Apple, to be fair, isn’t selling the same sugar water year-after-year in a zero sum war with other sugar water companies. Their sugar water is getting better, and I think this year’s seasonal concoction is particularly tasty. What is inescapable, however, is that while the company does still make new products — I definitely plan on getting new AirPod Pro 3s! — the company has, in the pursuit of easy profits, constrained the space in which it innovates.
Apple, to be fair, isn’t selling the same sugar water year-after-year in a zero sum war with other sugar water companies. Their sugar water is getting better, and I think this year’s seasonal concoction is particularly tasty. What is inescapable, however, is that while the company does still make new products — I definitely plan on getting new AirPod Pro 3s! — the company has, in the pursuit of easy profits, constrained the space in which it innovates.
That didn’t matter for a long time: smartphones were the center of innovation, and Apple was consequently the center of the tech universe. Now, however, Apple is increasingly on the periphery, and I think that, more than anything, is what bums people out: no, Apple may not be a sugar water purveyor, but they are farther than they have been in years from changing the world.
Ben Thompson, Stratechery via John Gruber
If you have been a regular reader, then you are familiar with my often-repeated argument that companies, like people, don’t really change. They are married too closely to their DNA. In case you need a refresher on my concept of corporate DNA, I recommend this old piece of mine from the archives.
There is a reason why Meta continues to be a worse version of Facebook, and why Google still struggles to look beyond its DNA of data-driven engineering. Apple is no different. It is a company driven primarily by hardware and hardware design. Everything it does starts with that and that is why I believe it ends up in the comfortable confines of hardware innovation. I explained yesterday that this is not a bad thing. They can continue to be a big player in the future as long as they actually start to adapt while still staying true to their DNA. I will have more on that later.
If Apple fails at something, it is that while it is good at launching a hardware platform, it does not quite understand its true capabilities. The iPad suffered because its biggest champion, Steve Jobs, died before it could take root.
They couldn’t turn Apple TV into anything meaningful. It could easily have been a hub for the digital home. They have created one of the most imaginative devices in recent memory, the Vision Pro, but it is languishing because it doesn’t get enough attention from a user’s standpoint. For instance, how is it that a company with unlimited money isn’t funding visual content for the platform? But then, it is not in their corporate DNA.
In the past, it didn’t have to do much as developers did it all. Mac developers’ loyalty was legendary. The iPhone is what it is because of the app economy it helped create. Apple’s challenge now is that it is a beast with many arms that has to juggle many balls. It has to satisfy Wall Street, and It has to make innovation junkies like meand media folks who seem to crave the new, interested in the company. And somehow, it needs to find imagineers to fill its ranks and give them the freedom to make its hardware sexy and usable.
