Apple is about to become a very different company. This September, Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down and will be replaced by John Ternus, the current head of hardware. But the shift is bigger than just a CEO transition — it’s the most significant move yet into a world where Apple’s executive team isn’t handpicked by Steve Jobs.

With the departure of Cook, who became CEO in 2011, the list of leaders who were in Jobs’ inner circle is dwindling. There’s still Apple’s senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, who joined in 1989, and has said that Jobs was like a “family member” to him. There’s also longtime marketing exec Phil Schiller, who worked with Jobs to launch key products, including the Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, and often appeared with Jobs during keynotes. Schiller stepped into a smaller role in 2020, though he still oversees one major business, the App Store.

Other top holdovers include Greg Joswiak and Craig Federighi. Joswiak started at Apple in 1986 and worked under Jobs for years, playing a role in launching the original iPod and iPhone. He later took Schiller’s spot as the head of marketing in 2020. Federighi, Apple’s software head, also had close ties to Jobs. He worked at Jobs’ technology company NeXT before it was acquired by Apple in 1996. Though Federighi left shortly after the acquisition, he rejoined Apple in 2009.

But many key Jobs-era figures at Apple are gone. iOS leader Scott Forstall, who was once seen as a potential successor to Jobs, was pushed out a year into Cook’s tenure over the botched launch of Apple Maps.

Bob Mansfield, a key part of Jobs’ executive team, finally stepped away after years of Cook pulling him back. He joined Apple through an acquisition in 1999 and later headed up the Mac’s transition to Intel processors. Mansfield nearly retired in 2012 but decided to stick around to work on the Apple Watch and later the (since abandoned) Apple Car project. Mansfield finally retired in 2020.

Cook had a similar experience with Doug Field, who Jobs hired from Segway to head up Mac product design (even though Jobs thought the Segway’s design was bad). Field left Apple for Tesla in 2013, rejoined Apple in 2018, and then went to Ford in 2021 (a role he left last week).

Vision Pro leader Dan Riccio, who Bloomberg described as a “key player” under Jobs for his work on hardware engineering, retired in 2024. Last year, Apple lost another old guard executive, former chief operating officer Jeff Williams, who helped bring to life Jobs’ idea of putting a glass screen on the original iPhone.

Perhaps the most notable departure in recent years was that of Jony Ive, the legendary Apple designer who called Jobs his “closest” and “most loyal friend.” He left Apple in 2019 after having stepped back for periods of time in the preceding years.

That’s not to say there’s no connection to the Jobs era in this new leadership team.

Ternus bridges the gap between Jobs and Cook. He joined Apple in 2001 and rose to vice president of hardware engineering under Cook in 2013, overseeing the launch of post-Jobs products like the AirPods and the iPhone Air. Apple’s newly appointed chief hardware officer, Johny Srouji, is in a similar position. He joined Apple to work on the A4 chip in 2008 and went on to launch the company’s first in-house Mac chip in 2020. Sabih Khan, who initially joined Apple in 1995, stepped into the role of chief operating officer last year.

Still, as one would expect after 15 years, Apple’s next leadership team is very much the team created by Cook. In many respects, he kept around the Jobs-era crew for a remarkably long time. There remain people on Apple’s leadership team who were there when the company wasn’t the behemoth it is today. But that era of executives is very much winding down.

It’s now up to these new leaders to leave their own stamp on Apple. During his tenure, Cook and his team have transformed Apple into a $4 trillion company. With Cook handing Ternus the reins to one of the biggest technology companies in the world, he’ll have some major decisions to make about where to take Apple next.

OpenAI is rolling out the latest version of its AI-powered image generator with new “thinking capabilities,” allowing it to search the web to help it create multiple images from a single prompt. On Tuesday, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT Images 2.0 can now create more “sophisticated” images, with improvements to its ability to follow instructions, preserve details of your choosing, and generate text.

It’s powered by OpenAI’s new GPT Image 2 model, with new thinking capabilities available to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscribers. When a thinking model is selected, the chatbot’s image generator can pull information from the web, create visual explainers based on files you upload, and “reason through the structure of the image before generating.”

ChatGPT Images 2.0 can also create up to eight images at once with thinking enabled, all while maintaining the same characters, objects, and styles in each scene. OpenAI says this should make it easier to generate things like manga pages, a series of social graphics, or design plans for every room in a house.

All ChatGPT users can take advantage of updates that let ChatGPT Images 2.0 “better capture the defining characteristics of photos,” in addition to pixel art, manga, cinematic stills, and other types of images. It can now generate images with a resolution of up to 2K and in more aspect ratios, ranging from wider formats, such as 3:1, to taller ones like 1:3. And it’s not only better at generating English and other Latin-script languages; OpenAI says Images 2.0 makes “significant gains” in creating images containing text in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Hindi, and Bengali.

OpenAI first released ChatGPT Images last year and launched its last big update in December, adding faster image generation and better photo editing capabilities. Since then, competition has only been getting stronger, with the arrival of tools like Google’s Nano Banana Pro and Microsoft’s MAI-Image-2. 

ChatGPT Images 2.0 is available to all ChatGPT and Codex users starting today.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has written a letter to the community as he prepares to step down from his role in September. “This is not goodbye. But at this moment of transition, I wanted to take the opportunity to say thank you,” Cook writes.

As part of the shift, John Ternus, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, will take over for Cook, who will become executive chairman. Meanwhile, Johny Srouji is taking over for Ternus and has now been appointed chief hardware officer.

You can read Cook’s full letter here: 

To the Apple community:

For the past 15 years I’ve started just about every morning the same way. I open my email and I read notes I received the day before from Apple’s users all over the world.

You share little pieces of your lives with me and tell me things you want me to know about how Apple has touched you. About the moment your mom was saved by her Apple Watch. About the perfect selfie you captured at the summit of a mountain that seemed impossible to climb. You thank me for the ways Mac has changed what you can do at work and sometimes give me a hard time because something you care about isn’t working like it should.

In every one of those emails I feel the beating heart of our shared humanity. I feel a sense of deepening obligation to work harder and push further. But most of all, I feel a gratitude that I cannot put into words, that I somehow got to be the person on the other end of those emails, the leader of a company that ignites imaginations and enriches lives in such profound ways it defies description. What an honor and a privilege it has been.

Today we announced that I’m taking the next step in my journey at Apple. Over the coming months I will be transitioning into a new role, leaving the CEO job behind in September and becoming Apple’s executive chairman. A new person will be stepping into what I know in my heart is the best job in the world. That leader is John Ternus, a brilliant engineer and thinker who has spent the past 25 years building the Apple products our users love so much, obsessed with every detail, focused on every possible way we can make something better, bolder, more beautiful, and more meaningful. He is the perfect person for the job.

John cares so much about who we are at Apple, what we do at Apple, who we reach at Apple, and he has the heart and character to lead with extraordinary integrity. I am so proud to call him Apple’s next CEO. This company will reach such incredible heights under his leadership, and you will feel his impact in every bit of delight and discovery that grows out of the products and services to come. I can’t wait for you to get to know him like I do.

This is not goodbye. But at this moment of transition, I wanted to take the opportunity to say thank you. Not on behalf of the company, this time, though there is a wellspring of gratitude for you that overflows inside our walls. But simply on behalf of me. Tim. A person who grew up in a rural place in a different time and, for these magical moments, got to be the CEO of the greatest company in the world. Thank you for the confidence and kindness you’ve shown me. Thank you for saying hi to me on the street and in our stores. Thank you for cheering alongside me when we unveiled a new product or service. Thank you, most of all, for believing in me to lead the company that has always put you at the center of our work. Every day we get up and think about what we can do to make your life a little bit better. And every day, you’ve made mine the best I could have asked for.

Thank you.

Tim Cook

Apple has appointed Johny Srouji as its new chief hardware officer, “effective immediately,” according to an announcement on Monday. He is stepping into the shoes of current hardware engineering head John Ternus, who will replace Tim Cook as CEO in September, while Cook becomes the chairman of the board.

Last December, Srouji reassured his team that he’s not “leaving anytime soon” after a flurry of reports suggested he was “evaluating” his future with Apple. However, other notable executives have left Apple over the past year as rumors swirled about Cook’s successor, with Sabih Khan taking over for Jeff Williams as chief operating officer and Amar Subramanya stepping in for John Giannandrea as the head of Apple’s AI push.

Srouji joined Apple in 2008 and previously served as the senior vice president of hardware technologies. He oversaw the launch of Apple’s in-house chips, starting with the A4, and helped develop a range of other technologies used in Apple products, including batteries, cameras, storage controllers, sensors, displays, and cellular modems.

“Johny is one of the most talented people I have ever had the privilege to work with,” Cook says in a statement. “He has played a singular role in driving Apple’s silicon strategy, and his influence has been felt deeply not just inside the company, but across the industry.”

Deezer says it receives nearly 75,000 AI-generated song submissions to its music streaming platform each day, accounting for about 44 percent of all daily uploads, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. Despite the increase in “fraudulent” uploads, Deezer says the consumption of AI songs makes up around 1 to 3 percent of total streams, as the platform continues to remove AI-generated music from its recommendation algorithm.

Deezer positions the tool as setting an “industry standard,” adding that the platform is currently the “only” music streaming service tagging AI-generated tracks. The service also demonetizes AI-generated songs and has stopped storing high-resolution versions of them. “AI-generated music is now far from a marginal phenomenon and as daily deliveries keep increasing, we hope the whole music ecosystem will join us in taking action to help safeguard artist’s rights and promote transparency for fans,” Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier writes in the blog post.

As AI-powered song-making tools like Suno and Udio become more popular, music streaming services are dealing with the flood of AI tracks in different ways. While Spotify announced new policies to clamp down on AI-generated music, Apple Music is asking artists and record labels to label songs made with AI. Bandcamp has banned AI music altogether, while Qobuz has started automatically detecting and labeling AI music as well. 

Since launching its tool in January 2025, Deezer says the number of AI-generated tracks uploaded daily has jumped from 10,000 to 75,000. Deezer has also started allowing other companies to license its AI song-detecting tool. As noted by Deezer, the tool can identify songs made using Udio and Suno, “with the possibility to add detection capabilities for practically any other similar tool as long as there’s access to relevant data examples.” The company is also working on a way for its music detection tool to identify songs without requiring a dataset to train on.

The Federal Aviation Administration grounded Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket after it shuttled its payload to the wrong orbit during its launch on Sunday, according to a report from the Orlando Sentinel. “The FAA is aware that Blue Origin New Glenn 3 experienced a mishap during the second-stage flight sequence following a successful launch,” the FAA said in a statement obtained by the Orlando Sentinel.

On Sunday, the Jeff Bezos-owned Blue Origin successfully launched New Glenn from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Though the rocket’s reusable booster returned to its landing pad without issue, the rocket’s upper stage failed to deliver AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite. AST SpaceMobile says the satellite “was placed into a lower-than-planned orbit,” which is “too low to sustain operations.” The satellite will be de-orbited as a result.

Blue Origin confirmed that its second stage shut off its engines and was in a “coast phase” after reaching an “off-nominal” orbit, but it didn’t provide any other details about what went wrong or when it will return to Earth. As noted by astronomer Jonathan McDowell, Space Force data shows an object in orbit, but it’s unclear whether it’s tracking the AST satellite or New Glenn’s upper stage.

When reached for comment, Blue Origin pointed The Verge to CEO David Limp’s statement on X, which says the company is “leading the anomaly investigation with FAA oversight:”

Now that we have a more complete view, we wanted to provide an update on our NG-3 mission. While we are pleased with the nominal booster recovery, we clearly didn’t deliver the mission our customer wanted, and our team expects. Early data suggest that on our second GS2 burn, one of the BE-3U engines didn’t produce sufficient thrust to reach our target orbit. Blue Origin is leading the anomaly investigation with FAA oversight to learn from the data and implement the improvements needed to quickly return to flight operations. We have been in steady communication with the team at AST SpaceMobile, we appreciate their partnership, and we’re looking forward to many flights together.

The FAA last grounded Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket for over a year in 2022 following a booster failure. It has also grounded SpaceX’s Starship and Falcon 9 previously, following mishaps during launches.

Update, April 20th: Added David Limp’s statement.

Netflix cofounder and chairman Reed Hastings plans to leave the company after nearly 30 years. The news comes as part of Netflix’s Q1 2026 earnings results released on Thursday, which says Hastings “will not stand for re-election to our Board when his current term expires at the Annual Meeting in June.”

After cofounding Netflix in 1997, Hastings served as CEO from 1999 to 2023, when he stepped down and took on the role of chairman. “My real contribution at Netflix wasn’t a single decision; it was a focus on member joy, building a culture that others could inherit and improve, and building a company that could be both beloved by members and wildly successful for generations to come,” Hastings says in the release.

Hastings is stepping down to focus on his “philanthropy and other pursuits,” according to Netflix.

During this quarter, Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion, marking a 16.2 percent year-over-year increase. The streaming giant says the jump was driven by “membership growth, higher pricing, and increased ad revenue.” It also netted a $2.8 billion breakup fee after walking away from an $83 billion deal to acquire the Warner Bros. studio and HBO Max.

At the same time, Netflix continues to make changes to its platform with a push into live content, video podcasts, and games. In March, Netflix raised the price of its streaming service once again, putting its cheapest ad-free plan at $19.99 per month, instead of $17.99. It even launched a games app for kids, called Playground, and added new Jackbox party games that you can play from your TV.

The company is planning to roll out a mobile app revamp by the end of this month as well, which will come with a focus on vertical video.