How are you, John?

Ok, you just introduced the new iPhone Duo. That, needless to say, a perfect Cupertino script, promises to revolutionize the concept of foldable smartphones once again. An elegant book-style format with a compact 5.4-inch external display, a 7.6-inch internal screen, the muscle of silicon A20 Pro and a software interface designed to make what until yesterday, for the rest of the competition, was just a creaking hinge and a slew of compromises seem fluid and natural. Everything is splendid, everything is impeccable, everything is rigorously “phenomenal”.

But now turn off the spotlights of the Steve Jobs Theater, sit here with us for a moment, take a breath and tell us the truth: how are you, John?

Eight days to change your life (and digest the world)

Because let's face it with that slightly cheeky frankness that we like to cultivate here: the event “Surprise and Shine” The September 9th parade was a flawless one, but behind the scenes there was a fifty-one year old man who until eight days ago was "only" the engineer in charge of hardware, the one used to making the frames, sensors and architecture of Apple Silicon chips fit together away from the media hype..

Eight days. Think about it for a second. On September 1st, John Ternus walked into his office as CEO of the largest company on the planet, and just a week later he had to appear before millions of people with bated breath, with a stock price approaching $4.75 trillion and the eyes of global finance trained on him like snipers. Enough to make you cringe at the mere thought of your first morning coffee.

“Uncle Tim” in the audience and the ghost of the little wolf

Yet Apple's liturgy staged one of the most graceful and emotionally intelligent handovers in recent history. At the opening of the show, Tim Cook on the screen: no solemn speech from a wise old man at sunset, no self-celebration, but just a relaxed smile, a good-natured wave of the hands — “No, no, not me” — and the direct indication: “That's your guy”.

It was a precious moment. In April, when we were discussing the handover and his appointment as the new CEO, we commented that Tim would not go to the park to give crumbs to the pigeons: he would stay there, like Executive Chairman, just like that wise teacher sitting in the back row enjoying the performance without stealing the scene. Cook has led Apple from a valuation of $350 billion to over $3.7 trillion over the course of fifteen years., holding the bar straight on civil rights, inclusion and defending privacy as a non-negotiable principle. Handing over the baton so casually was yet another example of managerial class.

Then, however, the lights went on for John.

Who would have expected the histrionic outbursts of historians? Stevenote, or the rough and polarizing magnetism of Steve Jobs, perhaps he was taken aback. Ternus didn't don a theatrical wolfskin and didn't improvise his role as a guru. He played the mechanical engineer. Calm, composed, essential. He opened the dance, let his colleagues narrate the individual pieces of the orchestra, and then returned to close the show.

And this is where the human aspect wins over the graphics. Ternus didn't land on a golden parachute from some investment fund: he's been at Apple since 2001, starting by designing a transparent plastic monitor and working his way up, step by step.. Some time ago he had confessed to an unusual fragility for a top manager: as a young engineer, in the corridors of Cupertino, he often felt that not belonging to that place. Knowing that that boy tormented by impostor syndrome is now at the helm shows that, every now and then, quiet competence and loyalty to the job trump stage presumption.

Bent metal and silicon (with feet on the ground)

Of course, there was no shortage of toys. In addition to the’iPhone Duo from $1,999 — which arrives with the typical timing that characterizes the fifty years of history of the bitten apple: waiting for others to be guinea pigs and then showing them to the world how it should have been done —, the iPhone 18 Pro, the AirPods 5 and the’Apple Watch Ultra 4, armored with Ceramic Shield 2 and a forty-eight-hour battery life so you won't be left stranded even if you get lost in the mountains.

But the real test for John was Artificial Intelligence. In a landscape where the Silicon Valley giants They burn billions a day chasing miraculous promises, Ternus' response was exquisitely faithful to his DNA: “There is no product in the world better designed to be your personal intelligent hub than iPhone.”.

No blind escape into the cloud: AI must reside first and foremost in local silicon, in the unified memory of proprietary chips. And for heavy computing? A pragmatic partnership with the 1.2 trillion-parameter Gemini model will finally give Siri the substance it's deserved for years. Pure, factory-level pragmatism applied to software.

Bending matter and remembering who we are

When we first talked about you, John, we joked that your last name sounded like a Marvel comic book mutant, one of those heroes capable of bending metal or transforming matter with his thoughts. Yesterday, when you opened and closed that iPhone Duo, you really bent that metal on the most watched stage in technology.

But the question we opened with remains the only one that really matters: you, inside, how are you?

Why calibrate hinges, optimize chips and balance Wall Street's books for the first time? earnings call October's tasks are tasks you can do by heart. The real challenge is another: always remembering that Apple isn't just an industrial giant, but a unique ecosystem in which a multinational company decides to take an ethical stance and put people first. Because, as we've learned since the days of our beloved Apple White MacBook “Biondino”, technology only makes sense when it takes weight off the backpack of creativity, never when it adds weight.

Your first Olympic dive went great, John. Now grab a coffee, take a deep breath, and never lose that air of a kind engineer who still remembers where you started.

The agenda stays open, the coffee is on the table. And we continue to search for beauty, everywhere. And if we don't find it, well... it's up to us to create it.