What the heck is going on at Apple?

Cook is denying that he has any current plans to step down. There was also a Bloomberg article about this a couple of days ago.

What they point out is that a lot of Apple's senior leadership are of a similar age and are simply approaching retirement now. But they are also losing younger rising stars they desperately need to fill the ensuing void. At the moment, they are simply losing talent left and right, and that is unsustainable if they want to maintain their competitive edge and avoid completely turning into Microsoft.

The more likely explanation is that a certain amount of internal rot has set in. They haven't really launched a successful major new product category in years, and a lot of their initiatives have either stalled or failed. Something is clearly not right, and top tier talent doesn't will only tolerate that sort of thing for so long before moving on.

This seems true at many companies. While I'm not all that impressed by many current leaders, I'm sort of terrified of my generation (younger gen x) taking over because some of them seem to not be prepared or not have been prepared for the roles.

> Cook is denying that he has any current plans to step down. There was also a Bloomberg article about this a couple of days ago.

No he isn't and no there wasn't.

> They haven't really launched a successful major new product category in years

I agree this is true, but Apple’s always done their best work when they’re the second mover. Smartphones, iPods, earbuds, good desktop PCs were all after they watched what was good and then made it better (if you like what they did, anyway).

The next hardware category is probably AR glasses if someone can make them good and cheap, nobody has so Apple won’t do anything but wait. I’m sure they have an optics lab working on something, but probably not full throttle (and the Vision Pro is an attempt to make the OS).

> They haven't really launched a successful major new product category in years

How frequently do you expect a new major product category across the industry? Is there any company who launched one that wasn't ChatGPT in the same time frame?

CEO’s always say they are not planning to leave up until the moment they leave.

This is a good point, technically chromebooks fit this definition?

> Cook is denying that he has any current plans to step down

This is one of those political things where people deny something right up until the minute when it happens.

Also it's hard to maintain exponential growth forever.

I guess we’re being a bit vague on timeframe but chrome books launched in 2011 so they’re one of those products that took ~10 years to be an overnight success, with 2020 being an accelerant. So my vote is no.

Personally I wouldn't count Chromebooks as something newer than Apple's last category-creating product since the iPad is in roughly the same time frame and netbooks a few years before that.

The Apple Watch is newer and is where I'd say the cutoff is for Apple.

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At a higher level, I'd say there were two personal-computer-hardware revolution periods that Apple featured heavily in:

1) home personal computers and then the GUI-fication of them and the portable-ification - the wave the Apple II was part of, and then the one the Mac mainstreamed, then laptops where Apple was pretty instrumental in setting design and execution standards

2) mainstream general-purpose/software-defined mobile devices (vs single- or few-function gadgets). Initial failures or niche products (Newton from Apple, Palm/PocketPC more successfully as a niche later) and then Apple REALLY mainstreaming with the iPhone and the extensions that were the iPad and Watch. I'm leaving out the iPod here since "single-purpose MP3 players" were a transitional stop on the gadget->general purpose device trend. (But that general purpose nature also makes it hard to invent a new mobile device category.)

Of things that have been percolating for a while, maybe VR/AR takes off one day, I'm not sure there's mass appeal there. Are people going to get enough utility over a phone to justify pop-up ads in their field-of-view all day long?

It's possible the LLM/transformer boom could lead to some new categories, but we don't know what that would look like yet, so it's hard to penalize Apple for not being a super-early first-mover in the last 3 years since nobody else has figured out a great hardware story there either, and even in their prime they were less of a "first mover" than a "show everyone else how it could be done better" player.

Chromebooks were almost 15 years ago.

Look outside the HackerNews/Silicon Valley bubble: Apple is doing very well. Consumers broadly don't care whether their phone has AI, as long as it has the ChatGPT/etc apps. iMessage and FaceTime have a stranglehold on, uh, everyone in America. They sell more iPhones every quarter. Their services revenue keeps going up. Mac sales are up big. Apple Silicon is so far ahead of anything else on the market, they could stay on the M5 platform for three years and still be #1. Apple Watch is the most popular watch brand in the world (and its not close; sensing a pattern?). Airpods, alone, make more money than Texas Instruments or SuperMicro. Yes; Vision Pro and iPhone Air sold poorly. Who cares? They're both obvious stepping stones to products that will sell well (Vision Pro -> Glasses-style AR device, iPhone Air -> thin engineering will help with the iPhone Fold). Apple can afford to take risks and adjust.

Sure, there can be cultural things going on. But at the senior leadership level, the degree to which those would have to be bad, in the absence of major revenue problems, to cause this reaction is... unheard of.

Yep. Corpo PR speak provides zero information. They will say they have no plans whether or not they do.

I'm serious. Cook did not deny that, and the Bloomberg article did not claim that.

> Apple’s always done their best work when they’re the second mover.

People say Apple does its best work as a “second mover,” but that misses the actual pattern: Apple builds great products when leadership is solving their own problems.

The Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad weren’t just refinements of existing products. They were devices Steve Jobs personally wanted to use and couldn’t find elsewhere. The man saw the GUI at Xerox and saw how anyone could use a computer without remembering arcane commands. So he drove the development of the Mac. He was using a shitty mobile phone, saw the opportunity and had the iPhone developed. Same with the early Apple Watch (first post-Jobs new product line), which reflected Jony Ive’s fashion ambitions; once he left, it evolved into what current leadership actually uses: a high-end fitness tracker.

The stagnation we're seeing now isn’t about Apple losing its “second-mover magic.” It’s that leadership doesn’t feel an unmet need that demands a new device. None of Vision Pro, Siri, Apple Intelligence or even macOS itself anymore appear to be products the execs themselves rely on deeply, and it shows. Apple excels when it scratches its own itch and right now, it doesn’t seem to have one.

Just like CEOs always say they are not planning any layoffs until the moment they do them

Foldable phones are one example. Apple completely missed the boat here, while even freaking Google managed to make a decent device.

Smart rings are booming. Apple has nothing, probably afraid that it can cannibalize their watch sales.

If we look at the wider industry, EVs and self-driving cars are coming. Huawei has its own car now, along with a battery research program.

Apple shipped only 20% of the smartwatches in 2024. They are the most lucrative brand with 60% of the market, but not the largest one by volume.

Apple used to put out new or interesting products. E.g. they just up and released Time Machine routers when no one was really doing that in the home router industry like at all, maybe a clunky usb ftp solution but this was first party apple white glove treatment of the issue. They had great software too in many different niches e.g. Aperture coming after Adobe's pro photo pie.

It was amazing how much diversity in really well thought out hardware as well as software was happening at apple years ago, when it was a far smaller company in terms of manpower and resources than it is today. I guess when the business model is selling ongoing subscriptions instead of compelling new products in order to get money, you stop getting the compelling new products coming out.

Obviously. It's a bit funny people take this at face value.

I think this is an interesting take that really reflects the saturation of the wider problem space of society. Much of the stuff that we could potentially need, we already have. It will be interesting to see what new products are released to the market in the next ten or so years which substantially change the way that we use technology.

I grew up in the South. Almost everyone has an Android phone, though my family is slowly converting to Apple as their subsidies renew

What's the appeal of a foldable phone? Always assumed they were just a luxury item or party trick that would add more friction to the user experience