then he can steer the ship in the direction that they need to go. And he's already started. Turnis has already reorganized Apple's hardware engineering division just weeks ago, specifically making it more AI integrated using data and artificial intelligence to improve product development itself.
The Mac Mini has seen massive demand. And the MacBook Neo is a $600 laptop that's genuinely the best value proposition Apple has ever offered. This is the pattern.
Under Tim Cook, Apple made great products and made sure they were expensive. Under Turners, there are early signs of a new philosophy. Premium for professionals, premium for enthusiasts, but also genuinely great products at prices people can afford.
The Neo's positioning and branding, for example, is a completely new direction for Apple. Hopefully, under John Turners, we never see something like $700 wheels for the Mac Pro. Tim Cook did something no one thought was possible.
He took the reigns from Steve Jobs, and he built something bigger, but it wasn't without criticism. He was too cautious, too predictable, and all about extracting money from users instead of groundbreaking innovation. John Turnis is not Steve Jobs, and certainly not Tim Cook.
at least going by his resume. He's probably not going to walk on stage and reinvent an entire industry with a single product. He's deeply non-confrontational and he is by most accounts a genuinely nice person.
And in Silicon Valley, that's almost a red flag. But he is what Apple perhaps needs right now more than a visionary, a real engineer, someone who understands why things work and why they don't. Someone who was right about the Apple car and right about making the iPad more than just a blown up iPhone.
Apple in the Turnis era might not be louder, but the products, if his track record holds, will be better, more thoughtful, more integrated, and possibly for the first time in a long time, genuinely surprising. Steve Jobs was the thinker. Tim Cook was the operator, and John Turners, well, he should be the builder, but we're about to find out.
Researching John Turnis' educational background got me thinking about my own degree in mechanical engineering. It's been a while since I graduated, so a few of those concepts can fade without regular use. That's where Brilliant comes in handy.
It helps you truly understand STEM concepts and relearn them instead of just skimming through. Brilliant is a learning platform designed to help you master maths, coding, and more through interactive step-by-step lessons and personalized experience. You're not just passively learning, you're solving problems visually and getting hands-on with the concepts.
I like how it adapts to your learning style, so you can keep improving at your own pace. Whether you're 10 years old or 110, is designed for everyone from curious kids to adults. I really like Brilliant's exponential functions course.
It lets you build, combine, and simplify exponential and logarithmic functions in an easy to understand way. As you go through lessons, you're actively solving problems step by step until the concepts actually click. That hands-on approach makes a big difference compared to just passively watching a lecture video.
Worldclass educators from places like MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, and leading tech companies help craft these courses. With Brilliant's expanded 2025 content library, there's more depth than ever before. From everyday data reasoning and probability to advanced problem solving and the math that underpins modern AI.
So, if you want to learn more or simply want to brush up on your knowledge base, look no further than Brilliant. Start building the habit of learning today. Not for grades or credentials, but for sharpening how you think, reason, and approach challenges.
To learn for free on Brilliant for a full 30 days, head to brilliant. org/coldfusion, scan the QR code on screen, or click the link in the description. Brilliant's also offering our viewers 20% off an annual premium subscription, which gives you unlimited access to everything on Brilliant.
Thanks to Brilliant for supporting Cold Fusion. So, as always, what do you think? Is John Turners the right person to take Apple forward?
Do you think Apple will turn over a new leaf or do you think things will stay much the same? Let me know in the comments section below. Anyway, that's about it from me.
My name is Dogo and you've been watching Cold Fusion and I'll catch you again soon for the next episode. Cheers, guys. Have a good one.
Cold Fusion. It's new thinking.
