On April 20, Tim Cook announced he is stepping down as Apple CEO, effective September 1, 2026. John Ternus — currently SVP of Hardware Engineering — takes the top role. Cook transitions to executive chairman and stays engaged on policy work.
Cook took the helm in 2011 after Steve Jobs and grew Apple from a $350B company to nearly a $4 trillion giant. For an agency that lives at the intersection of design and technology, this closes a defining chapter. Ternus built the M-series chips and led the Vision Pro hardware program — his Apple is likely to be a more engineering-forward one.
OpenAI shipped Images 2.0 on April 21 — 4x faster than the previous model, with a "thinking" mode reserved for paid users. The big unlock: it can now render dense text, small typography, and complex UI elements accurately. DALL-E 2 and 3 are being deprecated May 12. Worth testing for mockup and asset work.
Xenia's design team ran a hands-on with Google Stitch. The verdict: fast, and visually a step above Lovable and Cursor. Click a settings icon, get a full screen back. Good for getting unstuck early in a project.
"Some variations are solid, others don't really make sense — we got a scroll bar in the middle of a screen at one point. Design system import works, but colors and styles aren't exact."
— Xenia, Born West design teamXenia connected Claude Code to Figma using the open-source Figma Console MCP. Claude crawls frames and components directly, pulls structure and layout logic, then generates fully structured spec pages — ready to share in minutes. She also built a custom Claude skill that restyles docs to match Born West brand guidelines. Tested on two projects, already saving time.
Maury listened to an interview with Anthropic's Felix Rieseberg and flagged the Cowork roadmap as "one month — at most." For an agency already running on Claude Code, that's a live timeline to pay attention to.
Achal drew a line worth keeping: vibe coding is for prototypes. Agentic Engineering — reviewed, production-ready code built with AI — is the actual product. A useful frame for how Born West positions its build work.
Adobe launched a free AI study tool on April 7 that turns PDFs, notes, and web links into flashcards, quizzes, mind maps, and podcasts. Direct shot at Google NotebookLM from the creative suite giant. Shaped by feedback from 500 students at Harvard and Berkeley.
Achal flagged gh-stack as worth watching — especially for chunking out large features when working with AI models. Stacked PRs let you break a big build into reviewable slices without losing the thread.
Amazon quietly launched a DevOps Agent. Another agentic coding entrant into a fast-crowding field — worth watching how it integrates with existing AWS tooling.
Philadelphia courts banned all smart AI eyeglasses from courtrooms starting Monday March 30. Achal's take: "And so it begins." The wearables-in-sensitive-spaces conversation is just getting started.