Enough talk, Apple. It’s time to deliver all that ‘amazing’ stuff already

Tim Cook, Apple’s affable and hyper-efficient CEO, will have been frustrated last week when yet another leak resulted in even more of the company’s dirty laundry being aired in public. Having demanded that employees stop leaking internal memos, he was faced with the transcript of an entire all-hands meeting escaping Apple Park and showing up online. He doesn’t seem like a man who angers easily, but this must have been vexing.

Or perhaps not. I try not to be overly cynical when it comes to Apple’s relationship with the media, but this particular leak showed the company in a—how to put this—suspiciously positive light. Among its revelations: Cook is excited about Apple’s “amazing” slate of upcoming products; Apple has invested heavily in AI and expects to dominate the sector despite arriving late, because it has dominated multiple major markets in the same way in the past. It’s the sort of dirty laundry you’d really quite like your neighbors to see. Maybe the trousers are especially fancy.

In fact, rather than an embarrassing leak, this is exactly the sort of thing Apple has been putting out into the public sphere over the past few years. (I’m not alleging this was a deliberate leak, to be clear, merely that it’s a fortuitous one.) Whereas Steve Jobs famously drummed into his Mac team the principle that “real artists ship,” insisting that anyone can have good ideas, but the real genius lies in turning those ideas into a practical reality, the company he founded has gone in a different direction. These days, Apple is all talk.

I think the habit began in 2017, when the company announced a product called AirPower alongside the iPhones 8 and X. It sounded great: a wireless charging pad that could charge multiple devices at once and dynamically adjust its power output to optimally handle their various demands. Apple had an attractive design, and even showed prototypes to journalists at the announcement event. The prototypes were non-functional, but never mind: the real thing would be here in early 2018.

And then it wasn’t. And then it was cancelled, with rumors of production problems so severe and so fundamental that it’s astonishing they weren’t identified before the announcement. Unless you conclude that the announcement was made disastrously early, more in hope than expectation, that Apple lost its nerve when pundits accused it of losing the ability to innovate and felt it necessary to announce something, anything that was genuinely new.

AirPower was an accessory rather than a flagship product, so that sorry saga did comparatively little damage to the Apple brand. Some readers may even feel that killing the project rather than pushing through to release reflects an admirable perfectionism, and they may be right. But it’s hard to say anything positive about the similarly premature announcement of Apple Intelligence last year.

Leading into the iPhone 16 launch, the company made all kinds of grand claims about Apple Intelligence’s capabilities, basing an advertising campaign around the idea that the new handsets were made for AI. But even the most rudimentary Apple Intelligence features weren’t ready in time for the phone’s launch, and the ones that were most appealing (and which were clearly showcased in the ad) haven’t appeared at all, and who knows, may never do so.

There was a time when this kind of vaporware nonsense wouldn’t fly at Apple. When it would drop fully formed products out of a clear blue sky, telling us not that they would arrive “some time next year (assuming nothing disastrous goes wrong),” but that pre-orders are open right now and the products will be here next week. It used to make products and then tell us about them, and if people wrote mean things on the internet, Steve Jobs would ring them up and make them cry. He wouldn’t reactively announce something that hadn’t even been finished yet.

Almost two decades ago, my favorite band released an album with no prior publicity. “Hello everyone,” the lead guitarist wrote in a blog post. “Well, the new album is finished, and it’s coming out in 10 days.” And you could pre-order it that very second. There were literally zero expectations; it was a wonderful surprise. I loved that album.

Compare that to Apple’s grand claims and vague promises. What are these amazing products? Sadly, Tim Cook can’t say. So why mention them at all? Is it because they’re actually quite boring? Or is it because they’re still just ideas and they might never become reality at all?

Real artists ship. Everything else is just talk.

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

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