This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on January 15th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.
A CEO on the way out, a new product that flopped — and an embarrassing concession to a major competitor. Apple faces a stormy 2026.
Seen from above, it resembles a kind of round spaceship. With a lake, several parks, and rental bikes inside, Apple Park is a lavish architectural spectacle.
When the campus opened in 2017, Apple was on a strong upward trajectory. The company had successfully managed the leadership transition after Steve Jobs’s death, relations with China were better than ever, and both the Apple Watch and the AirPods headphones had got off to a strong start. With a powerful tailwind from the iPhone, which had become the company’s new economic engine, they felt virtually unbeatable for several years. Until now.
For a company with an exquisite feel for everything from interior design to marketing, Apple has had an unusually high number of failures recently.
Just this week, Apple brought in Google’s AI model Gemini as the foundation for its own AI push and the voice assistant Siri. After AI chief John Giannandrea suddenly retired at 60, the tech giant’s AI staff was also split into two parts.
The world’s third most valuable company does not even have a unified team for AI development. And what do you do then? You bring in one of your worst competitors — Google. That is a little embarrassing.
The failure with Siri is far from the only one of late.
Apple’s “Project Titan” ran for ten years without anyone officially acknowledging it existed. But Silicon Valley’s worst-kept secret leaked constantly. Apple was trying to build an electric, self-driving car. That was fairly obvious given that they were hiring large numbers of staff from Tesla, Volkswagen, and Lamborghini, among others.
Tests ran for many years, and Apple-registered vehicles could be spotted on the streets of San Francisco. Reports of as many as 5,000 employees on the car project circulated in the media. Until 2024, when the project was shut down. There was no car.
What did emerge did not fare much better either. In 2023, Apple unveiled the Apple Vision Pro — a “spatial computer,” or a kind of computer headset that was supposed to create entirely new experiences.
The problem was that nobody could quite explain what experiences were meant. Earlier this week, the influential analyst Ben Thompson wrote that Apple “lacks a fundamental understanding of the device they’re trying to sell” — this after attempting to watch a basketball game on the Apple Vision Pro and concluding that it was worse than watching it on TV.
Even the flagship — the iPhone — has faced criticism. Beyond a lack of exciting new features, what was promised has not been delivered. The iPhone 16 was supposed to come with Apple’s own AI services, Apple Intelligence. But when the services were finally released — many months after launch — they still could not live up to what Apple had promised when the product was announced. The delay led to a long series of lawsuits from disappointed customers and their eager lawyers.
Finally, Apple faces a likely CEO change. Current CEO Tim Cook is expected to become chairman during the year, stepping down as chief executive. Cook himself was chief operating officer when he stepped up after Steve Jobs. But Cook’s former COO Jeff Williams stepped down from that role last summer, and his replacement Sabih Khan is probably too inexperienced to take over as CEO.
The line of succession is therefore far from clear. Large parts of Apple’s leadership team have been there a long time. Services chief Eddy Cue joined the company in 1989 and software chief Craig Federighi started in 1996. That is before many of Apple’s employees were born.
Many instead point to hardware chief John Ternus as a plausible CEO candidate. He is well-liked and has been at the company since 2001 — almost a quarter of a century. If the board wants fresh ideas it may need to look outside the company’s walls — but that is unlikely. Apple prefers internal solutions.
2026 therefore looks like a stormy year for Apple. Much suggests that AI companies like OpenAI are finding their way into the mobile market, which could shake up what has in practice been an oligopoly for many years. The stability of the iPhone could be threatened — for the first time since it launched in 2007.
There is plenty to address. Apple is well behind the other tech giants on AI, its new products have wobbled, and the company may be facing an imminent CEO change. At the same time, the fundamentals are very strong. They have a full war chest, a very strong brand, and solid profitability.
The question is simply what the direction should be for the next ten years. And who will step forward to describe that strategy.
