Apple’s AI bet got a CEO. Why John Ternus, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering? Why not Craig Federighi (software) or Eddy Cue (services)?

My read is that Ternus’s appointment reflects a bet on hybrid computing. Frontier model training compute has been growing around 5x per year in recent years, while GPU memory bandwidth has improved around 28% per year.

That creates a widening systems bottleneck and strengthens the case for shifting routine AI tasks to edge devices while leaving heavier workloads in the cloud.

This new device landscape is still evolving, but it will be a combination of the highly portable phone with the persistent desktop or server. Both play to Apple’s strengths – they run on the same architecture and sit inside an installed base of over 2.5 billion active devices.