Apple: Still cooking the hot sauce
Fifteen years after he stepped into Steve Jobs’s size 13s, Tim Cook has handed over the CEO role at Apple to 25-year Apple veteran John Ternus. Fortunately for Apple-fanciers, Cook appears to have no plans to move to a retirement community in Florida and take up pickleball. Instead, he is moving into an executive chair position, with a pay package of $47m in salary and stock that suggests he will still be playing a significant role.
Ternus’s first major public outing in the hot seat was the annual iPhone launch in Cupertino, where he unleashed the iPhone Duo, a $2,000 foldable iPhone featuring, if you can control your excitement, “a remarkable hinge”. This feat of engineering means that the 7.6-inch screen looks seamless when it’s open. This is a crafty piece of work, though some might think that an iPhone that changes into a mini iPad at the price of a Macbook Pro is some way short of being a real game-changer.
Under Cook’s leadership, Apple may not have captured the imagination in the way it did under Jobs, but it became remarkably proficient at getting deeper and deeper into its customers’ wallets, with services contributing 26.2% of sales in 2025. The big challenge facing the company is how it adapts to the universe of AI, where it has resisted the temptation to torch untold billions of dollars to build data centres and develop superintelligent AI. Siri remains at the heart of Apple Intelligence, but despite years of claims of imminent improvements, it’s still a bit rubbish and Ternus will need to sharpen it up pronto.
John Lewis: Perhaps consult a dentist?
There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth across the heart of Middle England at the news that the turnaround that has long been promised at the middle classes’ favourite partnership is stubbornly failing to materialise. The partnership, owned by its 67,000 staff, comprises the department store giant John Lewis and the aspirational supermarket brand Waitrose. It has announced a pre-tax loss of £124m for the first half of the year, its largest interim loss yet, excluding the first year of the pandemic.
The Waitrose side of the business is trundling along solidly, generating a profit of £103m as its devoted clientele did whatever they could to avoid being spotted at the car park of shame outside Aldi or Lidl. At John Lewis, however, sales were down 2% as customers deferred big-ticket purchases amid cost of living pressures and fragile consumer confidence, and the business was hit by higher National Insurance contributions and substantial business rates. Chair Jason Tarry was optimistic about how many of Dyson’s new £400 toothbrushes it had been selling, but it will need a lot more than intelligent teeth cleaners to address the decline.
The property market, long beset with affordability issues, has been bunged up even further by speculation as to whether there might be fundamental changes to the way property is taxed, and this means there are fewer new homeowners shipping in the white goods and the matching sets of nonstick cookware. With a bit of luck there will be more clarity following the government’s autumn budget and this will give consumers the confidence to upgrade the surround-sound widescreen.
