Apple: Take another bite
After 15 years as CEO of Apple, Tim Cook is preparing to head upstairs to an executive chair role and hand over the reins to John Ternus, a 25-year Apple veteran who is currently senior vice-president of hardware.
Cook is enjoying something of a victory lap as he hands over a company in rude health, reporting Apple’s “best March quarter ever” with “extraordinary demand for the iPhone 17 lineup” and “double digit growth across every geographic segment”.
Cook has received unfair criticism over the years for not being Steve Jobs, and failing to unveil any world-changing new products, but he has been instrumental in building an extraordinary supply chain and adding an enormously profitable services business as he transformed the sheer scale of Apple’s operations into a $4-trillion behemoth.
Ternus faces a number of big decisions when he takes over the hot seat, notably how to respond to growing pressure from Washington to invest in manufacturing in the US, how to react to surging memory costs and how to convince investors that Apple is not lagging behind its peer group in AI.
The company has opted out of the race to hurl dollars at building AI infrastructure, choosing instead to sign a deal to use Google’s models, and it is expected to unveil a new AI-enhanced Siri voice assistant in June.
A Siri that actually works would be a big step forward, and other treats in store include a foldable smartphone and the continuing enthusiasm for its $599 bargain MacBook Neo.
Ternus has some big old shoes to step into, but the Apple machine will keep rolling.
Purdue Pharma: Sackcloth for Sacklers
At long last, after legal wrangling that has dragged on for almost seven years, Purdue Pharma has been ordered to pay more than $8bn for its role in defrauding the US government and giving doctors kickbacks for dishing out OxyContin.
The cash will be paid out to the states, cities, health insurers and individuals who have had to deal with the costs of treating opioid addiction. Purdue itself will be shut down for its role in fuelling the crisis, to be replaced by a public benefit corporation dedicated to combating the problem.
The long-time owners of Purdue, the Sackler family, have agreed to contribute $7bn over 15 years as part of the deal, but they are far from out of the woods after a Supreme Court ruling in June 2024 that the bankruptcy plan could not shield family members from future civil lawsuits. Their name has been so comprehensively tarnished by their role in the scandal that it has been removed from buildings and galleries at institutions such as the University of Oxford and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This is the first time a major opioid settlement has included payouts to individual victims or their survivors but many of the 140,000 people who filed claims against the company when it first filed for bankruptcy in 2019 have been shut out of the settlement entirely, and payouts are substantially lower than expected at about $8,000 for a family member who suffered a fatal overdose.
The lawyers representing Purdue’s victims are expected to walk away with more than $100m of the settlement money, and many victim families are deeply unhappy.
