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Apple is reporting strong iPhone sales while its new CEO privately presses his software chief to move faster on artificial intelligence. Those two facts sitting side by side reveal the bind Ternus stepped into on September 1, 2026. The company’s investment in AI chips signals how seriously Apple takes the competitive pressure.

The New CEO’s First Real Test

Ternus came up through hardware. His most urgent problem is software.

Ternus succeeded Tim Cook, who moved into an executive-chairman role after leading Apple. Ternus built his reputation running hardware engineering, overseeing the chips and enclosures that define Apple’s products. Fortune has characterized his early tenure by noting the honeymoon is already over.

The Push Behind Closed Doors

Bloomberg reported a private meeting that signals how seriously Ternus takes the AI deficit.

According to Bloomberg, Ternus held a private meeting with software chief Craig Federighi and pressed Apple to accelerate its AI roadmap. The reported concern is specific: improving Siri alone was reportedly viewed as insufficient to close the gap with competitors. Bloomberg’s account is based on anonymous sources, and Apple has not publicly confirmed the meeting or its contents.

Why Siri Is Not the Whole Answer

Turning a voice assistant into an autonomous agent is harder than shipping a new chip.

Making Siri genuinely capable runs into real obstacles: privacy constraints, permissions architecture, and reliable execution at scale. Apple built its advantage around deep hardware-software integration, while competitors have pursued rapid AI-model iteration. Reconciling those two philosophies takes time, and time is a resource under pressure.

An Organization Built for a Different Clock

A reported mismatch between hardware timelines and software cycles is now a strategic liability.

Reports describe internal tension between hardware development cycles that run several years out and software planning windows of roughly 12 to 18 months, according to sources cited by Ynet News. Any AI push spanning devices, operating systems, and services simultaneously collides directly with that gap. Executive turnover in corporate development and App Store management, reported by The Verge, adds further difficulty in establishing a unified strategic direction.

Margin Pressure Arrives at the Wrong Moment

Rising memory costs and slowing services growth are tightening the window for a successful AI pivot.

Rising memory-chip prices are expected to squeeze Apple’s margins and could push product prices higher, according to Reuters. Analysts cited by Reuters also expect services-business growth to slow compared with earlier periods, raising the stakes for AI-powered offerings to generate new momentum.

Regulators Add Another Constraint

European rules on App Store access could limit how aggressively Apple moves in key markets.

Ongoing European Union scrutiny over App Store rules and platform access remains unresolved, according to CNN. Requirements around third-party distribution and AI assistants could restrict Apple’s options in markets where the company has significant exposure.

The Business Still Works. The Next Chapter Does Not Yet Exist.

Apple’s risk is not today’s balance sheet; it is the absence of a clear next growth engine.

Fortune reported record iPhone sales in a recent quarter, showing the hardware ecosystem has not lost its hold on consumers. The harder question is whether the next major growth engine exists before the current one plateaus. Ternus must build that engine without dismantling what already works.

Three questions will define his tenure: Can Apple close the AI gap without compromising its privacy identity? Can improved AI actually drive new revenue rather than simply defend existing ground? And can a hardware-trained CEO accelerate software decisions fast enough to matter? Apple has not disclosed its full AI roadmap. Bloomberg reports, however, that the internal urgency is real.

Nintendo has teased a new LEGO Yoshi set.

A news update posted to the Nintendo Today! app on Monday, November 9 is labelled “New LEGO Super Mario Set Hatching Soon,” with the subtitle “Adults Welcome.” Clicking into the post reveals a full chunk of Yoshi’s face in plastic brick form.

The teaser confirms that the set is a new addition to the Super Mario theme, owing to the rideable dinosaur’s debut in Super Mario World. However, the ‘adult’ focus of the teaser suggests the Super Mario line is branching out into more complex sets built for display.

There’s no word on pricing or release date, but based on the copyright information, we expect LEGO Yoshi to release in early 2027.

The LEGO Super Mario theme currently has about 20 sets in rotation, but well over 100 sets have been released since the lined first debuted in 2020. The previously released LEGO Mario & Yoshi set, which evokes a retro pixel art look, is set to join the most of those sets in retirement this December. Apparently LEGO can only handle own Yoshi at a time.

The Super Mario theme has generally stuck to the old-school ethos of being built for interactive play, the bulk made up of smaller sets with one or two minifigures. In recent years, however, the company has branched out with larger decorative builds for adult fans.

I think it’s safe to say we’re looking at a giant LEGO Yoshi, which falls into the latter category. The closest approximation that currently exists in the Super Mario line is the Mario Kart sets dedicated to Mario and Luigi, priced at $179.99 and $169.99, respectively.

While LEGO generally sticks to modern depictions of the Super Mario characters, the company has also experimented with sets like the LEGO Donkey Kong Arcade. The ‘hatching’ reference may just be for marketing’s sake, but it would be cool to see LEGO try and replicate something like the Hatchin Yoshi toy that was released alongside The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.

Like Nintendo, LEGO is generally trying to balance its appeal across generations with different ‘levels’ of sets. The LEGO Pokemon theme, for example, originally launched with three massive and particularly expensive builds dedicated to individual pocket monsters. A year later, the toy company released more than a dozen smaller (and cheaper) Pokemon sets using its new Smart Play technology. The strategy generally feels like “here’s one for the adults,” then “here’s some for the kids.”

The challenge with the more adult-focused sets is they’re significantly more expensive. LEGO uses a relatively standard “price ber brick” model for its sets, which have only gotten bigger with time. Still, the strategy seems to be working well for LEGO, who reported record-breaking revenue in the first half of 2026.

Blythe (she/her) is an Audience Development Coordinator at IGN who spends way too much time in character customization screens and tracking down collectibles.

By now, it’s obvious that Donald Trump has never had a secret he couldn’t resist blurting out on television.

His latest slip-up — if we can really call it that — happened during an interview with CBS’ new and improved 60 Minutes program on Sunday evening.

During the interview, Trump took a bizarre left-turn in the conversation to share news that the White House almost moved to arrest a top tech executive over some vague problems with AI safety. It was a “situation where somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI,” Trump explained, using the original term that he later claimed to be officially replacing with “super intelligence.”

That “somebody” is apparently an executive at one of the country’s top AI labs, or as Trump put it, “one of the big ones.” Any more details were scarce, other than the fact that person in question has a wife and kids.

“We called them very strongly and said, get ready to go to jail. Please give your wife a kiss goodnight,” Trump said. “We said, ‘go home right now. See your wife and children. Give them a kiss good night. Because tomorrow morning, you’re going to jail.’”

That would seem to rule out tech figures like Apple’s Tim Cook, who has no children of his own, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who has a husband and one son. Elon Musk is divorced, so he doesn’t quite fit either, and it might also rule out Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who may or may not have children. But narrowing Trump’s target down any further would be pure guesswork — figures like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and the now-embattled Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang do have wives and children, facts which have netizens divided on who Trump is ultimately referring to.

“It has to be Dario, everyone else has bent the knee,” one poster suggested on Reddit.

“Dario doesn’t have kids right?” another user chimed in. “Has to be Zuck.”

Others made it clear they don’t trust a word that comes out of Trump’s mouth. “It doesn’t have to be anyone,” a Redditor said, receiving over 400 upvotes. “Trump lies.”

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