NYC public schools ban AI through middle school

**Meghan McCarty Carino** (0:01)
Back to school, but not for AI.
From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Meghan McCarty Carino.
New York City Public Schools announced a new policy this week, banning the use of AI among elementary and middle school students. We'll get into it on today's Marketplace Tech Bytes Week in Review. Plus, Google survives yet another antitrust case without having to break up its business. But first, the changing of the guard at Apple. This week, John Ternus took over as CEO after a 15-year run by Tim Cook. Here with more about what this means for the iPhone maker is Joanna Stern at New Things.

**Joanna Stern** (0:52)
To really look at the history of Apple leadership, we had a very strong founding leader who was, of course, Steve Jobs, who was very close to the products. We have all heard how obsessive Steve Jobs was about little things on the products, how involved he was in the design and the engineering, how he wanted it to look and feel to the consumer.
Then Tim Cook takes over and Tim Cook is not that type of leader. Tim Cook is an operations guy. He is fully in on the sourcing when he came to Apple to help work on the Mac, to help source and work on operations to make sure the supply chain could be more efficient, work closely in China, and then works his way up the ranks to lead the company and be fully focused on how to grow Apple from a company that had just released the iPhone to becoming this global technology superpower really that now is in all types of devices that are really threaded through the iPhone. So that's what Tim Cook's history and legacy seems to be. And now we are now back to a leader who again is less of an operations guy and more of a product guy. And I think that's a really interesting thing for people who watch this company who use these products to understand is that the CEO is now going to be very invested, very focused on these products, how they look and feel to you, the consumer.

**Meghan McCarty Carino** (2:10)
And he is taking the helm right before this big iPhone unveil coming next week. So what are you going to be watching there?

**Joanna Stern** (2:18)
I will be watching there from there. So that's exciting. I have said this is one of the most exciting iPhone launches in history. I have been at, I think, every single iPhone launch. And I think this is because we are really looking at a different type of iPhone, right? This is the foldable iPhone that has been rumored.
Lots of other foldable phones already on the market on Android side, Samsung, Huawei, Google, but not on the iPhone. And so this is, we're looking at Apple to explain why they have entered this foldable phone market at this time. We're also looking, of course, at what the price increases are going to be. We have heard that the prices will go up because of the ramageddon and the prices of AI driving up storage and memory. And so that is just to be expected. In fact, the name of the event is Surprise and Shine. And I think it will not be a surprise if these prices go up.

**Meghan McCarty Carino** (3:10)
This is a very interesting moment for Apple. Obviously, I think the iPhone has been doing incredibly well for Apple, but we have these price increases, the new lease program coming on. And all over this is kind of the big question about where Apple will end up in the AI economy.
How are you sort of thinking about where Apple is in this moment?

**Joanna Stern** (3:37)
Well, it's also really good timing for John Ternus because the tide and the message is about to shift for Apple on AI. They had this blunder. They had said that they were going to have this new series almost two years ago. There's been lawsuits about it. They never delivered it. And now, this fall, with iOS 27, which we expect in September, this new series arrives. And it is quite good. I've been using it. I've been testing it. I've been working on my review of iOS 27 And so Apple can finally now say, we don't suck at AI. We don't suck at Siri. And that's a big thing.
It gives them the underpinning now to design other products, which I believe we're going to start to hear about next week, which may be this home display, a device that you can talk to Siri and it can control things in the home if you've used HomeKit, which is from Apple's sort of smart home platform. We're going to eventually see some ways that AirPods are going to work better with Siri. We're going to see a big integration, I'm sure, with this new Siri and the new iPhones that are coming out. So what Apple's message can be versus some of the other companies is like, we control everything. We control the hardware, we control the software, and now we control this AI layer.