Siri, Are We Falling Behind?

Culture is everything

The following is a collection of thoughts I started a year ago about one of the most-beloved brands in the world. I think they are lost and rather in search of meaning.

Apple’s original core vision

The original core vision of Apple was to build the best products on earth. And they did it at the best price they could, but never at the cost of quality or user experience. And they fulfilled their mission: to this day, many Apple products are unmatched.

Through the first 30 years of existence, Apple defined key tenets for the brand:

• differentiated branding and marketing (people still mention the 1984 ad that the Apple board originally refused)

• premium design, either software (iOS, macOS) or hardware (Macbook, iPhone) — Apple ships the best product; they do not ship junk

• world-class user experience

• privacy-first: people pay for the product

Through the years, Apple managed to innovate and ship products that redefined our industry. Jobs said it better than anyone at the launch of the iPhone.

Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything and Apple has been – well, first of all, one’s very fortunate if you get to work on just one of these in your career. Apple has been very fortunate. It’s been able to introduce a few of these into the world.

However, since 2007, Apple stopped innovating.

Instead of staying an innovation machine, Apple became an iteration machine. They no longer ship products that redefine an industry. They ship iterations or marginal improvements of existing products.

Search for Meaning

What’s next after the iPhone?

Tim Cook surfed the wave started by the iPhone tsunami. He squeezed every penny from it: Apple made some features extremely expensive and they forced developers to pay a 30% Apple tax on every sale within an iOS app. Anything Apple launched since the iPhone is not a breakthrough innovation; it’s a marginal improvement.

Tim Cook managed to make Apple a remarkable company from a financial standpoint, but he failed to keep the innovation flywheel going.

The issue for Apple is to find the next big thing.

For some time, people believed it was the Apple Car. But after years of development and refusing to buy Tesla in 2017, the project got canceled. Apple stopped iterating on this idea, even if they had billions in the bank to do so.

The recent flop of the Apple Vision Pro gives us a better peek at the change of culture at Apple. Despite the technological achievements, Apple needs to face the fact that nobody wants to spend $4500 to live with googles strapped on their face.

There is more evidence that Apple is lost and unable to ship anything significant. When we see major improvements in AI every day, Siri is still struggling.

What values?

Apple has been one of the best brands in terms of marketing. The brand positioned itself as a premium brand, and their advertisements were designed accordingly (see “Here’s to the crazy ones”). They communicated their values very well: innovative, great to use, and user-friendly.

But today, such values are gone, and Apple is lost.

Take the Apple commercial about the environmental footprint. The ad made the Apple CEO Tim Cook like a child being lectured by a morbidly obese “Mother Nature”. The ad is childish and makes the Apple CEO appear stupid and out of touch. Jobs would clearly never have approved this (he mentioned once that one of his biggest mistakes was to make a teleconference with Bill Gates where he appeared on top of him).

Steve Jobs said it was a big mistake to put Gates’ picture above him. Do you think he would have approved the Mother Nature ad?

More recently, for (another iteration of) the iPad, Apple launched the commercial Crush!. And yet, it was another huge marketing miss where Apple suggests they are crushing creative people, the same population who want to “Think Different” and bought Apple for years. At a time when people are afraid that AI will take their jobs, it was the worst message to send.

What future for Apple?

There is no question that Apple will keep making profits from their products for the years to come. There is no iPhone replacement today. And attempts at shipping AI-based products (humane pin, rabbit R1) to replace it are failing.

But this will not continue indefinitely. The lack of innovation, coupled with the few disastrous commercials, shows that the company is searching for meaning and in need of changes.

Apple needs to reinvent itself, know who they are, and find what their next big thing is.