Apple chief executive John Ternus says the company will use artificial intelligence in its products but does not want to ship it for its own sake, according to TechCrunch’s report on an interview with Wired’s Steven Levy, published on October 31. Ternus, who succeeded Tim Cook as chief executive on September 1, described success as a product in which people do not need to think about whether AI or conventional software makes a feature work, and said the test is whether Apple has built something people really love.

The remarks come ahead of Apple’s fiscal fourth-quarter results on Monday, the first earnings call under Ternus, and a day after Apple overtook Nvidia as the world’s most valuable company, according to Bloomberg. They also fit a pattern: across several interviews since April, Ternus has described AI as a tool for products rather than a goal.

What Ternus told Wired

Lens could not open the Wired interview itself, so this account relies on TechCrunch’s report by Anthony Ha. According to that report, Levy asked about Apple’s position in AI, which has been widely seen as behind rivals for the past couple of years, largely because Apple delayed a more powerful version of Siri. Ternus acknowledged that everyone has an opinion but said he likes where Apple is, and that the company is absolutely going to use AI in new products.

The central line, as TechCrunch reported it, was a statement of restraint. “We don’t want to ship AI for AI’s sake,” Ternus said. He went on to say that the aim is for people not to have to think about whether a feature relies on AI or on traditional software, and that the question is whether Apple has built something people truly love.

Levy also asked whether AI agents, which carry out tasks on a user’s behalf, could make apps unnecessary. TechCrunch reported that Ternus said such a shift could make life very easy for people, but that creating products is “a deeply human and personal thing.” The answer left open how far Apple expects agents to change the way people use its devices.

A message he has repeated

The framing is consistent with what Ternus has said elsewhere. In a Reuters profile published on April 21, the day after Apple announced the leadership change, the news agency described him as treating AI as a means to an end and quoted him from an earlier Tom’s Guide interview as saying Apple always asks how technology can be used to ship good products. Reuters characterized his approach as careful and pragmatic at a time when Microsoft and Google are spending heavily to put AI across their businesses.

The German site ifun.de, reporting on October 21 on a roughly ten-minute video interview with Time magazine, said Ternus argued that users should not have to notice whether AI powers a helpful feature, and that Apple wants to concentrate on uses that give a concrete benefit. The same report said he made a similar point about the company’s foldable iPhone, saying that technical possibilities are not enough and that what matters is whether a feature improves usability. ifun.de paraphrased the interview rather than quoting it, and Lens did not view the video.

In a separate interview with Clique TV, summarized by 9to5Mac on September 21, Ternus said this is the most exciting time in his career to be building products, and described AI as enabling capabilities once considered science fiction that Apple plans to use for new experiences. That interview also touched on how Cook had asked him whether he would consider the chief executive role, which Ternus called mind-blowing, according to 9to5Mac.

The backdrop: Siri and the Google partnership

The caution on AI is shaped by Apple’s own record. The Associated Press reported in April that Apple had fallen behind in the AI race and struggled to deliver features it promised about two years earlier, and that it had turned to Google to help make Siri more conversational and versatile. The AP said Apple’s shares fell more than 2% on the day Ternus’s appointment was announced, which it read as a sign that some investors doubted a hardware background was enough preparation for AI.

Analysts quoted by the AP and Reuters framed the challenge in similar terms. Forrester’s Thomas Husson said the new chief executive had to make sure Apple could make AI work as the user interface of the future, and IDC’s Francisco Jeronimo said designing great hardware is a well-defined problem while building an AI platform that developers and companies adopt is a different challenge entirely. The AP listed an open question: how much of its AI Apple should build itself and how much should rely on other companies’ models.

Some of that has since been answered. TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez reported on August 3 that Apple’s new Siri had arrived in the consumer beta of iOS 27 in July, with the general public due to receive it with the official release in September. She described a voice assistant that can hold a spoken conversation, find personal items such as receipts or photos from vague descriptions, and operate apps and websites. Apple, she wrote, partnered with Google to use its Gemini models to train and refine Apple’s own Apple Foundation Models, which are designed to run on Apple chips and Apple’s private cloud infrastructure.

Perez’s verdict was mixed: the assistant was functional and fairly impressive, but being a capable chatbot no longer counts as the breakthrough it once would have been. TechCrunch’s later report on Ternus’s Wired interview says the more powerful Siri has since launched, which it dates to this summer.

The spending contrast

Ternus’s emphasis on products rather than technology lines up with a financial stance that investors have recently rewarded. Bloomberg, in a report carried by Bloomberg Línea, said Apple has largely stayed out of the race to build AI data centers and kept capital spending under control, and expects free cash flow to rise 38% to $142 billion in its 2026 fiscal year. It credited that restraint, along with a search for safety, for Apple’s climb back above Nvidia on October 30.

The comparison is stark. CNBC reported that Amazon expects about $220 billion in capital spending this year and Meta up to $145 billion, while Alphabet has guided to $195 billion to $205 billion. In the latest quarter, free cash flow was negative $42.4 billion at Amazon on a trailing 12-month basis, negative $9.07 billion at Alphabet and negative $2.12 billion at Meta, CNBC said. Alphabet’s shares had their worst day on record on Thursday.

Lens analysis: a stance of not shipping AI for its own sake is therefore also a stance on capital allocation, and it has been favorable to Apple’s share price this week. It does not shield the company from the boom entirely. TechCrunch reported on June 25 that Apple raised U.S. prices for Macs and iPads, citing a rise in memory and storage costs tied to the AI data center buildout, and that the company said it had never seen a component price rise so much so quickly. Apple depends on the AI boom’s supply chain and, for Siri, on Google’s models, even though it is not building the data centers itself.

What to watch

The first test is Monday, November 2. Apple releases fiscal fourth-quarter results at 1:30 p.m. Pacific, with a call at 2 p.m. including Ternus and chief financial officer Kevan Parekh, according to 9to5Mac. Apple guided in July to revenue growth of 9% to 11%, about $111.7 billion to $113.7 billion, and a gross margin of 47% to 48%, and warned that supply constraints and currency changes could affect the results, per Beebom’s summary. The foldable iPhone Duo was scheduled to go on sale on October 23, after the quarter ended, so it will count toward the next one. TechCrunch’s hands-on report on the Duo, published the same day as the Wired story, found the roughly $2,000 foldable engaging and named its use of Touch ID instead of Face ID as its biggest drawback.

Lens analysis: the call gives investors a first chance to hear Ternus address the new Siri and the question of agents in a financial setting. The strategy he described to Wired depends on delivering features that people use without noticing the technology behind them, which is hard to measure from a single quarter’s numbers.

Ternus has said what Apple will not do. What the company ships next in AI, and how soon, is the part that remains to be shown.

Sources

Image: Apple Park 2022.jpg by InvadingInvader, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Illustrative photo; it does not show the events described.