Can Apple innovate if iPhone remains the biggest slice of its revenues?
Every year, complaints come from the usual suspects demanding to know when Apple will innovate, and specifically when it will launch a new, even more popular form factor than iPhone. Does "innovation" require iPhone to fail as a product?
Can Apple innovate?
Based on criticism, it might seem that for Apple to "innovate," it must get rid of smartphones and deliver some new, arbitrarily different product to take the place of iPhone. But Apple isn't competing against iPhone.
Apple is competing against the status quo that exists outside of Apple.
Apple's successful innovation on display
To innovate literally means "make changes in something established, especially in introducing new methods, ideas, or products." You'd have to be really intellectually lazy to think Apple isn't doing that.
In fact, reviewing the history of consumer technology, Apple has introduced the most profound changes in new methods for personal computing-- with bold and often radically challenging new ideas -- and its products have been some of the most exciting examples of fresh new takes that rival tired-out efforts by the established tech industry players surrounding it.
Mac ate up the Apple II, although not immediately
The results of its innovation are apparent in the market, where Apple creates and dominates demand for high-end notebooks, phones, tablets, watches, and-- with AirPlay 2, HomeKit, HealthKit, and CarPlay -- even broadly across premium home entertainment, home and health-related devices, and in the automotive space as a user interface.
The initial spark of Apple's innovation (1970-1990)
At its start in the 1970s, Apple was a conventional computer maker, differing mostly in the sense of selling more expensive gear that was often better built (outside of the ill-fated Apple III that was rushed to market).
But Apple's biggest differentiator was the Mac, and its biggest innovation was applying research at PARC (the Palo Alto Research Center created by copy-machine maker Xerox) to revolutionize personal computing.
Xerox was afraid of introducing new graphical computing systems that might threaten its lucrative cash cow copiers, which required lots of billable time and effort to support and maintain. An easy-to-use computer system that dealt with virtual documents rather than physical papers would be the death of copy machine empires. In fact, it certainly was.
Today, emails even commonly request that you don't waste resources by printing them out on paper. Copiers still exist, but aren't the center of office life; computers are. Xerox is barely around as a brand anymore.
Apple entered into a partnership with Xerox to take a look at the new technology the copier firm didn't quite know what to do with; after a million-dollar investment from Xerox, Apple undertook the effort to adapt Xerox's windows of an on-screen, graphical user interface, driven by a mouse, as Lisa and then Macintosh.
Lisa was a first attempt to make use of existing technology to deliver a relatively high-resolution, dot-matrix display with enough storage and memory to work with virtual documents in the computing space. By the time it was released in 1983, its technology was still too expensive to catch on outside of a few shared machines inside major companies.
What was catching on was IBM's new DOS PC of the same era, which was cheap enough to put under everyone's desk, and even for many people to have at home.
Innovating unlike the industry
Like Xerox, IBM was also afraid of innovating too far with the PC and challenging its own bread and butter: bigger office minicomputers that again required large support staffs to set up and keep running. Unlike both of them, Apple was keen to ditch its entire existing lineup of Apple II's and deliver an entirely new generation of personal computing.
That explains why Apple went out and found a much more powerful processor in Motorola's 32-bit architecture 68000, while IBM purposely sourced a cheaper and more limited Intel 8088 -- certainly not the best processor for the job, even from Intel. Just like Xerox, IBM was afraid to really innovate and end up with a smaller business empire.
As the Lisa's high price struggled to woo enough buyers, Apple was actually fostering internal, innovative competition with another project: a less expansive but still relatively powerful Macintosh, aimed at taking the place of the simpler but ubiquitous PC as well as the Apple II line.
Like its partner IBM, Microsoft was also worried about something that might dethrone the lucrative empire tax it had managed to establish on PCs by licensing its proprietary MS-DOS software to IBM. While rushed to market "first" to beat Apple's release of the internal development of Macintosh (as Microsoft was developing software for it), nobody seriously used Windows 1 or 2 because they were not any better than MS-DOS.
Unlike Lisa and Mac, Microsoft's first stab at Windows couldn't even support overlapping windows.
Years after it embarked on its own initial efforts to copy the Macintosh, Microsoft didn't widely deploy Windows until Apple's Macintosh graphical UI had established a clear advantage over text-based computing. Windows wasn't bundled on new PCs until its third version in 1990.
Windows 1.0, released November 1985 (left) and Windows 2.0, released December 1987 (right)
A second spark of Apple's innovation (1990-2000)
Apple of the 1990s is perhaps most famous for its unsuccessful effort to launch the Newton MessagePad, an ambitious effort to deliver "pen computing" on a small tablet device. Like Lisa, this effort turned out to be "too new" in both its hardware and software and also too expensive to justify significant sales.
Apple also tried to license the Mac the way critics had long demanded, which also ended up disastrously.
Being entirely new didn't make Newton a successful innovation; neither did Mac licensing
As with the Mac, Apple went shopping for a powerful new CPU that could drive Newton and -- after failing to find anything good enough -- ended up working with desktop chip maker ARM to deliver a new mobile chip. That new chip architecture grew to great success and is now the world's most successful globally, driving virtually everything outside of legacy WinTel PCs.
While Apple teetered on failure in the late '90s, Steve Jobs was able to sell Apple's joint stake in ARM for over a billion dollars and rescue his company in the way that wags like to pretend Microsoft's $150 million investment somehow did.
But Apple's big success of the '90s wasn't some entirely new form factor that boldly invented some vastly different product category. Nor was it the ill-fated Mac licensing that pundits lauded as precisely what would save Apple because Microsoft had already demonstrated it worked.
The very same kind of critics who castigate Apple's every move today were also doing it back then when they imagined that innovation was just doing what everyone else was doing-- the opposite of innovation! They didn't get it then and they still don't get it.
Innovation takes the Mac mobile
Apple's big success of the '90s was actually an incremental advancement of the Macintosh. It was the PowerBook.
Leading up to the PowerBook's 1991 introduction, Apple decided its "luggable" Mac Portable wasn't enough to bring the Macintosh into the rapidly expanding market for notebooks. The company's internal Apple Industrial Design Group initially began working with Sony to miniaturize the components and design of the Mac to fit in a notebook.
PowerBook innovation saved Apple and became its top seller
But Apple also didn't just make a conventional PC notebook running Mac software. PC laptops of the day were oriented around text-based DOS software and applications. Because Apple's PowerBook would run the Mac's pointer-oriented, graphical UI, Apple relocated the trackball -- effectively an upside-down mouse -- front and center, leaving palm rests on the front edge and pushing the keyboard back towards the screen.
Like the Mac's UI itself, the result was controversial at first, but after catching on, it eventually became the layout with which virtually all notebooks were designed, even today, over 30 years later. If you get it right the first time, you don't have to blindly make new, arbitrary changes just to change things around.
Innovation should be driven by improvement, not pure novelty.
Apple had dutifully made regular changes to the Mac and PowerBook to use new technologies, from better screens to better mice, even replacing them with the superior trackpad. Apple also went shopping for chips again and this time settled on a new 64-bit architecture jointly created by Apple, IBM, and Motorola: PowerPC, used in new Macs starting in 1994.
Yet at Steve Jobs' return with the 1996 acquisition of his NeXT Computer, the Old Apple wasn't innovating on all cylinders, and its market results reflected that. Consumers were flocking to the Windows PCs and notebooks, which weren't really innovating as different or better but were cheaper. Newton was floundering as the cheaper, simpler Palm Pilot gained traction.
A third spark of Apple's innovation (2000-2010)
Jobs surveyed the market to identify where it could innovate into a new space. There were many potential options, some of which the Old Apple had already tried to muscle into. That included laser and inkjet printers, CD-ROM players, and digital cameras -- which Apple brought to market with Kodak but couldn't dramatically usher into the mainstream because like Newton, they were too new to be practical.
Apple had been unsuccessfully trying in so many areas that Jobs went on a slashing spree to rid it of all this deadwood. He even pared back the Mac and PowerBook lines into a much tighter array of products. Sometimes the most innovative thing you can do is say no and focus on what you're good at.
iPod was a Mac companion
But Jobs also delivered a new hit with the iPod. MP3 players, unlike cameras and disc players, were not dominated by established players that would be hard to unseat.
They were largely experimental, somewhat impractical, and ripe for the same kind of innovation Apple had excelled at before with the Mac: a great dot-matrix UI that could display anything.
Jobs' Apple again went shopping for powerful mobile chips and found the best one was the ARM chip it had started work on a decade prior. As with Sony and the PowerBook, Apple largely licensed the handheld internals and focused on adding what it was good at: a dot-matrix display and very usable controls.
A keyboard wouldn't fit and wasn't necessary. Instead, Apple adapted the trackpad into a circular selector and button that could be used to spin through an efficient set of menus to play hundreds of songs, instantly from a hard drive.
Many reviewers famously hated it and its price. The market responded by rapidly making Apple a profitable company and setting it up to launch its next major spark of the decade with the iPhone.
Apple's successive generations of iPod became more and more powerful until they were offering to handle your calendar, contacts, notes, and even play videos and simple games. The industry and its pundits broadly imagined -- or perhaps dreamed -- that MP3-playing smartphones would arrive and derail Apple's iPod by doubling as an MP3 player.
There was much salivating and a loud smacking of lips that Apple's iPod success was destined to dry up and blow away.
Apple again does the opposite of the industry
Instead, Apple went to work to innovate beyond the iPod. Rather than just adding a phone, Apple instead borrowed the computing platform of the Macintosh to deliver a mobile computing device that could also act as a phone and an MP3 player.
Jobs didn't call it a mobile Mac. Instead, he focused on its three strongest features at the iPhone's introduction.
"Today we're introducing three revolutionary products of this class. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.So, three things: a widescreen iPod with touch controls; a revolutionary mobile phone; and a breakthrough Internet communications device. An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator. An iPod, a phone... are you getting it? These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone."
Jobs introduced iPhone as three features
Apple's 'three-in-one solution' wasn't afraid to cannibalize the iPod; it aimed to! In fact, while Apple continued to offer iPods for some time in the wearable space, it also delivered a version of iPhone without the phone, called iPod touch. It boldly migrated the entire iPod into the very platform that would replace its existing MP3 system.
While the new iOS platform of iPhone was gobbling up the conventional iPod, Apple was also preparing to radically reinvent the Macintosh. It didn't need to replace the Mac, but it did need to equip it for the future.
Outside of the Mac, the PC industry only imagined cheaper products. PCs and notebooks were all getting cheaper, flimsier, and less powerful as the bloat of new iterations of Windows taxed them to death. The answer to many was Netbooks, a dirt-cheap soft-of-notebook scaled down with a bargain-basement price. Perhaps it wouldn't even run Windows!
Microsoft was clearly afraid of a future PC form factor that failed to pay a Windows tax, so just as it had done with its pen-computing concepts, its Palm Pilot concepts, its SPOT watch concepts, and its smartphone concepts, it also delivered "ultra-portable" concepts wedded to a slimmer variant of software branded as "Windows."
Yet outside of the conventional PC market, Microsoft Windows wasn't making serious headway in slates, PDAs, watches, tablets, or netbooks, and its market results reflected that.
When PCs went cheap, Apple went premium
Rather than making a Mac netbook, as so many wanted, Apple looked at the MacBook (the new name PowerBook got when Apple went shopping for a better alternative to PowerPC chips and settled on Intel's x86 for Macs and MacBooks) and decided to fundamentally revolutionize and upgrade the physical, core architecture of its platform by ushering in the future.
The 2008 MacBook Air unveiled a new architecture that could make use of new "methods, ideas, and products." That included Apple's new Unibody construction for building a slim new case with unparalleled strength and rigidity.
It also included the innovation of moving the Mac to solid-state drives. In the last article, I erred in stating that MacBook Air only used SSD. As a commenter correctly noted, it was initially offered with a spinning disk as a cheaper option.
MacBook Air was light, thin, and expensive.
Yet the MacBook Air did indeed introduce SSD before it was broadly affordable, demonstrating the clear advantage of an emerging new technology that could instantly launch apps and open documents, and could last longer and handle aging more gracefully than a failing mechanical hard disk. Like many other innovations, SSD was initially prohibitively expensive for consumers before it became commonplace; that occurred because Apple saw the potential past the price.
The MacBook Air also debuted new controversy by encasing the memory, drive, and battery and gluing them inside in a way that wasn't user-serviceable. Apple's goal was to deliver lighter and thinner devices that didn't require space for latching mechanisms and didn't invite users to pull out drives and memory and replace them with something cheap that might fail, as was a common problem.
Selling MacBooks as sealed products delivered innovation that made products better, more reliable, and simpler, at the cost of riling up critics who didn't want anything to ever change, and confused their cheap neanderthalism with innovation.
While PC and even Linux netbooks appeared to be successful for a hot minute -- or perhaps 15 minutes -- they aren't really around today. What is around today are copies of the MacBook Air, which virtually every PC notebook looks exactly like. Most of these also now use SSDs and Unibody-like construction.
A fourth spark of Apple's innovation (2010-2020)
Jobs' last major impact at Apple was iPad, the 2010 device that quickly crushed netbooks and rendered them pointless. If you're going to accept limitations for being cheap, why not get a nice device that isn't just flimsy e-waste? The market agreed.
While critics eventually recognized iPad to be a worthy new "innovation" from Apple, at its debut there was controversy inside and outside the Apple flock, where many expected the tablet to be a pen-based Mac. Instead, it was a "big iPod touch," or you might say, an iPhone without the cellular phone, in a larger size. After its initial introduction, Jobs reported feeling annoyed and depressed at the disparaging hostility critics flung at it.
Critics hated on iPad as much as any other innovation from Apple
Apple actually created its iPad prototype first, in an effort to deliver the concept of a highly mobile, one-piece, wirelessly connected display that delegated some of its computing utility to the cloud. Yet selling such a device would be Newton-style difficult because nobody really knew they needed it yet.
So Apple's real innovation here was to add a cellular phone to its iPad prototype and shrink it down to be usable as a mobile phone. Many could see some benefit to having a smartphone, if only they were easier to use. Cellular providers were also able to subsidize the price of an amazing, data-hungry handset more than the price of a potentially-successful tablet.
So when critics only count Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and maybe Apple Watch as The Innovations and ignore Apple's more blockbuster shifts of the industry-- things like UI, construction, silicon, OS, controllers, and components-- it gives away that they don't know what they're talking about. Throughout the 2010s in particular, they certainly didn't.
Apple makes smart watches popular
And speaking of Apple Watch, which debuted under Cook in 2015, it too was like iPhone in the sense that it replaced an existing iPod. Apple actually pulled its wrist-wearable 6G iPod nano off the market and revamped it into being an iOS-based, purpose-designed, fashionable new product category with an entirely new input system based on the Digital Crown, again with a dot-matrix display.
Apple Watch became the 6G iPod nano of the future
And yet, despite all of its newness, critics like to disparage Apple Watch as not really a big deal because it didn't replace iPhone as a communicator. Apple would have to be monumentally stupid to hope to displace iPhone, nearly as foolish as the critics who outright demanded it.
Recall that also in 2015, the Wall Street Journal insisted that Apple also get rid of the entire Macintosh line and focus on iOS-based devices. Wow, it is spectacularly and profoundly inept to think Apple should dump entire massive categories of its business for no good reason, just to look 'innovative' to people who can't grasp the concept.
Apple did discontinue iPods, but only after delivering the more capable iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch lines, all of which can also play MP3s and videos, making them better iPods than iPod. But Apple had no need to discontinue the Mac after launching iOS because the macOS does things iOS doesn't attempt in order to be ultra-mobile.
Apple has also launched other products and initiatives that take iOS in new directions. HomePod in 2017 basically created an iPod for your house using iOS, and replacing a controller with your voice; it only has one simple button and no real dot matrix display for perusing menus or any sort of complex, graphical UI.
While it's hard to compare HomePod to Apple's big hits, the problem isn't the product; it's that there isn't a similar potential demand for home iPods or even a home iPad. Nobody else who tried to sell voice first home devices has delivered any sort of commercial hit, unless you count Amazon and Google giving away devices as commercial activity.
Stationary Voice First tablets for the home are even less popular, indicating--just like curved smartphones and 3D TVs-- that there isn't always a huge demand for a product category when you invent something "new," just because.
Time imagined an Amazon loss leader would usher in the future
And the reason why Apple's premium innovations are so much more successful than rival smartphones, tablets, and watches is that Apple built its products to be better than the status quo, not just reach a minimum viable product.
Measuring Apple's innovative success against iPhone's popularity is deceptive because there is naturally a larger market for a handheld smartphone (who are we kidding, it's a computer-camera that can text) than there is for just an MP3 player, or for a large tablet that doesn't need replacing every year or two, or a desktop or laptop Mac, which also lasts longer than an iPhone.
Apple could also make gimmicky folding phones (Why? To show off displays it doesn't desperately need to sell?), or PCs that turn into tablets (Why? To sell fewer units and earn less?), or even smart-toaster-refrigerators (Why? To attempt selling a distracting array of products nobody needs?) but it's concentrating on delivering the best new products it can, and for which have some clear, potential use that will justify their development.
A long history of rarely appreciated innovation
Having reviewed Apple's biggest sparks of innovation over the past forty years, leading up to today's Vision Pro as tomorrow, today, it becomes clear that Apple isn't merely innovating in new product categories' with new marketing names.
Critics are hating on Vision Pro as much as any other innovation from Apple
Depending on how you look at things, Macs and MacBooks could be "one innovation," when they now encompass several product categories and markets all named Mac. Is that a lack of innovation? Apple's Macs are and have been at the forefront of innovative thinking so bold it has frequently risked controversy and often raised the ire of critics.
But you could also say Apple's entire iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and homeOS are also really just optimized variants of the macOS they descended from, and therefore all of its product categories are really Macs under different names. Certainly, that doesn't make them examples of a "lack of product category innovation."
Even different iPads in Apple's range serve broadly different purposes and audiences! They wouldn't be more innovative under widely different marketing brands. Apple was at its least innovative period back when it had the most sub-brands and product categories!
And just because iPhone, Apple Watch, and HomePod eventually replaced iPods as a product category, doesn't mean Apple's other product categories have to be replaced to deliver "innovation." Certainly not the cash cow iPhone!
A better understanding of the often invisible work Apple has done with its user interfaces, its OS platforms, its silicon chipsets, its graphics, its Neural Engine, and its physical hardware gives you a deeper appreciation of the real innovation Apple has achieved, even as the overall industry has clung to legacy and desperately tried to preserve it to avoid the expense of innovating and the potential opportunity cost of delivering new, real innovation that threatens its existing status quo.
I'll work to deliver a closer look at examples of these in upcoming weeks.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
Innovation at Apple is dead so long as Tim Cook is the CEO.
It can explain it in ONE sentence: consumer technology innovation is driven by the smartphone, the primary computing modality of consumers today.
Unfortunately this is so typical of many technologists: they can't see the forest for the trees. All of the major tech innovations we see in our lives today stem from the ubiquity of the smartphone. Wireless communications (cellular, WiFi, Bluetooth, RFID), NFC contactless payment, advanced cameras, biometric identification, display panel improvements, battery technology, and machine learning/AI. All the wearables and accessory devices are rooted in smartphone innovations. That's just the tip of the iceberg.
To look at the computer sitting on your desk as the focal point of the discussion of consumer technology is antiquated. It has been for over a decade.
This excessively long winded article is full of cute little snippets of computing history which shows he clearly doesn't grasp the fundamental nature of where innovation is happening today.
If I had to pick one specific moment and/or device that Apple invented (after the iPhone) that was the game changer/mic drop moment, it would be the A7 SoC (launched September 20, 2013 in the iPhone 5S), the first mainstream 64-bit smartphone/tablet SoC to ship in volume. The rest of the semiconductor industry was speechless when Apple unveiled this phone powered by this silicon.
Like a handful of others at the time, I speculated that Apple was working on chips that could be used in a computer. Seven years later, Apple announced Apple Silicon, the M-series SoCs for Macs (and later iPad Pro and now presumably in their proprietary cloud servers).
On the other hand, Apple has given up on some markets prematurely and sometimes they ignore their customers in astounding ways. No one and no company is perfect.
inner.
The original Mac OS
What has changed, truly changed...
Classic Mac OS, and the classic macs. were intuitively designed. The idea was to make computing more human and intuitive to grasp. I didn’t "get" computers until I sat down with a PowerMac 8100/80AV as a young man. PC’s had DOS and win 3 at the time…
The Mac was a revelation. Everything was represented by an icon. System extensions were objects you could pull out of the system and trash if you felt like it. For a visual creative, the mac was amazing. I felt like I was on-top of the tool called a computer. I understood it and it worked with me. Sure, I could brick it by digging too deep, but fixing it was always doable and rarely felt like I was out of my depth.
I wont pretend that there weren’t stability issues, there for sure were… And. there-in was the rub... MacOS got too old and the codebase wasn’t going to be able to take the classic mac into the future.
I still think that classic MacOS is the most human OS to ever exist, it was the lovechild of Steve Jobs, created during the most humane period of his career. He was a young idealistic guy, he pulled in hippies and very progressive tech nerds, that wanted to make a computer for humans. And they did…
Mac OS X - the return of Steve Jobs.
Steve returns to apple as a man with considerable different experience. He is not a young idealist, he was always a controversial character, but this time, he comes in wanting to take apple to the top. I am not saying he didn’t want that at the start, sure. SJ probably wanted apple to be very successful, but he was young. This time he is a mature businessman with ideas on how to take apple to the top…
How can you trace those two ways of thinking to how the mac has changed?
Making the best computer for a human to use, versus making the best, most successful company are two very different philosophies. The old apple was going to make the best computer, and thought that if you build it, they will come… The new apple was going to make the most money. And when you view the world through that lens, you will not be making a tool for humans.. You are looking to make the human be at the centre of a "business model" And I believe there-in lies the rub.
Apple isn’t making the best computer for a human to use now… Because they are not in that business, they are in the business to make the most money possible. You do not do that by putting the human 1st. You do that by putting profit 1st, and when you look at all the issues that have rose with apple products after the 2nd coming of Jobs and subsequently the Tim Cook era… You see that the problems come directly from that.
Apple cares about profit, not about you as a human-being trying to use a tool.
We old heads know how it felt to use a Macintosh, yes sure… It was expensive to buy, but it would get out of the way and make you able to benefit from this amazing new tool.
I suspect Apple, along with Ms and whatever other tech giants exist out there, are bound to always make the wrong decisions, because their goal is always to make as much money as possible on YOU. They will always make bad decisions due to their profit motives always getting in the way…
So, Linux and open source is likely the only real way forward. Unless Apple can be changed on such a base level that it once again is looking to make tools for YOU… But I wouldn’t hold my breath…
Perhaps Apple's greatest innovation is turning out to be its much derided walled garden approach to hardware and software. The incredible proliferation of devices that we now own has made seamless integration between them FAR more important than it ever was during Steve's lifetime. Consumers not only want their devices to "just work," they want their devices to "just work together." As a result, there is nothing stickier in the whole of consumer tech than the Apple ecosystem, which Apple keeps proving, quarterly report after quarterly report. And the sheer size of that ecosystem has spawned, under Cook's leadership, what is now the second largest and by far the most profitable division at Apple, which is Services. How big is Services? It's annual gross revenue exceeds that of Tesla, its profit margin leaves Tesla in the dust, and if ranked as a standalone company, Services would be approx. #40 among the Fortune 500. But yeah, Tim Cook doesn't know what he's doing. Ironic that Cook gets roasted for cancelling Apple car R&D, but no credit for delivering a new Apple division that beats Tesla revenue now, is growing much faster than Tesla and blows the doors off Tesla when it comes to profit margin. But "Waaaah" it's not a car so it doesn't count. Idiots.
Of course, the trolls will point to supposedly "successful" and innovative products from other companies as examples of what Apple should be doing. Well, here's the thing that Apple never does: spend years selling a product at a loss to maintain market share. Here's Lori Wright, head of Xbox business development, testifying under oath at trial when asked if Microsoft makes a profit selling Xbox consoles: "We don't. We sell the consoles at a loss." Oh, but wait! Look at the amazing innovation from Meta in Quest headsets! So smart of them to price innovative headsets for the masses! Apple needs to do this! Except Meta has never made a penny on headsets. Its Reality Labs division just reported losing $1.5 BILLION PER MONTH in the most recent quarter, which is a 50% increase in the $1 BILLION per month it has been bleeding for years. But don't worry! Better days are coming! Zuck's latest innovation, due out in two years or twenty, who really knows, is Google Glass! You know, because it was such a hit the first time that Google pulled it from the consumer market after 7 months.
Allow me to save you the cost of a Wharton MBA: selling products at a loss for years with no end in sight is neither a success nor a business.
As a former Amiga user I’d be happy to buy any third platform if someone would have the balls to design one with in house hardware and OS software, be it the resurrection of Amiga, SGI, Sun, BeOS, or even Darwin, but for all the talk, no one in tech with money wants to do it maybe the next generation will, there will be new operating systems in the future it ain’t over…. but the free pizza and beer crowd of Linux, however won’t be the ones to do it.
Apple has had a remarkable near 30 years of success. iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, most Mac laptops, AppleWatch, AirPods, Apple Silicon. Each of those took an industry and turned it upside down.
Become poorer doesn't necessarily mean it makes you innovative. Apple is way more than what it was when only Macs were its selling point. And yes sometimes it takes a few attempts to get innovation right and even Steve messed up sometimes. Remember the G4 cube?
Apple routinely ignore any and all feedback from the customers. For example: I found a problem with the HomePod - with a specific network configuration and playing specific songs, the HomePod would consistently disconnect from the network... every single time. I presented this to Apple, and after some testing (which ignored the network configuration and specific songs) they decided there was no problem. My only option was to stop using the HomePod and use a competitor. The company has an extremely focused on a "you don't know what you want and need, we do"... and in some instances they have been correct, but far from all. Musk is far more a visionary than Cook. I have been vocally anti-Cook from the get-go, because he is a monstrously bad CEO... and always will be. His strengths are geared toward a COO position. Jobs picked him as his successor, and was just as wrong as when he picked Sculley. No offense to Kawasaki, but he is in marketing and has no clue about engineering. I have designed quite a number of products from idea all the way through production. Implementing an idea is not difficult, it simply requires someone with an understanding of what is needed and the skillset implement it... aka an engineer. Iteration is how most companies keeps the upgrade cycle happening. Generally small-ish improvements on a regular basis and after a generation or two, the customer upgrades. Apple has succeeded because they have had a handful of remarkably insightful ideas which resonate with the customers, and they have historically manufactured high quality and aesthetically pleasing products, and that's about it. It is certainly true that no company and no person is perfect. However, Cook is about as imperfect a CEO as one could have and still have a company. Under his "leadership" there is zero innovation... and I doubt there will be as long as he is CEO.
I have completely ignored his article and focus on this: Apple cannot clearly innovate like a startup - which is what Tim Cook was telling us a number of years back is that Apple was functioning like a startup.
No it clearly is not. It no longer has the cojones to take a new road to riches.
They cancelled a $trillions$ in revenue - aka the Apple Car - an opportunity to supply software to the car manufacturers of the US, UK, Germany and Italy - which is what the Chinese are doing with Xiaomi. The car industry is shifting from ICE to BEV and Xiaom's software is integral to controlling the battery which is the integral component of the EV car.
Instead these bunch of long past their prime old dudes are pushing sheit uphill with the Apple Vision Pro. A product that no one wants; has no use cases and will die as surely as the Apple Car that Apple killed off.
Luca Maestri is retiring - I would suggest that Tim & Co do the same and hand over the leadership reins to new blood at Apple that can clearly see the future and not dwell and spend $$$ on dead products with no future and rehashing the same cash cows: iPhone,
"Can Apple innovate if iPhone remains the biggest slice of its revenues?"
That's a weirdly framed question. Why does one have to be exclusive of other? Typical D.E.D Strawman's argument.Look at the input devices, macOS (not to mention iPadOS), Apple Watch Series 10, and the constant shuffling of iPhone lens positions with 16 being the new 12. That is not innovation. I love my MPB but the main benefits are not innovation but the return of a proper keyboard, MagSafe, and the iPhone-processor thanks to ARM + TSMC. For most purposes MBP is a very nice evolution of the TiBook from 2001.
And when Apple tries to innovate it is Cook copying Zuckerberg (AVP), Musk (Car), and being late to the Generative AI. Most of all Cook is behaving like Sculley. He had his best developers do stupid stuff like OpenDoc, Newton, and QuickDraw GX to show he could build the future. Cook is doing the same with core system and Safari just standing still. There won't be a NeXT CEO to fix Apple again.
"But Apple isn't competing against iPhone."
"Apple is competing against the status quo that exists outside of Apple."
I don't need more evidence beyond my own experience of observing all of these things unfold over the past nearly three decades, if we start with the Mac. Apple's history is obviously not one of constantly increasing success, they've had their ups and downs. It can be argued that at their lowest they were at the edge of a cliff. But surviving a near death experience fundamentally changed Apple's trajectory for their future. Bringing back Steve and adapting to the reality of their situation, discarding the dead wood, and narrowing their focus to what they could do best turned things around for Apple.
Even though Apple has expanded what they go after, much of that expansion is in the form of building complementary products, services, and an ecosystem that enhances the value of the things that are central to their focus. To be clear, the core focus of Apple isn't embodied solely in building new products, it's really more about delivering the things that are most valuable and desirable to their customers, from health, productivity, awareness, human connectedness, entertainment, self expression, learning, supporting personal and professional endeavors, managing time, managing money, etc.
The iPhone is simply a mechanism to deliver the value that Apple is truly focused on providing for its customers. If some other form of vehicle proves to be a better conduit to provide those things to Apple's customers, Apple will absolutely jump on board whatever that is. But in the meantime, the iPhone is one of the best ways to deliver the value that Apple is committed and focused on bring to its customers.