The Tim Cook Era Officially Ends & Why MapQuest Soars to No. 1 App

life throws a lot of challenges at you how you adapt is what matters rising stars on amazon ads is all about rising to challenges this docu-series follows small business owners as they grow and advertise their brands with the help of amazon ads you can see them go from building awareness to driving sales they didn't even need huge budgets to get started advertising watch the full series at advertising.amazon.com slash rising dash stars good morning brood daily show i'm neil fryman and i'm toby howell today tim cook signs off at apple for the last time then map quest has made an unexpected surge to the top of the app store it's tuesday september 1st let's ride it is the first of september the time of year you typically start swapping out your iced coffee for pumpkin spice lattes but maybe not this season there are indications that the king of fall might be losing its crown to fast charging competitors google trends data shows that the psl led searches in only three states last week falling behind chai and matcha at this point last year it led in 32 states and in 2024 48 states food trend experts say it's not that we haven't fallen out of love with pumpkin spice just that so many more options are available that give you that same cozy autumn feeling miso caramel brown butter honey smoked butterscotch banana coffee syrup toby is this the end of a spice dynasty no and i'll tell you why it is just moved into the classic pantheon like you don't need to search for pumpkin spice latte anymore that being said miso caramel has my attention that sounds quite savory and delicious uh the fact that banana coffee syrup though has surpassed pumpkin spice coffee syrup in most google trends rating that is where i draw the line disgusting how are we back on bananas i thought banana bread was like a pandemic era thing no pumpkin spice is here to stay it's it's like lebron it just has a little longevity at this point it's not getting passed by yet even though i will be indulging in some miso caramel this fall season and now a word from our sponsor american express neil i am all go you're what i'm up the wall i'm non-stop i am busy which is why i appreciate the american express business platinum card because it's backed by a membership that's designed to support businesses whenever opportunity shows up with award-winning customer service statement credits for key business solutions and premium travel benefits the business platinum card gives you support that's there when you need it most so while you're focusing on running your business the business platinum card in american express membership are built to back you every step of the way learn more at go.mx morning brew and find out your welcome offer which could be as high as 300 000 membership rewards points that's go.mx morning brew offers and benefit terms apply at apple tim cook's watch has ended the john turnus era is about to begin yesterday marked the final day for cook as apple ceo the role he's held since 2011 when he replaced visionary co-founder steve jobs at the helm of tech's most innovative hardware company many thought those shoes were too big to fill for a soft-spoken supply chain geek like cook to succeed jobs it's like asking someone to perform on stage after zara larson but now that his tenure is over it's clear to everyone that tim absolutely cooked in his 15 years in charge apple stock soared more than 2 000 percent to become the second most valuable company in the world boasting a market cap of nearly 5 trillion dollars revenue and profits quadrupled the year cook became ceo apple sold 72 million iphones this year estimates suggest it'll sell 255 million warren buffett a major apple shareholder famously said he was somewhat embarrassed to admit that tim cook made him more money than he himself ever did there were missteps apple's vision pro the company's splashy foray into virtual reality so far a massive flop others didn't cook for lacking a long-term vision and creative juice that animated jobs and now in the thick of the ai revolution apple has been slower than peers to roll out features with siri becoming an afterthought compared to chat gpt and claude that's a problem for john turnus apple's hardware boss and cook's hand-picked successor once again there will be big shoes to fill let's step back into the kitchen one last time to give cook his flowers the big question was are you going to become steve jobs 2.0 that's an impossible question you could not fill those shoes but what tim cook really did his big innovation was making the iphone incredibly useful every single day and every single day and every single day and every single day and every day everywhere in your daily life we take for granted the fact that your iphone can now do things like buy stuff like payments was a big thing that cook pushed into music and entertainment fitness uh wearables and accessories all of this were big innovations not necessarily in the way that steve jobs innovated but in the way that cook innovated he created this idea of a connected ecosystem the wall garden that makes apple so valuable the more products you add into your ecosystem the more valuable it becomes and the more valuable it becomes the more valuable it becomes which is why an apple watch is fine but an apple watch plus an iphone is even better and then an apple watch plus an iphone plus the subscription to all of apple's services that is the coup de grace so again he wasn't you know this visionary product leader but if you look down into what he did he made that connected ecosystem that's made apple so valuable some of those products were very successful that rolled out during cook's watch one of them is the apple watch now apple sells more watches annually than the entire country of switzerland does airpods were another thing that were kind of lambasted when they first came out you remember when they first introduced and people were like what the heck is going on they were extremely ugly but now airpods are as big as major league baseball by sales those are the hardware things that came from cook and then there was this services business that he built up a lot of folks were wondering why apple is launching a tv streaming service but that in at least in the past few years has not necessarily become a huge profit center but a huge brand play for apple as well the other thing that cook is very good at is being a diplomat essentially when you're a ceo of a company this large specifically when your crucial relationships you have to maintain are one with the u.s and the other with china which is where all your supply chain rides you have to be basically become an international diplomat and he was uniquely good at being a so-called trump whisperer when it comes to top tech ceos during trump's first term trump basically became a diplomat and he was uniquely good at being a diplomat and so he basically noted that cook was one of the only ceos who would personally call him and that seemed to go a long way the fact that he's been able to maintain a relationship with these two frenemies of geopolitical powerhouses just shows how astute he was at being a diplomat as well as a tech ceo some more some final uh cook lore so he held this uh this goodbye dinner on august 23rd and cooper tino with some of his colleagues and he had his favorite band play at his dinner that band one republic he was he was loving the he was loving the good life it checks out and then finally what is he going to do in retirement well here are some clues apple posted a new job listing it was looking for an executive bodyguard who must be able to hike quote several miles at a time in austere environments so it looks like the man is going to be out into nature meanwhile we haven't even talked about john turnus uh he has uh he has a big event coming up this is going to be trial by fire on september 9th next week apple is going to be launching its iphone 18 the iphone 17 was a big hit but the thing about the iphone 18 which is accompanying it is a foldable iphone the first ever so we'll hear from turnus in not too long in just a few days let's move on it's been a week since president trump issued an executive order renaming lake ontario as lake america amid an escalating trade war with canada and yet opened different map apps and you'll see different labels as each tech company decides whether to abide by the change or not so far in lake america's corner there's google maps who updates its software to match official government sources but lake ontario has an unexpected champion map quest yep the og mapping service is not only still around but rocketing up the app store rankings after its led to a massive surge in downloads yesterday it leapfogged none other than google maps to become the number one navigation app in the u.s and as of this morning reached the number one app on the overall charts the reason it was well positioned to capitalize on the moment is because it's been here before last year during the gulf of america naming controversy it one reaffirmed that it would keep the name gulf of mexico and two launched a tool that let consumers rename the body of water anything that they wanted it's running back that same playbook for lake ontario to even bigger success its post reading we're not changing it on x reached over one hundred thousand likes doug burger map quest general manager insist the company didn't initially see this as some grand political statement i wouldn't call it a stance i would call it a well-timed joke but he went on people clearly want to hang on to the names of bodies of water that they recognize neil i have such vivid memories of printing out map quest directions to go to soccer tournaments growing up but it took a trade war for me and millions of other people to realize that this thing is still alive and kicking the Download numbers are kind of mind boggling. On Sunday, the MapQuest app saw 80,000 iOS downloads compared to the daily average of 500 in early August. I don't know what the percentage gain there, but there's a lot of zeros. And then on Google play downloads were 20,000 over the weekend from a daily average of about 1000. So, I mean, you said it was alive and kicking. It was alive. I don't know if it was kicking before this particular tweet, this particular decision, uh, his, his reasoning for behind this, Doug Berger said, we want to get people an app that keeps the names they're familiar with. And this is a big contrast from Google, which both of these companies had had to deal with what happened last year with Gulf of America and Gulf of Mexico. Google maps has had this policy that they changed the name to reflect official government sources. So in the United States, now that official government sources are using Lake America after president Trump's executive order that will in America, in the United States, you will see Lake America in Canada. You will still see Lake Ontario because that's what they want to keep calling it outside of the U S or Canada. You're going to see both names. Like we see with Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of America, you see Lake Ontario, and then in parentheses Lake America. And that just maybe did not sit well with a lot of people. Let's go back in history though, and just give you what MapQuest has been up to. Remember, it launched back in 1996. That was well before GPSs were even really a thing. Smartphones were definitely not a thing. So you had to enter two locations where you started, where you wanted to go, and then it would give you turn by turn directions, which you had to print out. I remember being in charge of it sometimes in the backseat and you know, your parents are driving to a soccer game. They're like, where's the turn? Do I go right or left here? And it was so stressful, but that is how things were in, you know, the late nineties. It reached a peak valuation of $1.1 billion when it sold to AOL in December of 1999. That is roughly $2.2 billion in today's dollars. And yet from there, it was kind of downhill. Verizon actually acquired MapQuest as part of its 2015 purchase of AOL. And yet the sale price was so, oh, and actually then they went on to sell it one more time to this platform system one. And the reported sale price was so small that Verizon didn't sell it to AOL. So they went on to sell it to AOL. And didn't file public paperwork recording the transaction. So quite a fall from grace. But again, it is still around. You were on it this morning. Give us your quick review. Not great. Yeah. I was hoping they were doing something fun in the background and making this a very cool app, but no, it's basically like Google Maps Lite. And I put in my home address from here at our office to see how it would work out that navigation. And it didn't even give me an answer to that. So I was like, I'm going to go to Google Maps Lite. And I was like, I'm going to go to Google Maps Lite. And then all of the actual commercial establishments, whereas on Google, you would get a pretty robust review system where you got the stars and all the reviews and the photos and all that. It just directs you to Yelp, which I don't think a lot of people use anymore. So it wasn't great. I don't know how many people of the new people that they see now are going to stick with the app, but they are getting their 15 seconds of fame. And I think the whole, obviously now we have to see what Apple is going to do. They haven't really put out a statement. They've been reached out to by a bunch of media outlets and they haven't said what they're going to do about this particular name change. But I think the funniest part about this whole mess is Lake Ontario wasn't even named after Ontario, Canada. It's not even Canadian. All of this was named by indigenous people before Canada was a thing, before the United States was a thing. 400 years ago, it comes from a Wendat word, meaning the lake is beautiful. The lake is big. So not exactly sticking it to Canada because it's the little, yeah, nailed the name, except it is the smallest of the Great Lakes. All right, moving on. Syracuse University may be known as the orange, but these days it's feeling blue. According to the Wall Street Journal, enrollment has fallen short this year, leading to a budget deficit, a sign that the financial pain hitting smaller colleges is spreading, to larger, far more established and iconic ones like CUSE. For years, higher education has been bracing for a devastating enrollment cliff when lower birth rates manifest in a declining number of college students, pitting universities against each other for the fewer students that remain. That enrollment cliff appears to be hitting now. The fall of 2025 marked the largest number of Americans born in a single year coming to campus. But by 2041, college enrollments are forecast to fall by 13 percent. This is a prime example of what happens when you're a chihuahua in a dog-eat-dog world. The location does it no favors. In a mid-tier city in upstate New York, where the winters are brutal and a trend we've been following for a while, many high school kids in the Northeast are venturing south where you can party in the sunshine all year round. As a somewhat selective but still expensive private school, Syracuse also doesn't offer a clear value proposition to students who want to get more bang for their buck when it comes to college. The total cost of attendance there is over, $98,000. Not trying to pick on Syracuse, big Jerry McNamara fan, but the key point is, it could be the canary in the coal mine for other schools. It is brutal. It's the messy middle of the college landscape because you're not quite prestigious enough to command whatever price that you want, and yet you are still a lot more expensive than public universities. Former Syracuse Director of International Student Services, Juan Tavares, had this brutal assessment. The problem with Syracuse is that the school thinks of itself as a place to live, but it's not. The problem with Syracuse is that the school thinks of itself as a place to live, as like an ivy, but it's not. And that's kind of the problem right there in and of itself. I feel so bad picking on Syracuse, but you are right. We are just using it as emblematic of what is happening in the broader college landscape. The other thing that's happening too is that students are applying to tons of colleges. They know that they're supposed to go to college. So the average student applies to three times as many colleges as 25 years ago. And what that does to the colleges that they are potentially accepted to is you, actually think that that student is going to arrive on campus if they are accepted. It used to be like, Oh, they got into Syracuse. They're coming to Syracuse. No, they probably got into 12 other places and we'll make their decision later in the process, which makes planning for these universities much more difficult because you're not sure how many people are actually going to show up, which is why Syracuse did something pretty crazy. This reeks of desperation. They don't do it anymore, but the wall street journal interviewed one student who had committed to Cal Poly, uh, and she also got into Syracuse, but Syracuse facing this enrollment deficit reached out to her with a, an offer of $20,000 a year after decision day saying here is literally $20,000. She didn't make up her mind. And then they send her another $20,000 on the spot saying, please come. So this was a very desperate move. Syracuse says it doesn't do this anymore, but it is in deep financial pain. One of the big reasons is there's been a huge decline in international enrollment. Thanks to Trump's visa crackdown, Syracuse international enrollment where debt was down by half for undergrads and graduate students. That is really bad financially because those students pay full price. And when you're looking at the broader scope of these middle tier Northeastern private colleges, Syracuse is falling behind, behind Northeastern BU and NYU. Those three enroll 40% or more of undergraduates who paid the full price at Syracuse. It's just 21%. And in the, this is manifesting in the academics too. Back in the spring, Syracuse announced that it would be cutting 20% of academic programs, closing or halting enrollment in them. 93 of the 460 academic programs at the school is going to be closed or paused. So if you wanted to major in classical civilization, classics, German, Italian, Middle Eastern studies, and modern Jewish studies or ceramics or jewelry and metalsmithing, all things you can make a difference. So Syracuse is going to be cutting 20% of their enrollment. So if you want to major in at Syracuse, those things are no longer available because of this budget pain. I'm so sorry for that whole segment, Syracuse alumni. I'm sure it is a wonderful place. And at least used to have a great basketball team. All right, we're going to take a quick break and come back with Toby's trends right after this. 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Somewhere in the last few years, having an AI note taker sit in on your meetings went from a social faux pas to the most normal thing in the world. Granola, Firefly, Circleback, Whisper, Calendly, these names pop up more frequently in Zoom meetings than some of my actual co-workers, a trend I want to talk about on today's edition of Toby's Trends. Our society is moving to a state of East Germany, Eric Bond, a VC out of San Francisco, told the Wall Street Journal. Bond describes how meetings with founders have started to feel like a post-game press conference with microphones inching towards him. People used to ask if the intrusion was okay, but now Bond simply assumes every conversation he has in the Bay Area is being recorded. Some, like startup founder Emmy Chang, have taken it a step further. She uses AI to record every work conversation, but also first dates. Afterwards, she feeds the transcript into Claw to see if she could be more engaging in what percent she spent talking versus her date. Of course, the modern panopticon of digital recording devices, we find brings with it a plethora of legal issues. California, for instance, is an all-party consent state, which means everyone involved in a private conversation must agree to the recording. But oftentimes, AI note-takers don't automatically inform guests that their words are being transcribed. Granola, one of the most popular note-taking softwares, doesn't announce itself by default, leaving the responsibility of disclosing to the person using it. Neil, I'm a little surprised it took us this long to talk about note-takers because I see them living in a world where they don't know what's going on. I don't know if they're literally everywhere these days. Yeah, and the fault lines are emerging. You have, on one hand, the granola maxers, like the woman that you talked about who takes it on your first dates, but also there's Michelle Lim, who's the CEO of a small AI startup, told the Wall Street Journal, in the office, we actually get really bummed when we realize we're having a conversation and we forgot to turn on granola. I wish there was a granola in every room. They have it enabled by default for all internal meetings, and even when employees are just at their desks. So, hey, how was your weekend, blah, blah, blah. Maybe we'll talk about work. That is being captured by granola at this company. On the other hand, you have the folks who are worried about privacy, about being watched and recorded at all times. There's a VC in New York named Jeremy Levine. He told the Wall Street Journal that he changed his name on Zoom from Jeremy Levine to, quote, Jeremy Levine, I do not consent to transcribing or recording. It is really fascinating when you think about what this might do to conversation and canon conversation going forward, because if you enter every conversation with the thought that maybe this will live on well past what I intended it to, does that change how you interact with people? And a lot of people note that over time, social norms and laws evolve right alongside technology. But right now, we're clearly at kind of a crux in this debate. Is it going to be that everyone is just recording you and you're just, that's simply acceptable in broader society? Or are laws going to start cracking down? Are people going to push back against it? We've talked about it with meta glasses and those recording devices. This is just another version of that. So fascinating too, as hardware gets more discreet, it's not just going to be glasses. Like sometimes there are little recording pins that happen in everyday conversation. It's not just on your Zoom calls. Maybe this is the end of candid conversation as we know it. Wow. That was hardcore. But let's talk, final note, let's talk about this in the workplace. I mean, it has to be so useful. If you're a salesperson, if you're on the marketing team, if you're someone who is back to back to back to back Zoom calls all day, which I know there are a lot of you listening to this, that is your schedule to have these AI note takers come along and help you not take notes at every single meeting and give you not the big unlock here is not necessarily taking notes at meetings, but giving you automatically action items to do after the meeting to follow up with people, what you decided on, what particular things you need to do. After the meeting, I can see how that's extremely, extremely helpful. And what is interesting about granola is, and this is a big one that's taken off in Silicon Valley. It's probably the most popular one. It doesn't take a voice recording. It actually just transcribes it on the spot and lets you take notes alongside it. So that's their big set apart from the rest of the pack. And the competition in this space is absolutely infinite, basically. I mean, I read off that list at the beginning, but I could have read off 10 more because yes, absolutely. Everyone, has it the funny experience. We're not a very meeting heavy job at this point in our lives. And yet sometimes I've joined meetings. It was just me and like three other AI note takers. I'm like, is any human going to be here? Is it just me and the note takers, which I'm sure is an experience. A lot of you guys have had as well. All right, let's sprint to the finish with some final headlines. Hot tech backlash. Summer is going out with a bang yesterday. The FTC and 22 States sued Amazon alleging it quotes secretly and systematically overcharged advertisers on its platform. For years, earning as much as $20 billion extra from hidden surcharges. The suit focuses on Amazon's price and auction systems for various sponsored placements, which it says overcharged 1.2 million advertising customers since 2019. In a defiant response, Amazon said it did nothing wrong and okay boomered the FTC saying the whole thing is a misunderstanding. They wrote the FTC claims advertisers were harmed because they didn't understand how our auction worked and therefore overpaid. Not only that, but the FTC claims advertisers were harmed because they didn't properly describe our pricing and auctions to advertisers. But this claim fundamentally misunderstands how advertisers behave. However, if it fails to convince a judge of this, Amazon could be on the hook for billions in civil penalties. I'll try to just briefly explain how the advertising process works. So if you are a company, a, you want an ad slot, you would bid $5 company B might come in and bid $2 under the original system that the FTC was said was in place company a would win because they bid more than $5. So if you're a company, a, you want an ad slot, you would bid more than $5. But they would actually end up paying closer to that competing bid of $2. But they're saying that Amazon has been inserting a higher reserve bid. So something closer to $3 in a 50 cent. And they say that is where you're violating rules. You did not disclose that to advertisers. It's unfair because you have all the data here. Again, Amazon is saying, no, that's not actually what is going on at all. But that is what the FTC is going out Amazon for because they're saying that's a deceptive practice right there. Up next, you know, when you're looking at some Instagram profile, and you're pretty sure it's AI, but not certain Instagram hopes to clear things up. Yesterday, the platform introduced new rules about AI generated profiles, namely that creators have to properly label them as AI generated or else their reach will be limited. Like other companies that have recently introduced AI labeling. Instagram says it's about ensuring users aren't confused about what they're looking at rather than banning AI altogether. They said as generative AI becomes a bigger part of how people create. We've heard that people don't like seeing a profile that seems human only to find out later that the person featured is AI generated. Toby, I'm afraid I'm about to find out all my favorite creators are real. That is exactly why Meta is doing this. We saw something extremely similar at Spotify as well. They're not banning AI content. That is the big thing because again, they actually want people using their software to post AI content. They just don't want you to pretend to be a human being that's actually AI. Same thing for Spotify. If you are an artist presenting yourself as human and yet you are artificially generated, that is where you'll be devalued in the rankings, devalued in their system. I feel like this is directed at parents and grandparents in particular because we've all probably received videos saying like, hey, look at this person or look at this video and they don't know it's AI. That is not a good thing for a platform that wants to foster social connections. That is antisocial in nature. So that is why I think you're seeing this crackdown on AI influence. Just to stick up for them for a little bit. I sometimes can't tell the difference. Do you think you have it on lock whether something is AI or not? I get a little confused sometimes and maybe I'm just doubting myself, but whatever. It doesn't even matter if I'm 90% sure or not. The fact that I'm 10% not sure is the reason why I think AI labeling is coming to Spotify, Instagram, and pretty much every platform. Yeah. That golf swing you sent me yesterday, Neil, not real at all. He hit it 900 yards. All right, let's move on. British Columbia has a new piece of real estate, but unfortunately it refuses to stay in one place. A giant forested Island is floating around somewhere in the Williston reservoir in Northern BC. The thing is about 105,000 square feet or nearly two NFL football fields and appeared in satellite imagery on July 21st. And yet somehow we've kind of lost it after popping up in July. It vanished from its original location by August 5th and is floating around somewhere on Williston's 80 square mile surface. The leading theory is that decades of driftwood and decomposing vegetation formed a giant mat along the shoreline with the tree roots, essentially knitting the whole thing together. Then an unusually full reservoir lifted it loose while its trees started acting like sails, allowing the entire Island to sort of cruise around. Neil, 105,000 square feet of waterfront property is just out there for the taking. I think it's already been claimed by Bigfoot, but this mysterious Island feels like it's straight out of the Odyssey. And it's pretty crazy to look at this thing because it wasn't there before. And now it's, it's this forested, like there's actual trees. It looks like it's been there forever, but apparently it hasn't been. However, this is, this is kind of common to see these floating islands appear out of nowhere in certain lakes. If you have a house on Lake Chippewa in Wisconsin, I know there are some of you out there, you know, about the peat bogs that often break off from the bottom and then go to the top. There's actually one every single year named the 40 acre bog that has to be pushed by boat to prevent it from drifting into a local bridge. Have you seen the time-lapse of that happening? It is so funny because it's literally this swarm of boats just attach itself to the island and then just zoom it away. And it, they are literally pushing a floating island around. So it feels like a fun community tradition to do that in Chippewa. That is all the time we have. Thanks so much for starting your morning with us and have a wonderful Tuesday. Hey, guess what? Our monthly trivia night is back next Tuesday, one week from today, September 8th in Manhattan for a great time. Hit that link in the show description to sign up for free with your friends. And we can't wait to see you there to share your thoughts on the episode or anything else. Send an email to morningbrewdailyatmorningbrew.com or DM us on Instagram at MB Daily Show. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our supervising producer. Raymond Liu is our senior producer. Our producer is Olivia Graham and our associate producer is Olivia Lake. Technical direction by Nina Miller. Hair and makeup disappears faster than a Canadian island. Devin Emery is our president and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great show today, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow. So what are you waiting for? Lock in for kickoff because everyone and everything is on PrizePix. What you want? Download the app today and use code Spotify to get $150 instantly in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. PrizePix, run your game.