The Fallen Apple

It’s a troubling time to be a long-term Apple customer.

The company seems to have lost the one thing it held onto so firmly during all of the ups and downs of its history: its ethos of values-driven, liberal creativity and intentional design. Apple’s past periods of turbulence relating to profitability, marketshare, compatibility, and governance seem quaint now; memories of a better time. The Apple of today has become homogenous with its industry, in terms of its cultural failings.

We have the ageing and increasingly disconnected CEO whose only north star is the dollar, kissing the ring and kow-towing to a tyrant, clearly having chosen himself as a corporate sacrifice to the appalling present government of the US. Tim Cook is giving up his reputation in order to preserve not the company or its people, but rather the stock price. Is that noble? I’m sure that it’s seen as such in the context of American capitalism, but Cook at this point is so utterly contaminated and compromised that I think it’ll be as much of a relief to the man himself as to Apple’s employees when he finally bows out after weathering the remainder of this darkest chapter in modern US history. If, indeed, that chapter does come to an end on schedule.

I sometimes think about the full-page, black-background Steve Jobs memorial on the Apple site, with the list of tributes you could send submissions for. Then I try to imagine the same thing for Cook, and I find that it only cheapens the original. The Tim Cook of the Trump era is the erasure of a man who previously could do little wrong, but I think that ultimately it has also laid bare a person whose goals and even motives are as far from Apple’s erstwhile values as it’s possible to be. While Jobs gets to be remembered with artful aphorisms and elaborate hagiographies, surely Cook’s epitaph must be something along the lines of “another record quarter”.

More perniciously, Apple is also haemorrhaging people and knowledge.

Executives, experts, engineers, and designers are all leaving for more lucrative positions at even less scrupulous companies. Apple is currently the GUI laughing stock of the industry, a position once firmly held by Microsoft for decades, and the walking-back of poor decisions in followup point-releases has become normal. Liquid Glass is the sort of folly that was once limited to portfolio pieces and fanciful blog posts, complete with clumsy attempts to replicate Apple’s style of marketing copy; pretty little animations that showed as much inexperience in UX as they did proficiency in Photoshop. Now, these missteps come from the company itself.

Interface designers must have the same maxim as doctors: primum non nocere, and Apple could previously always be relied upon to remember and demonstrate it. Those days are apparently gone for now, replaced with whim and indulgence; tech demos canonised by whatever shoehorning is necessary. Putting aside the ugliness, and both inaptness and ineptness of the implementation, the largest problem with Liquid Glass is that it is so damned ominous. It portends, or perhaps reveals, a rot; an erosion in the core where Apple has always been distinct and steadfast.

Hardware design is another issue. Apple has stopped designing its existing successful products. Year after year, the same iPhone and the same MacBook Pro and the same Watch and the same iPad, tweaked with technological improvements, but with only gimmicks in place of meaningful iterations. We all know the trajectory of the future. Whether it’s OLED screens or cellular support on laptops, or folding displays and under-screen biometrics on phones, Apple will eventually get around to it, and give it a proprietary name to imply their competitors haven’t already had it for years. At a premium price, of course.

I have to wonder if we’re not seeing the result of fear. Fear of messing up a stable, winning formula, especially when you no longer have the industry-leading specialists to help you confidently move in new directions. Perhaps it’s even an echo of the same fear that leads to going too far with compensatory software design changes, knowing you can always roll things back, having already conditioned your customers to expect such reversions.

Apple’s attempts to forge new markets have met with lukewarm success of late, with Vision Pro being a thoroughly impressive piece of technology whose price is astronomically outrageous, and which has almost no market in its current form. Describing a new product with huge investment behind it as “for early adopters and enthusiasts” is often a sign of sickness within a company. Apple doesn’t do early adopter tech; it’s supposed to make the bold decisions that the industry was already afraid to make, and tap into huge, unserved but very real demand. To make the sought-after thing a reality through vision and design discipline, stripping away vestigial and self-limiting assumptions. That used to be Apple’s hallmark, and unique strength. When did it fall away?

There are other concerns besides. Apple is by no means free of the LLM madness that has been strong-armed into all discourse, but it is seemingly free of the ability to effectively execute in that area. The company appears to be walking the worst possible line between a Nintendo-like generational caution, and a panicked casting-around to try and leapfrog its own false starts. Siri is widely known to be the most primitive of its ilk, despite presumably having unequalled privilege of access to the systems it runs on, and there’s the unsettling feeling that Apple is losing ground logarithmically while its competitors steadily improve.

Apple’s history of innovation may have paradoxically robbed it of a critical survival skill: knowing how to enter a market where they’re not the innovator.

The thing is, for now at least, none of this seems to matter, because the investors are happy. Apple is the gold standard for hyper-profitability and predatory monetisation. Huge margins, hardware which runs only their own operating systems, operating systems that run only approved software (with even the Mac creeping ever-closer to an iOS-style lockdown), and software which pays its tithe to Cupertino at every stage. Leverage upon leverage, incompatible with our quaint old-world perceptions of ownership, so long as the money flows.

With the iPhone, Apple got a very big taste of the kind of monopolistic control and coercive integration that Microsoft enjoyed, and they liked it.

Then there’s the enormous, orange-hued, authoritarian elephant in the room again, and Apple’s role is very visible here. From golden trinkets to the parroting of political language, Tim Cook’s ensnared position, and the offerings and grovelling that have so quickly become part of it, lend a queasy note to the company he leads. Apple removes apps at the request of repressive governments, busts unions, fights tooth and nail against consumer-protection laws, has to be strong-armed into allowing repairability, and so on. Just as the US flag has internationally began to take on the whiff of fascism, so too is the Apple logo now tinged with something else.

Whatever the nuance, Apple’s old and hard-won reputation just doesn’t ring true now. The company feels like a performance of itself, diverging farther and farther from the original, shuddering with escalating dysfunction, and held together by the sheer, grotesque extent of its indentured income.

I hope very much to be wrong, but I fear that Apple’s skyrocketing revenue masks a steep institutional decline that is already well underway, propelled by the fact that success itself, improperly managed, is a poison. The Apple I see today is eating itself; fat and comfortable, acclimatised to compromise of principle, having lost both its edge and its wary memory of what facilitated its ascendance.

Heading for bankruptcy once more, in every sense except the financial.