Get ready, Apple has an ‘amazing’ pipeline of products on the way

Apple CEO Tim Cook rallied the troops at an unusual hour-long company meeting at the end of last week, talking up what he described as as “amazing” pipeline of products on the way.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported on the all-hands gathering in the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, citing the testimony of “people aware of the meeting.” The meeting came in the wake of last week’s record-breaking financial results and focused largely on AI, which Cook told staff was a tech revolution “as big or bigger” than the internet, smartphones, cloud computing and apps.

“Apple must do this,” Cook said. “Apple will do this. This is ours to grab. We will make the investment to do it.” And he justified that by noting that Apple hired 12,000 workers in the past year, with 40 percent of them in research and development roles.

Despite the CEO’s optimistic words, AI has been a difficult market for Apple to break into so far. It arrived later than almost all of its rivals, who had established AI products in the field long before Apple Intelligence. And even when the latter finally shipped, it was widely viewed as a disappointment.

But that’s all about to change–or so Cook would like his employees to believe, pointing out that lateness hasn’t historically been a barrier to success for the Cupertino company.

“We’ve rarely been first,” he said. “There was a PC before the Mac. There was a smartphone before the iPhone. There were many tablets before the iPad. There was an MP3 player before the iPod.” Despite failing to reach these markets first, Cook said, Apple is widely credited with creating the “modern” version of each. “This is how I feel about AI,” he added.

Readers may find Cook’s words about AI less than wholly convincing, because none of those historical successes were as delayed or as initially disappointing as Apple Intelligence. But the company’s wider product portfolio may look more promising.

“The product pipeline, which I can’t talk about: It’s amazing, guys. It’s amazing,” Cook said. “Some of it you’ll see soon, some of it will come later, but there’s a lot to see.

“I have never felt so much excitement and so much energy before as right now,” he exclaimed.

We’ll get to see the first of those products at the iPhone 17 even in September, when Apple is expected to unveil the all-new iPhone 17 Air.