Apple has to climb the mountain

Apple has a lot of challenges these days. Would Steve Jobs really be handling these problems better than current leaders?

The problems, some are long-term, others short-term, include (but are not confined to):

Chinese consumers turning to domestic brands in response to the US trade war.

US customers feeling the impact of tariffs and anticipated increase in product prices.

Regulators in every nation seemingly intent on chipping away at the services empire Apple built from thin air. 

Apple’s recently-disclosed failure to launch with Apple Intelligence.

Supply chain problems, partly in response to trade wars and partly exposed during Covid, when single-source supply chains collapsed overnight.

Declining consumer trust in technology.

These challenges are in addition to the tasks Apple has always had to manage — maintaining hardware and software quality, developing new products and services that surprise and delight customers, building consumer engagement, and inventing the best hardware in the world. A look at the recently introduced Mac Studio and M4 MacBook Air  show the company still has the ability to do that. Both are the best computers in the world in their class.

Challenges everywhere

But the central problem Apple has is mirrored in its own actions. 

You see, reports claim the company’s marketing teams insisted on promoting Apple Intelligence and its much-vaunted contextual understanding of users, even though the feature wasn’t ready. They not only insisted on it, but they also went large on pushing it, helping build just the right environment to create a crisis of belief when it was revealed the company would be unable to make the grade. (Subsequent reports suggest the feature is already working, but just not consistently enough; perhaps Apple should introduce it as a public beta to show how far it’s come.)

What problem does this mirror? 

Just as Apple’s own teams focused on a service that wasn’t ready, the rest of us out here continue to seek solace in impossible dreams. We live in a world of confusion in which populists, snake oil salesmen, and fake thought leaders thrive. Lack of belief, combined with a search for easy answers, means we choose the answers that seem easy. That’s what happened with Apple Intelligence — so great was the need to seem to occupy space in AI, the company chose to market a feature it hadn’t got working yet. 

It took an easy road, rather than a hard one, and in doing so reflected the muddy waters of our times.

That’s not how things were when Jobs introduced the iMac, iPod, or iPhone. Back then, we thought tech would help us, social media hadn’t yet been weaponized against wider public good, and many still wanted to believe global governments would meet the goals of Agenda 21, rather than using 1984 as an instruction manual. Conflict hadn’t yet exposed the deep rifts underlying the fragile global consensus, and Apple under Jobs spoke a language of hope and optimism that reflected a more optimistic zeitgeist. 

Apple today can’t cling to that past. 

A new language for a new time

That aspect of the brand no longer seems to match the existence so many of its customers experience. And it’s arguable whether senior management, ensconced in the Silicon Valley bubble, is exposed enough to identify a product design and marketing language that resonates in our new, highly complex, polarized, conflicted reality. While Apple has done extraordinarily well as the ultimate aspirational brand and enthusiasm for its products will remain among those who can reasonably afford them. But declining sales means declining profits, and in a world set up to mirror Wall Street’s irrational belief that perpetual growth is possible on a finite planet, decline is unacceptable.

That’s true even for the most successful company in human history.

That’s a lot of pressure for Apple’s top brass to handle. Plus, of course, in every case, the answers they have available to them appear to be least-worse responses, rather than good ones. Adding additional complexity, the challenges are themselves intertwined as societies everywhere undergo significant structural change, as political forces of various hues attempt to hold things together with false narratives of a history that never really happened. 

Just how can the future look better tomorrow when it’s based on a past that never existed? 

The journey

All the same, the more complex things become, the harder we work just to stand still. And with myriad connected challenges, it’s not at all certain even Steve Jobs would be able to visualize an easy way through. The simple answer is to keep hope alive, but the uncomfortable truth is that, just as it did with the iMac, Apple’s biggest challenge now is to find a consumer product truly emblematic of its time, something that speaks to us of who are we, what we need, and where we are going. 

In that light, perhaps the failure of the launch of Apple Intelligence really reflects the time we’re in. We can see the mountain but can’t yet make it to the top.

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