Another bite at the Apple
Apple seems to be having a moment—and not in a good way. The judge in the Epic v. Apple suit just excoriated top leadership for violating the ruling that required them to provide developers with a system to link users out to external payment processing. I won’t get into details here, but you should know that just about everyone outside Apple leadership viewed the order as completely reasonable. Yet Apple’s "compliance" was reverse-engineered to preserve their bottom line by imposing hefty fees on the external payments.
(Note: I can't claim credit for the title of this post; Judge Gonzales Rogers delivers the phrase beautifully in the last sentence of her ruling.)
Then there’s the Apple Intelligence fiasco. They announced it with much fanfare last June at WWDC, and it looked like a reasonable (if ambitious) approach to integrating LLM technology into their platforms. And if they had done it right, it really would have been a game-changer for their platform and the industry. But they bungled it by announcing vaporware. They’ve released basically nothing of consequence over the past year, despite having used the moniker aggressively to market the latest generation of devices and operating systems.
From a consumer perspective, they’re doing OK, but developer sentiment is grim, and their diehard insider community has been distressed about their direction for at least a decade. I count myself among them. I’ve been an Apple user since the beginning, and much of what I see in Apple now pains me. But while the company seems to have turned to evil, more profit-extracting machine now than human-centered enterprise, there’s still good in it. They still make (some) amazing products. And, on balance, Apple employees are talented, creative, kindhearted, believe deeply in their work, and want to do good things in the world.
So what should they do? Tim Cook could hang on as CEO for a good while longer. But should he? Where should they be focusing their efforts—with hardware products? With software? With image and PR? With developers?
The history
I mentioned in an earlier post that, having been born in 1973, I’m of the same vintage as the personal computer. One corollary to that fact is that I’m also roughly the same age as Apple and its line of computers. I’ve seen the company and its products evolve over the past five decades. I’ve used their products personally and professionally, I’ve created software for their platforms, and I worked there for six years.
Let’s take a quick tour of the defining eras of Apple as I see them.
Origins
From the outset, Steve Jobs envisioned the computer as a "bicycle for the mind." He wanted Apple to operate at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. And he had a vision for the educational potential of technology. The era of the Apple I, II, IIe, IIgs, and family had a strong focus on education. Many schools had one in their classroom—mine included. It was also the first era of software for individuals, and people created some really beautiful and influential programs for Apple’s computers—like Print Shop, VisiCalc, The Oregon Trail, and Lode Runner.
Macintosh
1984 really was a watershed moment in personal technology, rivaled only by the introduction of the iPhone 23 years later. I first used the 128K Mac at the home of a middle school buddy, and we stayed up until the wee hours creating art in MacPaint. It felt homey—inviting, familiar, comfortable. There’s a tiny, crystalline matrix of mental energy preserved in my brain from that night. It’s the core of my feelings about the company.
Both developers and customers came to the Mac to create amazing things. The entire desktop publishing industry grew from that creative energy, along with UI paradigms and application standard-bearers that survive to this day.
They could engineer. They could design. They could write! Inside Macintosh was as much a work of art as a reference guide.
NeXT
In retrospect, Steve never really left Apple in 1985—he just started an independent technology division that eventually merged back into the company to take over as the dominant technology stack. So I’m just counting NeXT as the … next … era. It incubated programming languages and application frameworks that remain at the core of Apple products 35 years later.
Meanwhile, Apple—under Sculley, but especially Spindler and Amelio—reached its nadir. They were unfocused. Their software wasn’t progressing in the right ways, their hardware largely stagnated, and they ceded more and more of the market to Windows. They burned cash and talent on risky projects. They were floating, but taking on water rapidly.
One bright spot in that era, however, was the PowerBook, which established the laptop form factor that grew to dominate the industry and never stopped improving.
(Re)invention
Steve returned in 1997 and rebuilt the company’s reputation from the ground up, starting with the iMac. Apple got back to its roots in hardware innovation, and it seized the Internet moment before it passed them by. They also proved they could create powerful partnerships across the industry: Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer were essential to the iMac’s market success.
Then came Mac OS X. They built it on an open-source, industry-standard core. They created a modern, powerful, flexible OS on top, with a UI to match. Then they gave developers powerful tools to make beautiful things—a rich offering of Mac-assed Mac apps.
Then the iPod. The genesis of multiple entire industries. A powerful harnessing of the creative work of thousands, in the pockets of millions. A cultural touchstone and consumer juggernaut.
All the while, they were iterating and improving, releasing better and better hardware and software: the iMac line, iBooks, PowerBooks. More and better iPods. Safari. Pages. Keynote. iMovie. iTunes.
iPhone
Apple reached its zenith in 2008. Not when they announced the iPhone in early 2007 or released it later that year—that was just the appetizer. But when they created the App Store and unleashed thousands of talented, creative developers onto a brand-new, exciting platform that was obviously the future of personal computing, they set in motion the forces that created the Apple we know today. The Apple with enormous brand equity, financial resources dwarfing entire countries, and cutting-edge technology still years ahead of competitors.
iOS built on the best of their technology stack and gave developers a powerful way to create entirely new classes of software. iOS, with Objective-C (and then Swift) and UIKit (then SwiftUI), was—and continues to be—an amazing canvas for creativity.
Alongside the iPhone, with regular improvements from camera to screen to battery to audio, the iPad and Apple Watch are two excellent examples of continued hardware innovation. Down at the silicon level, there’s a steady stream of ARM CPUs: first the A series for iPhones, then the S series for the Apple Watch, the M series for Mac, and the R series for Vision Pro. The M series, in particular, was a masterstroke for the Mac—the switch from Intel to custom silicon vaulted it into the lead in personal computing, and their current line of laptops is second to none technologically.
The present trouble
But in other ways, Apple has made some serious missteps in the smartphone era. They ceded the education market to Google and ChromeOS, despite having a fantastic platform in iPad. Their software quality has declined, both in design and stability. They’re verging on the level of unfocus from the 1990s, with a TV studio that does nothing for the core products and a car project that burned billions.
Steve built the company with a streak of his own arrogance at its core. At times, it’s been crucial to Apple’s success. Lately, their arrogance has manifested in destructive ways. The butterfly keyboard debacle is emblematic; even long after they knew the issues, they refused to make the necessary hardware changes. (Credit goes to the Mac team for eventually rectifying things, though much later than they should have.) The usability of their software has declined because UI designers have too often prioritized visual aesthetics over the Jobsian tenet that “design is how it works.”
Apple has also squandered developer goodwill. They’ve grown fat and addicted to rent-seeking on the App Store, off the backs of developers who often continue to put iOS at the top of their priorities when launching new apps. Developers don’t feel especially heard or supported—from reporting bugs to app review, documentation, or SDK quality. SwiftUI, while amazing in many ways, has failed to live up to its promise in others. It remains frustratingly full of sharp edges, inscrutable APIs, pernicious bugs, and it’s slow to compile and finicky for tuning performant UI.
Finally, they appear to be in danger of missing the boat on AI in the same way BlackBerry missed smartphones. Despite having an entire AIML organization, their success is mixed. Yes, they’ve done amazing things with narrow AI—in imaging, AR, and Photos—but Siri has stagnated. And most importantly, they’ve fumbled LLM adoption. Not because they’re late per se (Apple often arrives later with better solutions), but because the botched announcement came at least a year too early, likely out of fear of being perceived as late. And I have just enough inside knowledge from my time at Apple to know that they were, in fact, late to recognize the importance of LLMs and begin building internal expertise and planning capacity. I witnessed—from a distance, and through a narrow aperture—a mad scramble in late 2023 and early 2024 to make something—anything—of consequence that could establish their position in the AI race.
Taken together, these trends threaten Apple’s dominance. Worse still, they threaten the value of their products. And, worst of all, they threaten the core values of the company.
The future hope
Apple has many strengths. Their roots in education and the humanities set them apart from most other large tech companies, and those core values aren’t gone. They nailed the design of their signature products; for me, the original Macintosh and the iPhone are the quintessential expressions of elegance, simplicity, and a focus on their customers as whole people, not simply users. Hardware and software innovation have been a constant throughout their history. The product sense evident in the late ’90s and the following decade proves they can identify opportunities and build things that perfectly fit the moment.
Less well known are the cultural attributes Apple has carried through all its eras. Early in my time there, I took a course called What Makes Apple, Apple. It’s one of the signature courses of Apple University, whose mission is to preserve and evangelize Apple’s core values and way of working.
Working in a matrixed company, Apple employees often find themselves in a position described as “accountability without control.” Products and projects have many owners and even more stakeholders, and direction may not always come strictly from the top. If you’re accountable for your work but decision-making power is distributed, your success depends on your ability to build relationships and influence people. The best people at Apple have high emotional intelligence and view their colleagues with empathy and openness.
The way forward
When I sat down to write, I intended to get to this point much more quickly. But I’m glad I took the time to reflect and write everything down. I’ve never reflected on Apple this deeply, and as I wrote, a few things became clear.
A new CEO
Tim Cook has been incredibly successful. He built a near-miraculous operation to deliver millions of devices with complex software on a regular schedule, using his sense for operations and management. He clearly has the capacity for big visions: the Apple Watch is arguably his signature success. And he holds some values dear; for example, he has been consistent in his stance on privacy and health.
But his moment has passed. When you’re explicitly behind a policy to extract value from a market that far exceeds what you put into it—and have taken part in machinations to misrepresent that policy—you’ve strayed too far from Apple’s core values. And when you fail to sense the prevailing winds of technology and trim your sails accordingly, you’ve left your company adrift.
Apple needs a new CEO whose product and design sense rivals that of Steve Jobs. They need someone who can meet the current moment—not simply follow the AI trend, but lead and shape it toward Apple’s vision of moral, humanistic technology. They need someone rooted in Apple’s core values, who will take proud, public actions to express them. Someone who can issue today’s versions of Thoughts on Flash and A Message to Our Customers. (Tim was behind the latter, but I’m not sure he’s still that person.) Someone who does not appear behind Trump at his inauguration or donate $1 million to it.
Design roots
Apple should reevaluate its approach to design. For example, the iPad has never lived up to its promise—largely because it’s a very hard design challenge to create a product that is neither a current-generation smartphone nor a last-generation personal computer. But it’s not insoluble. And it’s not too late, if they build a clear vision for how it works.
On macOS, they should stop designing for visual or feature consistency with other platforms. Its paradigms were established, and have persisted over decades, for good reason. That doesn’t mean there’s no room for innovation, but it must happen within the defining constraints of the platform: information density, flexibility, adaptability, and extensibility.
Those are just two examples—many smarter people than I have written extensively on the subject.
Developer relations
Treat developers as the treasured partners they are. Without their enthusiastic adoption of Apple technologies, Apple’s products would not be as popular or capable. Invest money in more timely support for developer feedback. Expand the already-fantastic Developer Technical Support and Developer Evangelism teams to give developers better access to experts. Redouble engineering efforts to polish and support existing technologies alongside introducing new ones. Open up a few privileged APIs that would make developers’ lives easier.
And overhaul the business relationship. Reduce fees and commissions, clamp down on App Store scams, and eliminate any onerous restrictions that serve no one but Apple’s bottom line.
Focus
Stamp out organizational dysfunction. Recent reporting from internal sources has revealed serious issues. Most salient are the dueling AI efforts—both within the AIML organization and between them and Craig’s software engineering org. But there are plenty of other examples.
Cutting the car project was a good decision. Apple should make more such choices to return to its roots as a company that builds excellent things that enrich people’s lives. I love Ted Lasso and Severance, but do they really need a TV studio and streaming service?
AI
As an experienced technologist but AI layperson, I can’t pretend to offer much helpful advice here. Even the experts admit the future is unpredictable. But AI has capabilities today that are likely to endure and improve. In some domains, it’s already providing real value despite its limitations.
To me, code generation is the most obvious place to start. It should be a top priority to give developers first-class tools that integrate LLMs to assist in writing, testing, and debugging code for Apple’s languages, frameworks, and platforms. If Apple needs to spend billions to build and train its own foundation model to do that, then that’s what they should do.
There are already tons of great chatbots on the market. Apple is right to pursue integration with the likes of OpenAI. But they should go further: make the experience seamless, and give developers built-in capabilities to access those models from within their own apps on users’ behalf.
And to be honest, I actually like the vision of Apple Intelligence. It aligns with core values like privacy and security, and it’s designed to be a fundamentally different class of assistant than Siri or a chatbot. But, hey: current LLM technology, with its tendency to hallucinate and its susceptibility to malicious attack, will not cut it. It’s a moonshot-level effort to build a system that meets Apple’s standards of reliability. It can’t be done with any of the technologies I know today. But Apple has the resources to build it. (And if they follow my advice on developers, they’ll do so in a way that empowers developers to create even more amazing apps, rather than simply producing business logic for AI agents.)
The end
If you’ve read this far, thank you!
Despite their current predicaments, Apple is far from the end of the road. At worst, they could end up like Microsoft or IBM—having lost the dominance they once had, but still an industry leader. But they’ve shown themselves capable of reinvention, and they’re unique among technology companies in their combination of skills and values.
I’m hoping we’ll look back at this moment the way we remember the late ’90s before Steve’s return. Apple has fallen from its heights, but they have the seeds they need to grow back.