The iPhone maker said on Monday that Ternus will take over on September 1, while Cook will become executive chairman.

The leadership change comes as Apple strengthens its focus on artificial intelligence, responding to competition from companies including Nvidia, Meta and Google.

Ternus joined Apple in 2001 and currently serves as senior vice-president of hardware engineering. He has worked on several of the company’s biggest products, including the Mac, iPad and AirPods.

He is also seen as an important figure in improving Mac sales in recent years, helping the product regain momentum against personal computer competitors.

Although he has kept a lower public profile than some Apple executives, the company has recently given him a more visible role.

Last year, Ternus presented the iPhone Air, a major redesign of Apple’s flagship device and one of the biggest changes to the product line in years.

At 50, he takes over at the same age Cook did when he succeeded Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 2011.

Cook leaves the chief executive role after overseeing one of the most successful periods in Apple’s history. Since taking charge in August 2011, he has helped increase the company’s market value by about $3.6 trillion.

He was widely credited with expanding Apple’s global supply chain, especially through manufacturing partnerships in China, while also growing the company’s services and hardware businesses.

Cook also became the first Fortune 500 chief executive to publicly come out as gay in 2014 and often spoke on issues including workplace diversity and environmental policy.

Apple said Cook will remain involved in dealing with policymakers as executive chairman.

Ternus now inherits a company under pressure to show stronger progress in artificial intelligence.

Although Apple introduced Siri in 2011, it has struggled to match the pace of newer AI-focused companies.

Tech giants such as OpenAI and Anthropic have attracted millions of users with new chatbot products, while Nvidia has become the world’s most valuable listed company on the back of demand for AI chips.

In January, Apple reached an agreement with Google to use Gemini technology to improve Siri.

Ternus will also face competition in new devices. Meta Platforms has found success with smart glasses, while Apple’s Vision Pro headset has faced questions over its high price.

Alongside appointing John Ternus as CEO, Apple said Johny Srouji has been named chief hardware officer. He will continue leading the company’s custom chip and sensor teams.

The hardware engineering group previously led by Ternus will now be overseen by Tom Merieb.

On TikTok, the “For You” page drives the vast majority of viewing time. What appears on screen is usually selected rather than random.

I open my phone for a few minutes, intending to check one thing, then I scroll, one video becomes ten, and ten becomes an hour. It seems like a choice, but rarely is. What I am seeing has been filtered, ranked and placed in front of me for a reason.

This is the difference in how information is delivered today. Social media algorithms work differently now, and we no longer go out to find most content; it comes to us, already arranged.

What the system is doing

At a basic level, these systems track how people behave and use that to decide what to show next. They look at how long you watch something, whether you like it, comment on it, share it, or scroll past it.

Over time, patterns are formed. If you pause on a certain type of video, you will see more of it. If you skip something quickly, it fades away. The system keeps testing, adjusting, and refining. It does not understand meaning in the human sense but recognises patterns.

On Instagram, on TikTok, and on YouTube, the process is similar. Content is ranked, not just published. What trends are what holds attention.

That detail is important because attention, not accuracy or balance, is what these systems are built to reward.

Why it works this way

The answer is not complicated, we can say it’s commercial.

Companies like Meta Platforms and Google make most of their money from advertising. The longer people stay, the more adverts they see. The more engaged they are, the more valuable they become.

So the system is tuned to keep people watching and it’s not for a minute, but for as long as possible.

This impacts what is promoted. Content that triggers a reaction; amusement, anger, or curiosity, tends to perform better. Quiet, balanced or less emotional material usually does not travel as far.

In that environment, the feed is not a neutral stream, but an engineered one.

How your feed becomes your world

The process is gradual, but trust me when I say it is consistent.

When I interact with one type of content, the system offers me similar posts. I engage again, and it narrows further. Over time, my feed becomes more focused, more specific.

Eventually, I am not just seeing content, I am seeing a version of reality that has been developed around my past behaviour.

This is where the idea of a “bubble” becomes real. Opposing views don’t appear often anymore. Certain topics take over because they are repeatedly shown while others seem absent.

The result is that I may feel informed but I am often informed within a boundary I did not set.

Reflection or influence?

There is an argument that these systems simply show what people want. After all, you choose what you click, you decide what to watch.

That is partly true, but it is also incomplete.

What you see repeatedly can affect what you think is normal, popular or important. Repetition has weight. If a certain idea appears often enough, it begins to feel familiar. Sometimes, it begins to feel correct.

So the system does both. It responds to behaviour, and it guides it.

The balance between those two roles is where the debate comes in.

What this means

False information can spread quickly if it keeps people engaged. Outrage can travel faster than calm discussion. Trends can appear larger than they are because they are amplified.

In past years, Facebook has faced trials over how content was promoted during political events. Since then, attention has turned to how recommendation systems more broadly can impact public conversation.

The concern is not limited to what is posted but what is pushed.

Why it is hard to look away

There is also a human side to this.

Unpredictable content keeps people watching. One clip may be dull, the next interesting. That makes it harder to stop. Endless scrolling removes natural breaks, there is no endpoint.

Emotion also has a role to play in this too. Content that makes people laugh, argue or react tends to hold them longer and definitely, the system learns that quickly.

Over time, this creates a loop, the system offers, I respond, it adjusts, I stay.

Attempts to set limits

Regulators are trying to limit these impacts. In Europe, new policies are pushing large platforms to explain how content is recommended and to reduce the spread of harmful material. 

Similar discussions are happening in other regions, with calls for more transparency and accountability.

The challenge is increasing, but change is slow. These systems are complex, and they are important for highly profitable businesses.

Can you go back to controlling what you see?

To a degree, yes.

What you choose to engage with does influence what you see next. Following different accounts, pausing on different topics, and ignoring certain content, these have an effect.

But control is limited. The feed is still filtered, still ranked and you are not seeing everything, just what has been selected.

Where this leaves us

It is easy to assume that what appears on screen shows the world as it is, but it usually does not. It shows what holds attention, determined by past behaviour and commercial goals.

That does not mean there is no choice. It means choice operates within a system that is already structured.

So let’s look beyond the feed influencing what we see because it clearly is.

Let’s focus on whether what we see every day impacts how we think, and how much of that thinking is truly our own.

With that scale, we definitely can’t limit the app’s description to a tool just for messaging. For many MSMEs across Africa, WhatsApp is their business platform, the hub for sales, customer service, operations, and payments.

Across large parts of the continent, small businesses don’t run on standalone websites or dedicated point-of-sale systems. They conduct nearly all of their commerce via chat. 

The very ubiquity that makes WhatsApp powerful also creates a subtle but persistent drag on growth. 

This article focuses on how African SMEs use WhatsApp, explores the advantages it brings, examines the limitations it imposes, and argues why we must build infrastructure on top of it, before these enterprises outgrow their conversational foundation.

WhatsApp Business vs Telegram Channels: Competing for SME Communication

Two facts make WhatsApp essential to Africa’s MSME economy. First, WhatsApp’s global reach is enormous, over 3 billion people use it every month, according to Meta’s 2025 report.

Second, mobile technology is a cornerstone of Africa’s economy. According to the GSMA, in 2024, mobile technologies and services accounted for 7.7% of Africa’s GDP, driven by growing smartphone adoption and expanding mobile internet access. 

When mobile is the primary economic gateway, top messaging apps naturally become the infrastructure for business.

Together, these trends mean that WhatsApp sits at the intersection of accessibility and scale, a near-universal app accessed via the phone, the tool of choice for entrepreneurs with limited capital and moderate technical capacity.

How SMEs Use WhatsApp: Business Workflows in Chat

For many African SMEs, WhatsApp is their default workspace. Here’s how:

• Sales and discovery: Merchants use WhatsApp catalogues, broadcast lists and group chats as their storefronts. Buyers browse images and voice notes, ask questions, and place orders, all within the same chat.
• Customer service: Returns, complaints, confirmations, everything happens via chat. Because responses are usually fast and personal, buyers trust the exchange more than a faceless email or website form.
• Payments and invoicing: Sellers coordinate payments via mobile money, bank transfers or USSD. Customers share payment confirmations in chat. Some businesses then issue invoices as photos or PDFs inside WhatsApp itself.
• Operations and logistics: Orders are coordinated through group chats with delivery drivers or warehouse staff. Drivers get drop-off locations, customer photos, and verbal instructions, all in real time.
• Team coordination: Small teams manage tasks, schedules and recruitment through voice notes and chat groups, minimising friction in low-infrastructure environments.

These workflows mean that for many micro-entrepreneurs, moving off WhatsApp would slow them down and weaken the personal, trusted communication that underpins their sales.

The Upside: Why WhatsApp Triggers Growth

The benefits that come with this arrangement are real and substantial:

• Reduced entry cost: It is free to create a catalogue and share it. No need for a website or expensive digital tools.
• Trust-building: Real-time chat, voice messages and pictures create direct, human engagement. Buyers feel more secure.
• High engagement: Chat messages beat traditional outreach: responses are faster, and conversion rates are higher.
• Financial inclusion: Entrepreneurs who lack formal infrastructure can still transact, document orders and build a client base.
• Scalability: For many African SMEs, WhatsApp provides a way to scale activity without investing heavily in physical or digital infrastructure up front.

The Digital Ceiling: Limits to Scale

Despite the strengths, WhatsApp’s consumer-app roots embed limitations that become more obvious as businesses try to grow.

1. Account and device friction
   A WhatsApp account is typically tied to a single phone number and device, making collaboration difficult. Shared inboxes are awkward, unless businesses adopt the Business API, which comes with onboarding costs.
2. Absence of native data analytics
   Conversations in chat are unstructured. There is no built-in way to run analytics on customer behaviour, funnel performance or churn, unless external tools are used.
3. Limited integration with business systems
   There is no native link between WhatsApp and inventory management, accounting or fulfilment systems. Many firms must reconcile chat-based orders manually.
4. Payment reconciliation challenges
   Payments come through diverse channels, mobile money, bank transfers, USSD. Sellers rely on customers to share confirmation screenshots in chat, then manually reconcile records.
5. Platform risk
   Companies using WhatsApp face real vulnerability from outages or policy changes. The six-hour Facebook/WhatsApp outage in October 2021, and more recent API policy changes, show how a private platform can become a systemic risk.
6. Regulatory and formalisation gaps
   Transactions in chat are opaque to regulators, tax authorities and lenders. Without structured receipts or formal records, many businesses remain informal and credit-invisible.

These challenges add friction, cost and risk, particularly for businesses that want to scale beyond a single phone or a small customer base.

The Layer-2 Ecosystem: Building on What Exists

Recognising these limits, a growing ecosystem is building on top of WhatsApp. Providers include:

• Business Solution Providers (BSPs) that connect WhatsApp Business API to CRMs and customer-service dashboards.
• Chat-commerce platforms that standardise order intake and use templates to turn chat into structured data.
• Reconciliation tools that match payment confirmations to orders, reducing manual labour.
• Voice-to-text or voice-to-structure tools that convert voice notes into itemised orders.

These companies leverage WhatsApp’s reach while adding the structure, analytics and automation SMEs need to scale. But access is uneven: expenses, regional availability and ease-of-use vary, and many small merchants are still excluded.

Macro Risks and Policy Implications

The WhatsApp-first model of commerce presents bigger economic issues:

• Systemic concentration: When trade sits on a single privately-owned messaging platform, any disruption (technical or policy) carries significant economic risk.
• Tax and credit invisibility: Governments lose visibility into business transactions, making effective taxation and credit provision difficult.
• Lack of open data standards: Without a standard for business metadata inside chat (orders, receipts, invoices), each provider builds its own silo.
• Consumer protection: Disputes in private chat are hard to adjudicate. Regulators need clearer safeguards for transactions that begin and end in WhatsApp.
• Digital sovereignty: African economies must balance the benefits of low-cost communication infrastructure with the risk of over-dependence on a platform owned by a global company.

To address these risks, policymakers should incentivise interoperable messaging standards, support layer-2 tools for reconciliation and analytics, and promote subsidised digital infrastructure for SMEs.

A Founders’ and Investors’ Playbook

For entrepreneurs:

• Use structured order-forms or templates within chat.
• Invest in a Business API integration early if you anticipate growth.
• Automate payment reconciliation: match client screenshots with invoices or orders.
• Maintain fallback channels (SMS, email, USSD) to mitigate against outages.
• Record structured data from day one, it supports credit, compliance and scale.

For investors:

• Invest in SaaS firms building shared inboxes, CRMs or reconciliation tools for chat-based businesses.
• Prioritise companies that enable multi-user chat accounts or group-based order management.
• Look for voice-commerce technology: voice-to-text or structured templates that work in low-literacy markets.
• Support developers working on open messaging standards or APIs for business metadata.

WhatsApp has gone beyond being just messaging for African SMEs; it’s the bedrock of commerce for millions. It gives speed, trust, low cost, and inclusion. 

But it was not built for enterprise scale. Many businesses will hit a ceiling if they rely exclusively on conversational workflows.

We now face a choice. Do we treat WhatsApp as the final platform, or as the base layer for a richer infrastructure? 

To turn conversations into scalable economic value, we need to invest in structured data tools, open standards, and lightweight business platforms that build on and elevate what WhatsApp offers. Only then can we fully activate the possibilities of this de facto operating system.

At the heart of the issue is a supervisory fee introduced under the Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into force in 2022. 

The law requires major online platforms, 19 in total, including Meta, TikTok, Google, and Amazon, to pay 0.05% of their global net income. 

The money funds the European Commission’s monitoring of platform compliance with the DSA’s rules. But how the Commission arrived at each company’s bill is now under investigation.

Meta’s counsel, Assimakis Komninos, made it clear that the issue wasn’t about dodging regulation but about the logic, or lack thereof, behind the numbers. 

“The provisions in the Digital Services Act, or DSA, go against the letter and the spirit of the law, are totally untransparent with black boxes and have led to completely implausible and absurd results,” he told the five-judge panel in Luxembourg.

He objected the Commission’s choice to base the fee on the parent company’s revenue rather than that of the local subsidiary, a move he said distorted the true financial footprint of the entity being regulated. “Meta still does not know how the fee was calculated,” Komninos said.

Represented by lawyer Bill Batchelor, TikTok rejected the entire fee structure as inaccurate and discriminatory. “What has happened here is anything but fair or proportionate. The fee has used inaccurate figures and discriminatory methods,” Batchelor told the court.

According to him, TikTok’s supervisory fee was unfairly inflated by a method that counts the same users twice, once for using mobile, and again for desktop. 

“It inflates TikTok’s fees, requires it to pay, not just for itself, but for other platforms and disregards the excessive fee cap,” he argued. He also accused the Commission of overreaching by basing the cap on group-wide profits instead of earnings by the regulated unit.

In response, the Commission stood its ground. Lawyer Lorna Armati argued that the financial strength of a group cannot be divorced from the regulatory burden of its platforms. 

“When a group has consolidated accounts, it is the financial resources of the group as a whole that are available to that provider in order to bear the burden of the fee,” she told the court. 

Armati insisted that the process was legally sound and transparent enough for companies to understand. “The providers had sufficient information to understand why and how the Commission used the numbers that it did and there is no question of any breach of their right to be heard now, unequal treatment.”

The court is expected to rule in 2026 and the result would impact how the EU funds regulatory enforcement, and determine whether Big Tech continues to foot the bill under current terms. 

If Meta and TikTok succeed, it might force the Commission back to the drawing board, possibly lightening the financial load for other global platforms doing business in Europe.

The cases are officially registered as T-55/24 Meta Platforms Ireland v Commission and T-58/24 TikTok Technology v Commission.

The overheating occurs when up to 72 of these cutting-edge graphics processing units (GPUs) are connected in a single server rack, delaying the rollout of essential data centres and potentially disrupting operations for major tech companies.

The Blackwell chips, unveiled in March and expected to ship in the second quarter, were anticipated to boost AI processing with speeds 30 times faster than Nvidia’s previous offerings. 

However, the delays have left cloud service providers like Meta Platforms, Google, and Microsoft struggling to adjust their infrastructure plans. These firms rely heavily on Nvidia’s technology to power their AI-driven services and maintain a competitive edge in the industry.

Sources close to Nvidia’s operations have revealed that the company has repeatedly requested its suppliers to modify the server rack designs to address the overheating problem. 

While Nvidia’s spokesperson described these adjustments as “normal engineering iterations,” reports reveal that the timing of these changes could disrupt deployment schedules.

The redesign process has placed additional stress on customers who are racing against time to establish next-generation data centres. 

With high demand for AI-powered tools like chatbots and advanced analytics, any delay in the availability of the Blackwell platform could impact operational timelines.

Despite the current setbacks, the Blackwell chips come as a huge innovation in AI hardware. Combining two silicon dies into a single unit, Nvidia has achieved outstanding processing power. 

The chips are seen as essential for handling complex AI tasks, making them a necessary component for tech giants aiming to expand their AI capabilities.

Analysts had projected Nvidia’s revenue from the Blackwell chips to reach $6 billion in the coming quarter, showing the high demand for this platform. 

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently described interest in the Blackwell AI chips as “insane,” emphasising the industry’s reliance on the company’s technological advancements.

The delays come at a time when Nvidia is under pressure to maintain its top place in the AI hardware market. 

The company’s recent market valuation of $3.482 trillion reiterates its indispensability in the tech world, but challenges like these could open opportunities for competitors such as AMD and Intel to close the gap.

While Nvidia has not officially informed customers of further shipment delays, the adjustments to the server rack designs suggest ongoing work to resolve the overheating issues.