Steven Levy, writing for Wired last month after Apple’s CEO transition was announced, under the provocative headline “ Apple’s Next CEO Needs to Launch a Killer AI Product ” ( News+ link to get around Wired’s miserly paywall): Much more recently, I quizzed Ternus and global marketing head Greg Joswiak about Apple’s future, specifically its plans to get ahead of the AI transformation. Ternus acknowledged that AI is “an immense kind of inflection point,” but couched it as one of many leaps that Apple has navigated. Each hit product — the Apple II, the Mac, iTunes, the iPod, the iPhone, iPad — piggybacked on a previous product. “We never think about shipping a technology,” he said. “We want to ship amazing products, features, and experiences, and we don’t want our customers to think about what [underlying] technology makes it possible. That’s the way we think about AI.” That’s fine, but I look back to the mid-2000s when everybody was waiting for Apple to come out with a phone.…