TL;DR: Apple’s creative spark is gone. AirPods were the last genuinely exciting product. Since then, it’s been dull updates, buggy software, and flops like the Vision Pro. The rumored foldable iPhone? Late, expensive, and uninspired. Without a visionary like Steve Jobs, Apple feels adrift, still profitable, but no longer pushing the envelope. The Steve Jobs vacuum people talked to death around his passing has finally reared its head…
AirPods were the last notable “new” product from Apple. Since then, well, it’s been pretty mundane. The Vision Pro was a flop, the kind of product that only happens when sycophantic yes-men rule the roost. VR’s niche, AR more so, so why spunk all that cash on something so prohibitively expensive less than 0.1% of the population could afford it?
One argument would be that Apple’s run out of ideas; or, more specifically, it lacks an ideas-man (or women) at its helm.
Steve Jobs wasn’t a good engineer nor was he a practical dude.
But he had ideas and he knew how to instruct and motivate people to execute them for him.
This is where the iPod and iPhone came from; Jobs spotted the trend, thought-up the product, and financed and oversaw their birth.
iPod and iPhone made Apple, put it on the map, extricating it from a death spiral towards being just another tech company.
But those days are now long behind it, and this is now starting to become a problem.
AirPods: The Last Time Apple Captured Lightning In A Bottle
AirPods came out a long time ago in tech years. They were interesting products that, initially, I really didn’t like.
They were uncomfortable to wear and the sound was average at best. AirPods Pro fixed this with aplomb, cementing the range as the go-to headphones for gazillions of people in record time.
But since then, not much of note has happened.
Apple spunked a load of cash and resources on its Vision Pro, a product so niche and prohibitively expensive even an alien from another dimension with no concept of earth-based economic theory could have predicted it’d be a wash.
And then there’s Apple’s will-it-won’t-it approach to AI, some truly awful iOS releases that were chock-full of bugs and redesigns that made perfectly good apps totally awful (Photos app).
Apple’s Next Big Thing?
For a company that built hype on doing things that awed people (well, maybe surprised is a better word), Apple’s been very quiet of late.
I cannot think of a time, during the past decade and a half, when things have been so dull inside Apple HQ.
Yes, it’s still printing money like nobody’s business. But most of this is predicated on its legacy business models: iPhone and iOS.
Apple Watch and AirPods do decent numbers. Ditto its services. None of these things are new businesses, most are over 10 years old now – or getting on for it.
So what’s the next big thing for Apple? A foldable iPhone.
That’s right: an iPhone that folds. Excuse me, but I find it incredibly hard to get excited about a folding iPhone when we’ve had foldable Android phones since 2019. And guess what? They’re still not very popular.
If A Folding iPhone is Meant To Be Exciting, Apple’s Truly Not The Company It Once Was…
Six years ago, I’d have argued that Apple’s foldable phone would ignite interest in the format, doing what Samsung has largely failed to do these past six years.
But I don’t think this is the case anymore; it almost feels like that magnetism Apple once had, the ineffable pull its products exerted on consumers, has now disappeared back into the ether.
Apple sales have fallen in almost every market across the globe, according to the latest results from the tech giant.
The company said that demand for its smartphones dropped by more than 10% in the first three months of this year, while overall sales fell in every geographic region except for Europe.
Apple said that overall, revenues across the company declined by 4% to $90.8bn (£72.5bn), which was the biggest drop for more than a year.
The folding iPhone will be expensive, very expensive. It isn’t new, not in the wider market, and I don’t think Apple’s brand has the pull it once has.
The company feels stuck, as if it is no longer sure what the future holds, and that’s an odd place to imagine it in when, just a decade ago, it was setting the agenda for the entire industry.
Nowadays, it feels like just another corporate entity going through the motions, content with updating and tweaking its legacy products.
Whatever magic Apple once had appears to have withered away to a whimper. No one’s going to queue up for a foldable iPhone. No one cared about Vision Pro.
So how long before people stop caring about Apple? The Steve Jobs vacuum, the thing people talked about endlessly after his passing, didn’t appear right away. But it was always there, growing in the background. It just took about a decade to really develop into something serious.
