Double Sunrise at Apple

Apple's AI and Design Fixers • TikTok "US" • Meta's Subversive AI Playbook • Apple's Banana Stand • Sarandos on TV • Who Is This Guy?

Apple is in an interesting spot as we kick off 2026. Questions about not just AI, but also, oddly, design. And they’ve tasked arguably the two most important go-forward leaders with overseeing each…

🌅 Apple’s Twin Suns

John Ternus takes on design while Craig Federighi takes on AI as Apple prepares for a new CEO...

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I Note…

🤳 TikTok "US"

As expected, the deal is done. There’s a new JV with a new 7-person board. It’s "majority American owned" but what a strange, surreal deal. The largest single shareholder is still ByteDance at 19.9%. With MGX, a decidedly non-American investor, as one of the other key pillars of the deal, owning 15%. It sounds like most of the employees in the entity will still technically work for the parent company. And the new CEO, Adam Presser (previously an executive at Warner Bros!), is a longtime lieutenant of ByteDance’s CEO. Hard to see how you can view this as anything other than a win for the parent company (and, to an extent, China), as all they did was basically make a new franchise — one which feeds both money and content back to the parent. The other winners, right now, are the investors, who got a sweetheart deal with a $14B valuation — basically 1x US advertising revenue (which yes, is complicated because of the money flowing back). I’m still mostly curious how this plays out going forward. It’s good news that there’s apparently no longer a need to download a new app — which would have been a nightmare for TikTok US — and so presumably most users won’t care at first who actually owns the entity. But they might start caring if the product starts to slip. Like, say, if the re-worked algorithm isn’t as good. Oracle is now a consumer social company? In the end, Michael Dell got in, but not the Murdochs? There’s still a lot to play out here, I imagine. But congrats? [FT 🔒]

☠️ Meta’s Subversion of AI Competitors

Speaking of tick tocks… another day, another look into the drama at Thinking Machines Lab. The most interesting new bits here are around the potential motivations behind co-founders Barret Zoph and Andrew Tulloch leaving the company. Forget the interpersonal stuff, per this telling both Zoph and Tulloch urged Mira Murati to take an offer from Zuck to acquire Thinking Machines. When she dismissed it, Tulloch jumped shipped to Meta directly (where he had worked previously), while Zoph was clearly annoyed. To the point where in the recent (and widely reported) January meeting between Zoph, Murati, co-founder Luke Metz, and key employee Sam Schoenholz, they pushed for her to take a deal with Meta – or even Anthropic. When Murati denied their requests, those three jumped ship as well (it continues to sound like Zoph was fired, but mainly for optics before he could formally quit). Anyway, I’m reminded when Zuck also made the offer to buy the other big ex-OpenAI lab (well, beyond Anthropic!), Safe Superintelligence. When Ilya Sutskever turned down Zuck’s offer, co-founder (and CEO) Daniel Gross clearly thought that was a mistake and soon thereafter, he jumped shipped to Meta — all of which Sutskever has now confirmed. So even if a number of people (and companies) have turned down Zuck’s "Godfather" offers, those deals are clearly working to subvert his competitors, potentially poisoning them from within (that includes companies the size of Apple!). Up to 9 people are now apparently gone from or leaving Thinking Machines with this fall-out… [NYT]

🍌 Apple’s Banana Stand

While I already focused on this piece for my broader thoughts about where Apple stands right now with design and AI, it’s worth calling out the bits where they focus on how frugal Craig Federighi is when it comes to Apple’s spend. Humorously, they specifically call out his watching of the "budget for bananas", which, yes, sounds bananas. And is probably just a former, still disgruntled employee calling out some very specific example? Still, it’s worth noting because the single most important aspect of AI to date has been the spend. We can argue about if it makes any sense, or if it’s a bubble — it certainly is — but without question, it’s also needed to play this game right now. Apple may be well suited to sit back and let Google do the heavy spending here, but if they’re really serious about doing this themselves in parallel… including when it comes to hiring (see: above)… hopefully there’s always money in the banana stand is what I’m saying. [Information 🔒]

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I Quote…

"TV is not what we grew up on. TV is now just about everything."

— Ted Sarandos, making his pitch as to why Netflix should be allowed to buy Warner Bros. This is mainly about YouTube, but he also (appropriately) threw out the very Game of Thrones-like "Instagram is coming." A marketing campaign around this deal?

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Asides…

• So let me get this straight, Sony is getting out of the TV business but at the same time is getting back into the turntable business? (Though that could be spun-off to TCL too, it sounds like!) [Verge]

• A really good, quick interview of Demis Hassabis by Big Technology’s Alex Kantrowitz (with whom I do a monthly show) at Davos. [YouTube]

• One idea to for OpenAI to monetize beyond ads sounds like a cost-per-scientific-discovery model. Wonder what the rate will be? [Information 🔒]

• With one small AI product push, Google seemingly just destroyed the SAT test prep industry. [TechCrunch]

• So much drama over the positioning of the Dynamic Island in the iPhone 18 models (and going forward). It seems like it will still be front and center, just smaller. Decidedly not in the upper left corner… [MacRumors]

• Um, that Epic/Google agreement to end the litigation around the Play Store (which was highly problematic for Google) feels a bit more slippery with a secret $800M Unreal Engine deal! It’s something Apple might care about given what the agreement might mean for the future of the App Store... [Verge]

• Telly, the "free" TV (if you agree to an always-on ad bar below the main screen) projected 500k units sold in 2023. Millions in 2024. The actual tally for Telly? More like 35,000. To be fair, it’s maybe less a demand issue than a logistics one. Still. Yikes. [Lowpass]

• I really enjoyed the first episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms — a lighter, breezier vibe than Game of Thrones (and certainly House of the Dragon) — and now there’s talk of a GoT sequel show. Not the Jon Snow one (which is dead… for now), and not the movie, but one focused on Arya Stark. Reminder (per above) that either Netflix or Paramount will likely be making such calls in the future… [IGN]

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I Spy…

If I gave you 5 guesses, would you have any idea who this is? I would not.