Happy birthday, Apple! You don’t look a day over 49. As with any big birthday, it’s time to take a look back and marvel at how far you’ve come. The Apple of today is not even the Apple of 15 years ago, let alone 50.
If anyone still harbored any illusions about it, it is way past time to ditch two long-held ideas about Apple. First, the company is not beleaguered, doomed, or in danger of going out of business in any conceivable way. Mercifully, pundits seem to have finally accepted the fact that Apple is doing just fine, thank you, and is not going away anytime soon, so the Macalope no longer has to rail against this weird idea. It only took a decade. He’s not bitter about it. He’s just glad we’re all on the same page that Apple is and has for some time been doing better than almost any company in history.
Second, and relatedly, Apple isn’t the scrappy underdog anymore. Sorry. Last week, you may have seen a video of Steve Jobs addressing Apple employees in the summer of 1999 making the rounds that shows the company’s attitude after his return. How does it compare to other things that aired in 1999, such as “Strange World,” “Harsh Realm,” “Seven Days,” or “The Magnificent Seven”, the TV show?!
What the heck even are these shows? Was the Macalope off-world in 1999? Was he in a medically-induced coma? He has no recollection of these at all.
Anyway, like these shows, the video of Jobs is not necessarily must-see TV, but it sure does present a different Apple than we see today. It’s about 13 minutes of Jobs being Jobs, talking about Apple’s great products, who the company’s customers are, and taking fun pot shots at Microsoft and the other companies Apple goes on to sprint past in the next 15 years.
The nut graph of the talk is this:
We’re the last people in this business who give a sh*t about making great computers.
Jobs’ evidence of that was that Apple was the only one who made the whole computer, software and hardware. And, regardless of what you think about Apple’s software quality of late or its ability to come up with new designs that surprise and delight, what Jobs said is still true. Apple Silicon is one of the greatest innovations in hardware design of the last 10 years. Are they the most powerful chips out there? Not necessarily. But their performance per watt not only sets an industry standard, it enhances the user experience immeasurably. This is what Jobs was talking about.
That said, it’s hard to look at some of Apple’s software and think the company is executing at the same level it used to. Sometimes it’s hard to look at Liquid Glass at all. It’s a cruel irony that as long-time Apple fans are approaching an age where they might have to start worrying about glaucoma, Apple has delivered Glaucoma, The Operating System.
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Foundry
It’s become a bit of a running joke to post an error in an Apple product and comment, “It just works.” The truth of the matter is it never just always worked. Maybe things worked a little better back when we were plugging iPods into Macs to sync things physically, but what really happened was that when it worked, it worked so magically that you were more willing to forgive the times when it didn’t. That seems less the case these days.
(Some are also less willing to forgive the company when some of its corporate decisions seem so unforgivable.)
Like an aging rocker who only wants to play his edgy new synth techno material at a concert, Apple also sometimes seems less attuned to what people want these days. The Vision Pro, for example, is a nice product that few could afford. And when was the last time you used Image Playground? The day after it came out? Same. The one thing people do want, a more conversational Siri, is the one thing the company hasn’t been able to deliver. The Macalope still believes the company’s big mistake was joining the chorus of people declaring AI the next big thing rather than working on more tangible products people actually want.
Apple seems less like a company that is ready to murder its darlings than it used to be, too, unless you count murdering them by neglect. It’s matured (not said as a compliment), and Grandpa Tim would rather be on a fixed income generated by Services revenue. This is the company that can’t even bring itself to push apps that create non-consensual sexual material off the App Store.
Apple is not the same company it used to be. That said, it still makes a better product than any of its competitors and just in the way Jobs described back in 1999. Some other company will have to answer the question of whether it’s possible to be fabulously successful and still a scrappy underdog.
