#apple-intelligence

The cloud round-trip is the bottleneck for agents, not model quality. On-device time-to-first-token runs 15 to 80 ms against 180 to 600 ms in the cloud, and a single agent task chains 10 to 30 model calls. Here's what shipping a local agent on Apple, Qualcomm, and Google silicon actually looks like in 2026.

Apple named John Ternus CEO on April 20, 2026. The press called it smooth succession. The sharper read is that Apple already conceded its AI strategy in January with a $1 billion a year Gemini deal, and Ternus is the CEO you pick to ship that concession cleanly.