Most of you thought Apple would coast under its new CEO, and I think the iPhone Duo proves otherwise

Apple ran its first keynote without Tim Cook in charge on September 9, and I went back to our reader poll afterward to see whether the vote still reads the same way now that we have all watched John Ternus actually do the job. Most of you had already made up your minds well before he walked out, which is what makes the result interesting to revisit.

We asked where Apple is headed under its new CEO before anyone had seen him present a launch, and 734 of you answered. That timing matters, because we made the case at the time that judging a new CEO on one event was unfair to begin with, and the vote happened anyway.

Most of you expect Apple to simply keep going

The largest group by far, 54.36%, said Apple will chug along as always and keep growing steadily year after year. That is the unexciting answer, and unexciting answers tend to be right about companies this size.

After that, 21.39% think Apple will reach greater heights at faster rates now, while the doubters split into two camps. Slow decline into irrelevance took 20.57%, and only 3.68% believe the company is going to plummet quickly with Cook gone.

Apple is entering a market Samsung has spent years refining

The iPhone Duo is Apple's first foldable, and it arrives after the company spent seven years watching Samsung, Huawei and Motorola ship generation after generation without joining in. That is a long time to sit out a category, and it means the competition is not starting from the same place Apple is.

Our Galaxy Z Fold 8 review found the crease practically gone and the titanium structure genuinely sturdier under the screen, and our Fold 8 Ultra review called it one of the best we have seen even if it is not quite crease-free. Samsung has had close to a decade to get there, so the question worth asking is how much of that gap Apple can close in a single generation.

Ternus also let the iPhone Duo work with the Apple Pen, which quietly breaks a rule Steve Jobs set about styluses on touch screens. He has since said he never really treated it as a rule.

I am with the 21% who think things speed up

I understand why the steady-growth answer won, and it is the safe bet with a company this large. Still, I keep coming back to the fact that Apple's new CEO opened his very first keynote with the biggest change to the iPhone in nearly 20 years.



Ternus is a mechanical engineer who joined Apple in 2001 and spent years running hardware, so the products he introduced on stage are ones he helped build. Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman has written that Apple is moving into more new categories under him than it did under Cook, and Ternus told employees that the roadmap is the most exciting it has ever been.

A CEO who breaks a Jobs-era rule in his second week is not someone I expect to hold a steady course. I could be wrong, of course, and one keynote is thin evidence, but this does not look like business as usual to me.

Switch flash sale! Limited time offer!

Save $20 on Switch consoles from Back Market. Discount automatically applied at checkout. Offer ends 13 September 2026 at 23:59.

Get at Back Market