For 15 years, Tim Cook ran Apple like a masterful, risk-averse supply chain calculator. The Apple Watch, AirPods, the very slow drip-feed of iPhone redesigns and MacBooks — everything was about safety, iteration and guaranteed profit margins (minus Apple Vision Pro).

Apple didn’t do “experimental,” and they certainly didn’t do hardware tricks just because it looked cool.

Fast forward to September 2026, John Ternus officially took the CEO chair. And in just under two months, the entire Cupertino playbook has been thrown out the window.

I know chances are the iPhone Duo and MacBook PROLED have been in the works for years, but it’s a philosophy thing, you know? Cook almost certainly approved the R&D budgets, but Ternus was the chief engineer pulling the levers. Debuting his leadership with these unapologetically disruptive devices sets quite the tone.

The hardware may be fragile, there may be flaws and it might serve mainly as an incredible demo. But for the first time in a decade, Apple is actually making tech exciting again.

Covering the tenure of Cook, I ended up comparing the iterative upgrades to adding a slightly better spin cycle to washing machines. The tech is good, don’t get me wrong, but nothing really made me go “wow, that’s cool as hell.”

His defining products, the Apple Watch and AirPods, were masterclasses in this iterative dominance. Nothing was flashy or rushed; it was slow-cooked to perfection over years of minor tweaks until they owned the market.

Even when he took a swing at spatial computing, the Vision Pro was made in a safe way to be austere, pristine and luxurious — taking years of secretive R&D and prioritizing a hyper-polished, isolated ecosystem over mass-market accessibility or playful experimentation.

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