Apple's decision to retain Tim Cook as global ambassador while installing John Ternus as CEO is not a transition — it is a partition. The company has concluded, without saying so, that the geopolitical function and the operational function cannot be unified in a single executive's attention. Cook built the China manufacturing relationship and the Trump relationship simultaneously; Ternus has no equivalent standing in either. The partition reveals that Apple's new CEO faces a defining challenge in AI strategy while Cook holds the relationships that determine whether the company can…