You know Apple is in hot water when John Siracusa, one of the hosts of the Accidental Tech Podcast, writes in a new post brilliantly called Apple Turnover:
It’s time for new leadership at Apple. The road we’re on now does not lead anywhere good for Apple or its customers. It’s springtime, and I’m choosing to believe in new life. I swear it’s not too late.
I agree that modern Apple is no longer what it used to be.
A few recent things come to mind.
For example, the way the M4 Mac mini storage upgrades are priced is simply unacceptable compared to other storage you can purchase as a consumer today.
The way services revenue plays such an important part of the revenue pie. They take their 30% cut, ask 100 dollars from developers each year, and even advertise some of their services with annoying push notifications that they don’t allow from other companies.
The way they’ve fought and are fighting the EU’s DMA which has allowed alternative App Store options to exist, while making things as difficult and unpleasant as possible. It’s petty behaviour on all fronts.
And then there’s the colossal failure of the Apple Intelligence roll-out. I haven’t even enabled the feature on any of my devices! You could argue that the only net benefit from the AI roll-out has been that Apple has increased base model RAM capacity in their devices. (And, mind you, it was about time. Shipping devices with 16 GB of RAM is normal.)
And now, most recently, Apple’s fight with with the US courts and their inflexibility in regard to sideloading software and allowing external purchases is just sad to witness. I simply can’t be on their side.
Building better products
After we learned more information from the Apple & Epic court case where a judge put Apple on blast and called out Tim Cook it seems that at least some key folks at Apple have lost sight of what matter most: great products that enrich people’s lives.
It’s exactly as Siracusa points out in his post, too:
The iPhone is a better product when people can buy ebooks within the Kindle app. And yet Apple has fought this feature for the past fourteen years, to the tune of millions of dollars in legal fees, and has only relented due to a recent court order (which they continue to appeal).
I get it, Apple’s could be losing money by making these decisions.
But if they would make more product-focused decisions, they might avoid what seems to be an increasing sentiment of user frustration, and (unsurprisingly) end up with better products.
Yes, they will lose some of their revenue, but the products will be better. I think that makes the world a better place.
Rent-seeking
People who have been ardent Apple supporters for almost two decades are now saying Apple’s exhibiting “rent-seeking behaviour”. Ouch. I think it’s true.
Even on trivial in-app purchases, Apple just takes 30%. It’s no wonder they are fighting the court order for them to allow linking to external purchase URLs. After all, there’s no 30% cut in the browser with Stripe!
This is not an issue on PC or Mac, because you can simply get your software elsewhere than the official stores. On iOS, however, it’s definitely anti-competitive behaviour, because in reality Apple has made side-loading either impossible (in the US) or frustrating with fees (in the EU).
A different path
They could choose a different path. No doubt because of some of their decisions, Apple now has to play defense, and the next innovator might just make them irrelevant. It’s a tale as old as time.
They’re already losing ground in regard to AI, so I can only hope they turn this ship around.
I still want to really like Apple and their products, but it’s becoming really difficult. I don’t think I’ve ever been this concerned about the future of Apple before, even though I have been skeptical about some of their decisions over the years.
The last time I wrote negatively about Apple my biggest complaints were about software quality and bad keyboards. Things really are different this time.