Category: 3. Business

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Targeted Pulse, your weekly wrap-up of the top developments in oncology. This week, we saw FDA decisions, learned about care-changing trial data, and got a preview of the most anticipated 67th American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting and Expositionabstracts. From regulatory designations for promising new drugs to crucial clinical trials, here are the top stories that shaped the week.

The FDA has granted premarket approval to the IsoPSA blood-based in vitro diagnostic kit, intended to aid clinicians in deciding whether to proceed with prostate biopsy. It is indicated for men aged ≥ 50 years with elevated prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels.

Unlike traditional PSA testing, IsoPSA leverages the IsoClear™ platform to analyze structural characteristics (isoforms) of the PSA protein, offering enhanced specificity. Clinical utility is recognized by inclusion in NCCN and AUA/SUO guidelines, as it improves risk stratification for high-grade (Gleason score ≥7) prostate cancer. The test is expected to decrease unnecessary biopsies stemming from benign PSA elevations.

The phase 3 OptiTROP-Lung05 trial demonstrated that the combination of sacituzumab tirumotecan (sac-TMT), a TROP2-directed antibody-drug conjugate [ADC], plus pembrolizumab (Keytruda) offers a statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvement in progression-free survival (PFS) compared with pembrolizumab monotherapy for first-line treatment of advanced, PD-L1-positive non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

This study marks the first time an ADC combined with an immune checkpoint inhibitor has met a primary end point in the first-line NSCLC setting. The regimen also showed a positive trend in overall survival (OS) with a manageable safety profile. This combination represents a new, highly effective, and novel therapeutic option for clinicians managing these patients.

The FDA has granted traditional approval to pirtobrutinib (Jaypirca), a highly selective, noncovalent Bruton’s tyrosine kinase (BTK) inhibitor, for adults with relapsed or refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) or small lymphocytic lymphoma (SLL). This indication specifically targets patients previously treated with a covalent BTK inhibitor.

The decision is based on the phase 3 BRUIN-CLL-321 trial, which showed a statistically and clinically significant PFS benefit. Median PFS was 11.2 months (95% CI, 9.5–11.4) with pirtobrutinib vs 8.7 months (95% CI, 7.2–10.2) for investigator’s choice of therapy (HR, 0.58; P =.0105). This noncovalent agent provides a mechanism to continue BTK pathway targeting after resistance to covalent inhibitors.

The Targeted Oncology® poll highlighted several practice-changing abstracts for the 67th ASH Annual Meeting and Exposition, primarily in multiple myeloma (MM), CLL, and myelofibrosis. The most anticipated presentation is the phase 3 MajesTEC-3 trial, which evaluated the combination of the bispecific antibody teclistamab plus daratumumab (Tec-Dara) against standard-of-care regimens in relapsed/refractory MM. The data demonstrated statistically and clinically significant improvements in PFS and OS for Tec-Dara. These findings support establishing the Tec-Dara regimen as a new standard of care early in the R/R MM treatment landscape. Other highly anticipated data include primary results for pirtobrutinib in previously untreated CLL/SLL (LBA-3).

The bispecific HER2-directed ADC TQB2102 demonstrated robust activity in the phase 2 TQB2102-II-01 trial as a neoadjuvant therapy for HER2-positive breast cancer. Its novel design targets 2 non-overlapping HER2 epitopes to enhance blockade.

The 6.0 mg/kg regimen administered over 8 cycles achieved the highest total pathologic complete response rate at 76.9% (90% CI, 62.3%–87.6%). The drug exhibited a favorable safety profile, with grade 3 treatment-related adverse events occurring in 27.9% of patients across all cohorts. These compelling efficacy and safety data support the ongoing randomized phase 3 evaluation of TQB2102 against standard neoadjuvant regimens in this patient population.

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The company linked to the largest global raid on an illicit weight-loss drug facility is still selling unlicenced drugs to thousands of customers, a Guardian investigation has found.

Just over a month after the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) raided the site and released images of seized products with the Alluvi brand name visible, the company is still selling replicas of retatrutide. It is understood that nobody has yet been arrested in connection to the raid.

Retatrutide, which has not yet completed clinical trials, is an experimental injection developed by the US drugmaker Eli Lilly that targets three gut hormones: GLP-1, GIP and glucagon. Because it remains in clinical trials and is not approved for use, any sale to consumers is illegal. Despite this, counterfeit versions are being widely promoted on social media, with Alluvi – which did not respond to a request for comment – emerging as a key seller.

During the October raid, the MHRA carried out one of the largest single seizures of trafficked weight-loss drugs ever recorded globally. Officers confiscated tens of thousands of empty pens ready to be filled, raw chemical ingredients, and more than 2,000 unlicensed retatrutide and tirzepatide branded Alluvi pens destined for customers.

They also found large quantities of sophisticated packaging and manufacturing equipment, along with about £20,000 in cash suspected to be linked to medicines trafficking.

Despite this, Alluvi Healthcare Limited continues sales on multiple Telegram channels, one of which has nearly 3,000 subscribers. On 27 October, shortly after news of the raid emerged, one of its channels showed Alluvi-branded retatrutide pens, stating, “we are still fully in stock via telegram”.

Alluvi’s website is also still up and running as of 5 December, selling a “retatrutide 40mg x2 Bundle (R&D Only) for £339.99”. It advises customers: “If you’re using retatrutide for the first time, it’s essential to follow a gradual dosing plan to allow your body to adjust and minimise side effects.”

Buying retatrutide illegally carries serious risks. Because the drug is still experimental, products sold online or through unofficial channels are unregulated and may not contain the correct ingredients or dosage, and may not be sterilised to the correct standard.

Contaminated or incorrectly dosed injectable hormones can cause infections, dangerous blood sugar crashes, pancreatitis and cardiovascular side-effects. Using an unfinished clinical-trial drug outside legitimate medical settings is unsafe and potentially life-threatening.

One person who bought the Alluvi pen told the Guardian, speaking anonymously, that they had experienced severe “gastrointestinal issues, unstable peaks and troughs of energy, and dehydration”.

One of Alluvi’s Telegram channels also shares a video claiming to show a Royal Mail employee assuring buyers that “orders will be scanned in and they will be out for delivery”, and prompting the worker to say “from Alluvi”. The post promised next-day delivery.

On 1 December, the same account advertised that its “pens [are] in stock”, offering a 25% discount and directing customers to another Telegram channel for payments. Another Telegram channel – with over 2,000 members – includes a plethora of customers talking about their experiences taking the counterfeit weight-loss drugs.

The Guardian has seen evidence suggesting that payments for Alluvi products are being processed by an e-commerce business called Nutri Collectiv. Screenshots of orders indicate that customers buy what is described as a “weight loss plan”, with payments routed through Stripe, allowing the transactions to masquerade as fitness-programme purchases and avoid detection.

A Channel 4 investigation found that individuals who spoke negatively about Alluvi had their social media accounts taken over. Two TikTok accounts with millions of followers were used to impersonate legitimate weight-loss influencers who had criticised fake weight-loss drugs. The operators cloned the influencers’ profiles by copying their names and profile pictures, then contacted TikTok claiming to be the real account holders and alleging impersonation.

TikTok subsequently shut down the legitimate accounts, leaving the fake ones active. Five weight-loss affiliates told Channel 4 they had lost their TikTok accounts in this way.

Concerns about illicit production models of weight-loss drugs are heightened during the winter months, as it becomes harder to know whether products have been stored correctly.

Experts warn that colder temperatures can pose risks when it comes to storing weight-loss injections. Jason Murphy, a weight-loss expert and head of pharmacy at Chemist4U, said that winter temperatures can affect storage conditions and that the effectiveness and safety of the drug could be compromised.

“These drugs are made from living organisms and are highly sensitive to temperature variations and extreme highs or lows,” he added. “Extremely cold temperatures or freezing can damage their protein structure, reduce their medicinal effect, and potentially make them unsafe to use even after thawing … If you believe your weight-loss injection has been frozen, dispose of it immediately.”

The MHRA declined to comment.

sarah.marsh@theguardian.com

Within a year of initiation, a multidisciplinary project to improve screening and treatment for iron deficiency in pregnancy resulted in a sixfold rise in screening rates for iron deficiency in pregnant patients, a 20-fold rise in the number of intravenous (IV) iron infusions, and a significant improvement in median hemoglobin levels.

Screening rates went from 10% to over 60% within a year. Two-thirds of pregnant patients screened were found to be iron deficient, indicating that this is a very common, but readily fixable problem.”

Richard Godby, MD, lead author, hematologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota

Women of child-bearing age are at high risk for iron deficiency. Menstruation and low intake of iron-rich foods are some of the most common causes of iron deficiency among women in this age group, Dr. Godby said. In addition, some commonly used medications, such as proton pump inhibitors, can inhibit the body’s ability to absorb iron.

The body needs more iron during pregnancy. Iron deficiency and anemia during pregnancy have been associated with adverse outcomes such as fetal growth restriction, premature birth, low birth weight, and compromised development of the fetus’s brain and nervous system. 

Iron deficiency can be diagnosed with a blood test for ferritin, a protein that enables the body to store iron. However, guidelines from the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology – the professional society that represents most U.S. doctors in this specialty – currently recommend iron deficiency screening only for pregnant women with anemia, which they define as a hemoglobin level below 11 g/dL in the first or third trimester.

Dr. Godby and his colleagues worked with a multidisciplinary team at the Mayo Clinic to develop and implement a quality improvement project aimed at standardizing the screening and treatment of iron deficiency in pregnancy. They added ferritin testing to the list of recommended lab tests that patients typically undergo at eight to 12 weeks of pregnancy and again at 24 to 28 weeks. If patients had low ferritin levels at eight to 12 weeks, their teams offered to prescribe oral iron supplements. If patients’ ferritin was low at 24 to 28 weeks, the teams offered them an IV infusion of iron dextran.

To measure the project’s results, the research team compared changes after project implementation between the two cohorts of patients – one treated before implementation (2,097 pregnancies; the Before cohort) and one treated a year later, after implementation (2,429 pregnancies; the After cohort).

Results showed that, in the Before cohort, just 10% of patients underwent ferritin testing, compared with 63% in the After cohort. Among those tested, 66% in the Before cohort and 69% in the After cohort were iron deficient. Just 0.9% of patients in the Before cohort received IV iron dextran infusions, compared with 21% in the After cohort.

Among patients who received IV iron infusions, the median hemoglobin level improved from 10.7 to 11.8 g/dL. Patients whose hemoglobin level was 12 g/dL at study entry (above the cutoff of 11 g/dL to be considered anemic according to current guidelines from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists) saw an increase to 12.8 g/dL. “These findings suggest reassessing the threshold for diagnosing anemia and screening for iron deficiency in pregnancy,” Dr. Godby said. 

Before the project, 3.1% of pregnancies required a blood transfusion during hospitalization for delivery, compared with 2.7% after the project’s implementation. Most patients who needed blood transfusions had not been tested for iron deficiency. While this difference was not statistically significant, Dr. Godby said, it suggests that a reduction in the need for post-partum blood transfusions could be an additional benefit of treating iron deficiency during pregnancy.

Dr. Godby noted that nearly all of the patients in both the Before and After cohorts took prenatal vitamins, which are recommended during pregnancy and supposed to contain iron. However, these supplements were usually purchased over the counter rather than prescribed by the health care team. Over-the-counter dietary supplements are not regulated to ensure they contain the ingredients and amounts of ingredients claimed by the manufacturers, he said.

As a next step, the team hopes to analyze whether treating iron deficiency in pregnancy improves patients’ quality of life by enabling them to feel better, experience less post-partum depression, return to work sooner, and more.

Richard Godby, MD, of the Mayo Clinic, will present this study on Sunday, December 7, 2025, at 12:00 noon Eastern time in W304A-D of the Orange County Convention Center.

Nikhil Rathi, chief executive of the Financial Conduct Authority, made a pilgrimage on Friday from its glass and steel HQ in east London to the Pioneers Museum in Rochdale – the spiritual home of the co-operative movement.

His unlikely day trip aimed to highlight the City watchdog’s role in opening the way to a doubling of the size of the mutuals sector – a Labour manifesto pledge.

Among these customer- or worker-owned organisations, including huge companies such as John Lewis and Nationwide building society, are the 350 credit unions.

These are locally based lenders whose interest rates are capped by law and whose clients tend to include the low-income consumers left behind by major banks. Holding assets of £4.9bn between them, the UK’s credit unions serve about 2 million members. Their US counterparts have more than 143 million.

The FCA’s new report, which Rathi was in Rochdale to launch, included a series of recommendations aimed at encouraging credit unions to expand, and to offer more services.

The Treasury has already promised to review the “common bond” – the legal promise that governs each credit union, for example specifying the area it serves – to allow these to adapt more easily to changing circumstances. Ministers have also set aside £30m to fund modernisation – updating credit unions’ IT systems, for example.

Yet campaigners for fairer lending fret that cash-strapped customers will continue to be left at the mercy of loan sharks unless mainstream banks are forced to do more.

The need is certainly there. Visiting an employability project on a housing estate in Stockton this week, it was depressing to hear about residents resorting to loan sharks, often unaware of the cheaper and less unpleasant alternative of a local credit union.

That chimed with evidence from a recent roundtable discussion organised in Glasgow by campaign group the Finance Innovation Lab, where low-income borrowers recounted their experiences to local MPs.

“When there’s an unexpected cost like that you just need to get it sorted, but you’re left with no good options,” one woman said, citing a broken bed as an example of the kind of expense that can drive consumers into paying extortionate interest rates to unscrupulous lenders.

Recent research by Fair4All Finance, the government-backed not-for-profit that promotes financial inclusion, found that 1.9 million adults in Britain had turned to unlicensed money lenders or loan sharks in the past year.

Dr Paul A Jones of Liverpool John Moores University is an expert on the credit union movement. He is optimistic about its future, and argues that some of the impetus for growth must come from within the sector itself.

“We need more credit unions of a significant size. We need more credit unions to get in the fast lane,” he says. “If you don’t want to, and you want to carry on in your village hall with 1,000 members, no problem, but that’s not where growth is going to come from.”

He welcomes some of the changes promised by the government – but warns that the constraint on many credit unions is lack of capital. “External investment is going to be important,” he says.

That’s where the Finance Innovation Lab and a coalition of other charities and lenders argue that legislation is needed, to force the powerful high street banks to play their part.

The government published its financial inclusion strategy last month, aimed at easing the struggle of consumers to secure affordable banking, insurance and other crucial services. But it included no specific targets, and made few firm demands of the finance sector.

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There was backing for a “small sum lending pilot”, led by Fair4All Finance, “to help expand access to affordable credit in England”. But the scale of the pilot was not specified – and it was unclear how it would differ from existing mutual lenders that already make small loans.

Campaigners including the actor Michael Sheen, who made a TV documentary on the exorbitant cost of debt for low-paid consumers in his home town of Port Talbot, argue for the much more muscular approach of a “Fair Banking Act”.

This would be a new law, modelled on the US Community Reinvestment Act, which has been in force for almost 50 years. Under the US version, banks are ranked by regulators according to how well their services reach underserved communities – and obliged to publish strategies to show how they will improve.

In many cases this then involves working with credit unions, or community development financial institutions (CDFIs) – another form of non-profit lender – hugely expanding the amount of capital these institutions have available to back new lending.

The coalition promoting the idea, which includes the Finance Innovation Lab alongside a string of mutual lenders and other campaign groups, argues that if such an act were implemented in the UK, it could lead to lending by credit unions and CDFIs to jump from £250m today to up to £3bn a year.

The proposal is backed among others by the Co-operative party, whose members include 41 Labour MPs, including the Treasury minister James Murray and the Treasury select committee chair, Meg Hillier.

It is a stretch to imagine the government slapping a Fair Banking Act on an industry that Rachel Reeves has called the “crown jewel in our economy”, but with the sector’s power should come responsibility.

The banks escaped the windfall tax that many on the left had hoped to see in the budget, and which the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) argued could raise £8bn a year. It does not seem too much to ask that, in return, they put a fraction of that sum behind supporting the local, mutual lenders that help to keep the loan sharks at bay.

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Entering Printemps in downtown New York City feels like an escape. A slight smell of musk hangs in the air as shoppers weave carefully around racks of coats and shelves of handbags and shoes. For the holidays, the store set up a small ice rink on its second floor where skaters perform on weekends.

The French luxury retail emporium opened its first New York outlet earlier this year and has said it wants shoppers to feel so comfortable that it feels like their own chic “French apartment”. The store has a bar upstairs, along with a roving champagne cart, and encourages shoppers to sip on their drinks while they browse. Plush carpeting in the dressing room, full of orange and reds, is reminiscent of a Wes Anderson movie set.

Across the street at Trinity Church, hundreds of people line up for free food and other necessities. Dodge your way past the steaming potholes and snarling traffic and a doorman welcomes you to another world. The atmosphere is so heady that suddenly, when browsing through its racks, a $600 black fur coat seems entirely inexpensive, and the $1,450 leather tabi boots upstairs are an investment.

On a recent weekday afternoon, fashionably dressed shoppers milled slowly around the store. Some took pictures of the skating rink or of displays of housewares that instructed: “Please ask for assistance – do not touch.”

Julien, who declined to give his last name, was visiting the store to pick up a gift for a Secret Santa exchange and said he wasn’t surprised by the prices. “For the brands they have, it’s normal,” he said.

Kathy, another shopper, said that she offered to take her friend out to lunch at the restaurant located inside the store and see if she could find a certain brand of ballet flats. “This is the only place that carries them,” she said, holding two bright green Printemps bags.

For a small fraction of Americans, the Printemps fantasy of comfortable luxury is just a way of life. An $890 chapka hat is a sweet gift for a friend, dropping $200 on perfume that smells like freshly cut grass is normal.

Around the corner from Printemps is the headquarters of the New York Stock Exchange, the ultimate symbol of American wealth and one of the main drivers of all this luxury spending.

Over the last few years, many Americans have reported they’re struggling with higher grocery prices, rising healthcare costs and other bills, and have given up on dreams of buying homes. And yet the stock market has only gone up and up.

The S&P 500 has shot up nearly 86% over the last five years, hitting record highs, especially with the recent AI boom. A ballooning stock market has meant a small percentage of Americans have been striking gold. According to data from the Federal Reserve, Americans in the top 1% of wealth own nearly 50% of the stock market. The top 10% own 87.2% of the market. The bottom 50% of all Americans own just 1.1% of stocks.

Area chart showing corporate equities and mutual fund shares held, in millions of dollars, by wealth percentile

Meanwhile, inflation has gone up from a recent low of 2.3% in April to 3% in September, while the unemployment rate has risen slightly, from 4% in January to 4.4% in September. The Yale Budget Lab has estimated that price increases from Donald Trump’s tariffs will cause a 1.2% price rise in the short run, costing the average household $1,700.

The split between rich and poor has handed Trump the biggest dilemma of his presidency. While the president promised to fix prices, and continues to blame Joe Biden’s presidency for today’s prices, his recent approval ratings show Americans are unhappy about the economy. In the YouGov/Economist poll of Trump’s approval ratings around specific economic issues, he had +5% approval on inflation after his inauguration in January. By 2 November, his ratings dropped to -35%.

With Republicans facing a tough fight to maintain control of Congress in next year’s midterm elections, Axios reported that Trump is set to embark on a US-wide tour to stare down “criticism that he’s prioritized global issues over pocketbook worries”.

It may prove to be a tough sell. In April 2020, at the very start of the pandemic, economist Peter Atwater came up with an easy way to describe what this divide feels like to Americans: a K-shaped economy. A small few are on the upper part of the “K”, while most Americans feel as if they’re sliding down on the bottom side of the letter.

To Atwater, the “K” described a time when “those at the bottom experience price inflation at a time when those at the top are experiencing asset inflation”.

Higher prices affect everyone, no matter a person’s financial status. But inflation doesn’t affect everyone equally.

A line chart showing that the wage growth for lower-income households dropped to just 1%, while it rose to 3.7% for higher-income households, compared with same time last year 

“Those at the top appear to have everything – not only everything, but have it in oversupply,” Atwater said. “Meanwhile, those at the bottom feel like they’re experiencing scarcity in everything that matters – affordability of food, healthcare, education, job opportunity.”

“If you’re at the bottom, the difference between 2% to 3% inflation over time is significant.”

Atwater said the phenomenon of the K-shaped economy didn’t start with the pandemic, but with the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis. Many Americans were upset to see the federal government focus stimulus efforts from the top down.

“What we saw is that it took until about 2018 before those at the bottom began to see any real wage growth,” Atwater said. “But Covid just poured gasoline on that fire.”

While inflation skyrocketed in 2022 after the Covid pandemic, prices started to cool in the years following. The annualized inflation rate went from 9.1% in June 2022 to 2.3% in April 2025 – the lowest it had been since March 2021. But since the spring, inflation has started climbing again.

And just as prices have been getting higher, key anti-poverty programs have been cut under the Trump administration, which advocates say has led to more Americans coming under the poverty threshold. Over the last year, the White House tightened enrollment into the national food stamp program and cut funding for housing assistance.

Research from the Robin Hood Foundation, an anti-poverty non-profit based in New York, found that the city’s poverty rate hit 25% this year – almost double the national poverty rate of 13%.

“The combination of rising costs, stagnation at the lower-end of the wage scale and reduction in support for helping people meet their basic necessities, these are all driving the poverty rate increase,” said Matthew Klein, chief program officer at Robin Hood.

Recent data has shown the outsized spending higher-income Americans have been doing compared with those in the bottom tiers of wealth. Bank of America found that low-income household spending has grown 0.7% over the last year, compared with a 2.7% growth for high-income earners.

A line chart showing that spending growth rose to 0.7% for lower-income households and to 2.7% for higher-income groups, compared with same time last year 

The trend has been showing up slowly in people’s credit scores. The number of people with super-prime credit scores has climbed simultaneously to the number of people with sub-prime credit scores also rising, according to credit agency TransUnion.

Chief executives of companies such as Delta, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s have pointed out the K-shaped gap they’re seeing in consumer behavior.

Delta’s CEO, Ed Bastian, said the company is seeing a lot of growth from its premium customers, who buy business- and first-class tickets. Henrique Braun, the chief operating officer of the Coca-Cola Company, said on an earnings call that the company’s revenue growth is being led by higher sales of its premium products, such as Topo Chico sparkling water and Fairlife protein shakes.

Meanwhile, McDonald’s CEO, Chris Kempczinski, said that the chain’s middle- and low-income consumers are “feeling under a lot of pressure right now”.

“It’s a really kind of two-tier economy,” he said. “People are actually skipping breakfast – or they are choosing to just eat at home.”

Julien, the Printemps Christmas shopper, said he’s seen his business as a custom stylist grow over the last year.

“Our company is growing, it’s better than last year,” he said. “No complaints there. Rich people are still rich.”

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Start the music. Players walk clockwise in a circle. When the music stops, everyone sits in a chair. Big Tech is setting in motion its plans for the next gen of lead designers, engineers, AI chiefs, and even CEOs.

In Cupertino, Apple execs with familiar faces are retiring or reducing responsibilities. Who’s in and who’s out? Well, chief operating officer Jeff Williams retired in November, and the speculation is that CEO Tim Cook could follow in the near term. Lisa Jackson, who has led Apple’s sustainability efforts since 2013, is now set to retire in January too.

There’s also the squad of Apple staffers who have been lured away to work with OpenAI, notably Apple’s former chief design officer Jony Ive after his independent stint at LoveFrom. In 2024, Molly Anderson was named industrial design leader, heading up a team of mostly fresh faces. Others have gone to Meta, such as Apple’s VP of human interface design, Alan Dye, who just this week was poached to head up a new Reality Labs design studio. At Apple, he’s been replaced by long-time UI designer Stephen Lemay. Phew.

In this swirl of shifting talent, John Ternus, who has worked for Apple since 2001, and served as SVP of hardware engineering for the last four years, reporting directly to Tim Cook, is emerging as the frontrunner to succeed Cook as Apple CEO, reportedly as soon as next year. WIRED asked Apple for comment but didn’t hear back before publication.

Alongside a steady drip of “leaks” on succession planning and Ternus’ position at the front of the pack, since 2023, Ternus has been given more prominence at product launch events. He announced the iPhone Air onstage this past September, and has appeared alongside other senior Apple leaders in press interviews and in-store Apple events.

“I think they’re testing to see what sentiment is like. Apple likes to control the narrative. So these ‘leaks,’ they’re not happening unintentionally,” suggests Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. “Apple’s lost a lot of people. I think it might actually be a net positive because it will create a fresh crop of people that have more power now than they did before.”

New Names to Know

It’s always tricky to pick up an individual’s contributions at Apple, beyond the odd detail, such as John Ternus himself reportedly being behind the MacBook’s TouchBar. Bertrand Nepveu worked in the Apple Vision Pro team from 2017 to 2021, after Apple acquired his VR headset startup Vrvana, and now runs Montreal-based VC firm Triptyq Capital. During his three and a half years, mostly working on the Vision Pro’s pass-through capabilities, the team ballooned from 300 to around 1,200. “John Ternus, even though I never worked with him, the feedback I got is that he’s a great product person,” he says, “and I think that’s what is needed for the next phase of Apple, especially with AI and with XR.”

With this future in mind, Nepveu sees the combination of Ternus-as-CEO working well with other personnel moves at Apple, including the news in March that Rockwell was taking over development of Siri from the head of AI, John Giannandrea. In another major future-facing reshuffle, Giannandrea was replaced this week by Amar Subramanya, who spent 16 years at Google, including work on Gemini and DeepMind, before a six-month stint at Microsoft.

“Mike Rockwell, I worked with him in the Vision Pro group, I think he’s the right person for that because they [XR and AI] work in tandem,” says Nepveu. “He used to joke that Siri was crap. I liked him because he didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. I was happy when I saw that he got promoted. I think in tandem with someone who is more product-focused [Ternus], it’s the way to go for Apple.”