This is Apple CEO, John Ternus’ manifesto

by Jonny Evans · September 9, 2026

Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus led the company’s big iPhone launch event with the following words.

I think they should be seen as a manifesto that will guide his future management of the company, so it seems important to record them somewhere.

His remarks began with his trademark, “hello”, after which he said the following:

“I am so thrilled to be here today. Before we get going, I want to take a moment to express what an extraordinary privilege it is to represent the remarkable teams here at Apple.

I have spent much of my life at this company, and I continue to be inspired every single day by the curiosity, invention, and relentless pursuit of excellence that define Apple.

Our teams bring an incredible level of collaboration and care to everything they do. All in service of a mission that has guided us from the very beginning to make the best products in the world.

Every day, people around the world rely on our products to create, learn, live healthier lives, and stay connected to the people and things that matter most. And the values at the heart of Apple continue to guide everything we do.

As we look ahead, we see a future filled with enormous discovery and transformation. AI makes entirely new kinds of experiences possible.

An AI can become even more useful when it brings together your life with the apps, services, and products you use every day. And this means the product at the centre of your experiences becomes even more essential.

What I like to think of as an intelligent personal hub.

It’s the intersection of broad new capability, and a deep understanding of your personal context that makes this idea so powerful.

Now, if you were designing the ideal version of this help from scratch, how would you do it?

Well, first, you would want something that is always with you. Deeply personal and able to bring intelligence to the moments when it matters most.

It require a powerful processor that can run incredibly capable on device models to quickly answer questions in the moment, and pervasive networking to access knowledge, and even more capable models in the cloud.

You need a large, beautiful display to show rich content … high quality cameras and microphones, so it can see, you can hear, and reason over the sights, sounds, and the world around you.

Of course, you give it all day battery life. You’d want it to be super easy to use without a big learning curve. And finally, it wanted to work seamlessly with your other devices, apps, and services. So, it feels like one integrated experience.

In other words, you would arrive at something remarkably familiar, because there’s no product in the world better designed to be your intelligent personal hub than iPhone.

As your personal home, your iPhone can do so much more for you because it understands your context. This includes your calendar, your relationship, your routines. The most private details of your daily life.

Now others see that data as something to collect and store. They move into their servers and ask you to trust them.

But honestly, trust only goes so far when your data is no longer yours to control.

That’s why Apple Intelligence runs on device whenever it can. When greater capability is needed, private cloud compute extends that same level of privacy protection, ensuring that nobody, not even Apple, can access what yours.

It’s personal intelligence, that’s actually personal. iPhone sits at the centre of an amazing ecosystem of intelligent features and experiences that work seamlessly across the products you use every day.

From Siri becoming more capable and more personal across your Apple products, to meaningful health insights, with Apple Watch. The powerful new AirPods features like live translation, and so much more.

Simply put, iPhone brings powerful AI capabilities, together with your personal contacts, on the device you have with you all the time. So today, we’re going to take these experiences even further with the next generation of iPhone. And here it is.”