Apple at 50: Steven Levy Interviews Executives About Winning the AI Era
As Apple celebrates its 50th anniversary, WIRED's Steven Levy sat down with senior executives — including marketing SVP Greg Joswiak and hardware engineering SVP John Ternus (the presumed front-runner to succeed Tim Cook) — to discuss the company's future in the AI era.
Apple's AI Position
Despite widespread perception that Apple has "whiffed" on AI, executives insist they're at the forefront:
- "We were doing AI before we called it AI!" says Joswiak, pointing to features like Face ID, computational photography, and Siri
- "Every single great chatbot works great on our products" — Apple's value proposition is being the best platform for AI, not necessarily building the best AI
- Ternus argues that even if Apple didn't lead in AI technology development, its products remain the best place to use existing AI tools
The Next 50 Years
When pushed on whether computing paradigms will shift to cater specifically to AI, the executives acknowledged the challenge:
- Jony Ive's OpenAI collaboration: Apple's former design chief is reportedly working with OpenAI on AI-first hardware, potentially creating a direct competitor to Apple's ecosystem
- iPhone-centric model: Apple's business model is fundamentally built around the iPhone — a 42-year-old franchise that continues to evolve (Macbook Neo just launched this month)
- Platform play: Apple's strategy may be to make its devices the indispensable substrate for AI, regardless of who builds the models
The Anniversary Moment
Apple is notoriously allergic to nostalgia (Steve Jobs once icily told Levy: "If you look backward in this business, you'll be crushed"). But the company is begrudgingly celebrating with concerts, commemorations, and a series of books and oral histories.
Analysis
Apple's 50-year track record of navigating inflection points — from GUI (Macintosh) to internet (iMac) to mobile (iPhone) — suggests the company shouldn't be counted out. But AI represents a fundamentally different kind of challenge: it threatens to redefine what a computing device is, potentially making the iPhone-centric model obsolete. Apple's bet seems to be that its hardware, privacy focus, and ecosystem lock-in will remain valuable even in an AI-first world.