June's developer conference was Tim Cook's final keynote as Apple's chief executive. The departure had been announced in April, with the handover set for September 1 to the company's hardware lead.
A planned succession announced months in advance is the opposite of how leadership changes usually go in the sector, and the choice of successor carries its own reading: a hardware executive taking over a company whose current public debate is about software and artificial intelligence.
It makes sense when you look at what the company decided not to do. Rather than building its own AI infrastructure at scale, it contracted a third party's model for the most visible layer and kept its focus on devices, in-house silicon and local processing.
It's an explicit bet: if models became a purchasable input, competitive advantage returns to where the company has historically been strong, which is integration between hardware and system.
The period offered arguments for both sides of that bet, with competitors announcing billion-dollar investment in their own capacity and, at the same time, open models catching up to the frontier on quality.