Apple's former CEO says the company has its 'first real competitor' in decades (www.businessinsider.com)

John Sculley, Apple’s former CEO, told a New York conference that OpenAI is the company’s “first real competitor” in decades, arguing Apple has lagged in AI and must move beyond the apps era. He pointed to missed product cadence and setbacks such as the delayed Siri overhaul as evidence that Apple hasn’t made AI a core strength. Sculley urged that the next Apple CEO must steer the company into the “agentic era,” where autonomous agents—rather than discrete apps—handle complex tasks for users. For the AI/ML community this highlights two trends: acceleration toward agentic systems and tighter hardware–model integration. Agentic AI implies research and product work on persistent, goal-directed agents built on LLMs and planners, with implications for orchestration, safety, statefulness, latency, and on-device vs. cloud tradeoffs. Sculley also noted business-model shifts toward subscriptions as agents replace tool-centric apps. The presence of ex-Apple designer Jony Ive at OpenAI signals intensified focus on device form factors that pair LLMs with novel hardware, raising stakes for UX, inference efficiency, and privacy-preserving deployment. Overall, Sculley’s remarks underscore growing competitive pressure to translate LLM advances into polished, agentic product experiences.