100%. Anyone under 25 shouldn’t touch it for the simple fact that if you become a habitual user you will stop progressing. In everything.
No it’s not going to kill you. I know that. But it will sap your will to do anything to advance yourself as a person. The first 10 years after school are the most important in your career and you need to be motivated and busy if you want to be able to relax later on. Then you can smoke as much as you want.
Getting paid to think is peak everything. If you’re getting paid well to think, don’t take it for granted. That’s 1% of civilization type stuff. Your ancestors are proud and jealous that you’ve gotten this far.
To my 25 - 35 year olds, you have reached the age where people around you are starting to give up on themselves because they think it's too late. don't let that energy rub off on you. It's not too late.
Dijo una vez Gerard Butler: “Pude ser un abogado mediocre en algún pueblo de Escocia… y estuve a punto. Traje, corbata y una infelicidad que no sabía explicar. Me despidieron, y lo sentí como una humillación. Pero también fue mi salvación. Caminé por el festival de Edimburgo y vi a un actor en escena. Sentí un fuego que nunca me dio el derecho. Ahí supe: esto era lo mío. A veces, perderlo todo es lo único que te deja encontrar tu verdad.”
The succession everyone called for years just happened, and it's the most revealing personnel decision in tech this year. Apple is the company most behind in AI: Siri delayed three times, Apple Intelligence launched with hallucinated news headlines, and the upgraded assistant is reportedly going to be powered by Google Gemini under the hood. The obvious move was to put a software or AI executive in the CEO seat. Instead the board picked the guy who runs hardware engineering.
Ternus has been at Apple 25 years. He's a mechanical engineer. He's never run software, services, or AI. His resume is iPhone, iPad, Mac, AirPods, Apple Watch, Vision Pro, and the M-series silicon transition. He is the silicon-and-systems candidate.
Cook leaves with the receipts. Market cap from $350B to $4T, a 10x in 14 years. Revenue from $108B to $416B, nearly quadrupled. Services from a footnote to a $100B business. He inherited a hardware company and built a recurring-revenue platform on top of it. The market said thanks by selling AAPL down 1% after hours.
The Ternus pick tells you what Apple's board actually believes about the next decade. The AI race won't be won at the model layer where Apple is hopeless and renting from Google. It'll be won at the silicon layer (on-device inference, custom NPUs, thermal envelope, battery), the form factor layer (glasses, wearables, ambient computing), and the integration layer (the chip talking to the OS talking to the model). All hardware-adjacent problems. All Ternus problems.
The bear case is straightforward. Apple just promoted the executive least connected to the technology that's eating the world, at the exact moment software-native companies (OpenAI with Jony Ive's device, Meta with Ray-Ban, Google with Gemini-everything) are coming for the iPhone's distribution. A mechanical engineer running the most valuable consumer software platform in history. That's a real bet.
The bull case is the same fact framed differently. Every competitor is converging on the realization that AI hardware (the device the model lives on) is the next platform, and Apple has spent 25 years building exactly that. Ternus shipped Apple Silicon, the only credible non-Nvidia AI chip in a consumer device. He runs Vision Pro. He inherited the robotics team in the April reorg.
The boring read is succession planned years in advance, no surprise. The interesting read is that Apple just told you it doesn't think the AI race ends with the best chatbot. It thinks it ends with the best device. And it picked the person who builds devices.
You see when you lean into rage and do an absolute madness, that very same rage quickly leaves you stranded to deal with what you can’t undo. Now you are on your own with sane thoughts.