Who is Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus?

Ternus is a continuity appointment, which lowers near-term execution risk but does not solve the strategic bottleneck: Apple is still missing the market’s next platform shift. The key second-order issue is not whether Apple can ship AI features, but whether it can preserve its pricing power if AI becomes table stakes and device differentiation compresses toward silicon, ecosystem, and distribution. That creates a subtle but important risk to AAPL’s multiple: not a revenue air pocket immediately, but a prolonged cap on P/E expansion unless the company can prove AI monetization within 2-4 quarters.

The biggest near-term catalyst is WWDC, where expectations will likely be low enough that incremental product announcements can matter more than usual. If Apple signals a credible hybrid AI strategy—on-device where possible, partner models where necessary—it can buy time and reduce the market’s fear that it has ceded the consumer AI interface to Google, OpenAI, and Samsung. If the event disappoints, the stock is vulnerable because investors will reprice the narrative from “temporarily behind” to “structurally late,” and that can compress multiple support even if fundamentals remain resilient.

For GOOGL, Apple’s dependence is a quiet strategic win: every incremental layer of Apple intelligence that relies on Google models reinforces Google’s position as the default utility beneath premium consumer devices. The contrarian read is that the market may be underestimating how much Apple can use its installed base to distribute AI once the product is good enough; the ramp could be slower than bulls want, but even modest adoption across a billion devices is enough to re-rate the platform story over 12-18 months. The main supply-chain overhang remains China concentration, which matters more under renewed tariff rhetoric than under baseline conditions.