I am simply unable to write long-form commentary pieces right after a major Apple event. Usually my first, raw reactions are uttered on Twitter as the event unfolds. And yes, I often come across as excessively sarcastic, so at first glance it seems I don’t like anything Apple is presenting, and I sound like an old curmudgeon pining for the good old days and constantly lamenting the early demise of Steve Jobs.
I usually let a few days pass before commenting on a major Apple event because, first, I simply need to cool down. I just want to avoid writing my impressions when I still feel fully excited or disappointed about some aspect of the event or some new product or some new changes Apple has introduced or is going to introduce. Then, I feel I need to process the event: maybe my judgment is clouded or distorted because I missed some details; maybe after a few days what made me excited or disappointed in the heat of the moment fades away as I gather more information or as I mull over it, and I end up feeling less excited or not that disappointed about something that previously looked like a big deal in a way or another.
But Apple’s It’s Show Time event of 25 March was a weird one. If I had to really summarise how it left me, I’d say it left me empty. I wanted to let some days pass, all the while reading other people’s impressions and takeaways. But after a week, there’s really not that much to process, and that feeling of emptiness remains.
Still, here are a few notes.
The “Apple needed to expand on its services business in order to keep growing” narrative
You’ve surely read this in many analyses: the iPhone business can’t sustain Apple forever, sales have slowed down, so Apple has to find other ways to bring money in. If you didn’t know anything about Apple, you would think we were talking about a struggling company desperately trying new strategies to stay afloat. Instead, it’s Wall Street what’s giving Apple performance anxiety, and you have no idea how furious this makes me in turn.
In recent years, what has struck me more about Apple had to do with quantity, not quality. Every new product or service introduction has seemed to follow the logic of More rather than Better. In a lot of past marketing campaigns, Apple has presented itself as the streamlined, optimised, quasi-minimalistic alternative to the overwhelming and chaotic offerings of the competition. Apple’s attention to detail also meant We understand your needs, we have observed how other companies are trying to address them, but we’re smarter than them, we think we’ve identified what’s wrong in their proposition, and we’ve come up with a better one.
The overall impression I’ve got from last week’s event is that Apple is essentially playing a Me-Too card here: We looked at other subscription services, we think we have identified what works, so we too can offer the same kind of stuff in the hope to attract more consumers mostly thanks to our name and reputation.
Apple pursuing growth by emphasising services is a strategy that disappoints me for two main reasons:
1. It feels like ‘the easy way out’ — It feels like something you would expect from a lesser tech company. Why not address all the factors that have supposedly slowed down sales and growth before investing money and resources in other endeavours that will likely divert even more attention from the things that are already out there and need fixing?
People are buying fewer new iPhones and updating less frequently. Why is that? I don’t think it can be entirely chalked up to ‘macroeconomic conditions’. I have witnessed numerous times that when a product is truly desirable, people stop being budget-conscious and painstakingly comparing tech specs and price tiers. What can be changed here in order to make people want new iPhones?
Perhaps a good dose of innovation could help. Perhaps truly listening to customer feedback could help. Where by ‘truly listening’ I mean ‘acting more promptly upon it’. The Mac business appears to be in decent conditions overall. It could be far healthier, in my opinion, if Apple redesigned the MacBook line in a way that better addresses the needs of its target audience, and if that involves backtracking on certain aspects of hardware design — you know what I’m talking about here — so be it. In short, I think Apple should really pull a Snow Leopard on itself; but I doubt that’s going to happen.
2. It’s a leap in the dark — At least, judging by how things have been presented last week. Let’s be honest: I haven’t seen anything particularly groundbreaking or compelling in what Apple showed us. Apart perhaps from the Apple Card, nothing that has been unveiled on stage made me say Yes, this is really going to work. Mostly everything felt like weak tea, and the fact that 90% of what has been announced isn’t available yet but ‘coming soon’ really doesn’t help. Perhaps, as some have observed, Apple needed to stop the rumour mill and announce all these services in its own terms. But, especially when it comes to video subscription services, Apple is entering a territory with tough competitors, and now these competitors know what Apple is going to do and have time to prepare a countermove (if a countermove is necessary, I’m not entirely sure about that.)
Too many hobbies
Do you have a friend or acquaintance in your circle who is known for having too many hobbies and interests? Are you one such person? Could you say, in all honesty, that this friend of yours (or you) truly excels at each and every one of such hobbies? Unless he or she or you are extremely talented people with extraordinary capabilities, it’s hard to answer with a firm Yes. A hobby is something one pursues for pleasure in one’s spare time, in the end. Being the best at it isn’t a requirement.
The Apple TV, believe it or not, is twelve years old. Steve Jobs, back then, quickly and aptly framed the Apple TV project as a hobby. I believe the plan, in the long term, was to be carried out in the typical way of underpromising and overdelivering Apple (Jobs) used to approach things at the time. Let’s start small, and slowly but surely build upon that; let’s see where this goes after a few iterations.
Well, here we are in 2019 with a product that in the shared delusion of Apple’s group of executives represents a powerful media centre powered by a smart digital assistant, and a compelling gateway to a successful service. But, from what I can see from the outside, it’s essentially the same hobbyist project of 2007. They’ve just thrown more money at it.
Apple News has been a great success so far, according to Apple. It was first introduced in 2015 and it has been available in only three countries since then. Last week Apple said the service is now available in Canada as well. I struggled to view Apple News as more than another hobby back then, and after the introduction of Apple News+ last week, I still have the feeling that Apple is being serious about this service only in words. Because if the company really cared about it, they would provide better News apps and they would have made the service available in many more countries already. When I hear ‘news’, I think ‘global’, not ‘four selected English-speaking countries in the whole world’.
In my view, Apple is starting to look more and more like that acquaintance with too many hobbies. The problem is that the company is approaching them with overconfidence, first by treating these hobbies as if they were all first-class, serious endeavours, and secondly by thinking that they’re smart enough to excel at all of them. I’ve been around in tech long enough to recognise this as a potentially dangerous behaviour. I’ve also seen more than once that money isn’t a good-enough replacement to smartness when it comes to solving a problem or turning something into a success.
Actually it’s kind of worse than that: at the 25 March event, after the whole interminable section dedicated to presenting “what’s coming” on Apple TV+, the impression I had is that Apple sounded like that rich friend who likes to practice some indoor climbing every now and then, but suddenly announces they’re going to climb the Everest this autumn, and they’re going to do that by surrounding themselves with a bunch of famous rock climbers. It’s gonna be great! Sure, Tim, knock yourself out.
Dieter Bohn read my mind and made a video
I completely agree with everything Dieter Bohn says in the tenth episode of his Processor series of videos. Apple’s ‘show time’ event was really weird – here’s why only lasts six minutes and a half, and I suggest you watch it whether you usually like Bohn or not. Towards the end he says:
Tim Cook’s whole pitch is that Apple is providing services because Apple cares more about your privacy than your bank, or news sites, or cable networks, or even game developers. Apple will give you all of these services, and then when you use them, you don’t have to worry about being tracked by the companies that provide all of that content. […] There may be even good reasons to subscribe to stuff through Apple instead of through whatever service you’re using right now. But it was, and it still is, super weird to say that you’re going to provide all of that privacy… later; when it’s released… later.
The privacy angle really is the main thing here. And, in truth, I believe Apple when it says it’s not collecting data, and it’s not sharing whatever data it does collect. But I also have to admit that I’m not looking for more things to lock me into Apple world.
The most popular story that we saw on our site [The Verge] on Apple day was the Apple credit card. And I get it. Credit cards suck. All of the tracking that they do sucks. And some disruption there would be a very good thing. But is that how you want to think about Apple? As a bank or a credit card company? Or even a next-generation content subscription service thing? I don’t know.
Tim Cook ended the keynote with this line: Because at Apple, the customer is and always will be at the center of everything that we do. I want to believe that. But I couldn’t help but feel like a lot of the stuff that Apple announced this week was more about Apple than it was about Apple’s customers. The company presented a new vision for itself and for what it does, but it didn’t actually deliver anything yet but promises. It was a very flashy, very expensive presentation of a… business plan?
Apple has always been the company that delivers. This week, it was sort of just the company that promised. And that was just weird.
Apologies for the extended quote, but I couldn’t have said this better myself. And again, I’ve been in tech long enough that, while I agree with Bohn that it’s weird for Apple to act this way, I know it’s not completely unprecedented. When Apple was run by businesspeople in the mid-1990s, announcing products that would come later, talking about strategies, making promises they weren’t entirely sure they could keep, wasn’t that uncommon. It was also one of the reasons Apple wasn’t doing so well. Apple also had overcrowded product lines at the time, and a lot of high-end Macs were really expensive, sometimes unjustifiably so. So, while today’s Apple is not on the verge of bankruptcy as it was 22 years ago, I’m having a déjà vu all the same, and it’s leaving a bad taste in my mouth.
The lack of impact
When on Twitter I manifested my disappointment and lack of enthusiasm about these new upcoming Apple services, a few people were kind of surprised, and I also received a few private messages along the lines of Geez, Rick, what a buzzkill you are sometimes…
Now put yourself in my shoes. I live in Europe, not in the United States, so:
- Even if I were interested in Apple News+, it’s not available to me, just like Apple News was not available to me before.
- Apple Arcade is something I really hope will go somewhere, but I can only engage in a bit of gaming in my spare time, which isn’t much, so this kind of subscription is not going to appeal to me. I tend to play a few selected games and I try to support the developers directly.
- Apple Card is going to be available “for qualifying applicants in the United States”, as stated by the fine print at the end of the Apple Card page, so even if I like the idea of Apple Card, even if it’s a way better offering than my current credit card, it’s another thing that’s not available to me. And I’m not holding my breath for the foreseeable future.
- As for Apple TV+, I honestly don’t know how this is going to work, if Apple can provide the same content for everyone around the world at the same time or if there are going to be some limitations outside the United States. But still, even assuming I’ll be able to access all the intended new content, at the moment I don’t own an Apple TV, and what has been presented on 25 March was not substantial enough to make me want to purchase an Apple TV and subscribe to such a service.
Now I guess you can better understand how little these announcements have impacted me as a customer. In fact, I don’t particularly feel “at the centre of everything Apple does” right now.
A wake-up call
Saying that I’d like for these new Apple services to fail catastrophically is perhaps a bit mean, but I think Apple is at a point where a reality check is sorely needed in order to adjust that pride and overconfidence the company has increasingly displayed after Jobs’s demise. When Jobs was at the helm, certain smug attitude was in part justified and earned due to the quality of the results. Again, underpromising and overdelivering was really what made Apple shine for so many years. Today, underpromising and overdelivering has become more of an exception rather than the rule. Today, that smug attitude feels more and more unwarranted.
Today we have terrible fiascos like AirPower, which I hope won’t be forgotten and put under the rug in a matter of weeks. Because the AirPower affair is what best exemplifies how Apple works today. That and, of course, the handling of the whole situation surrounding the butterfly-mechanism keyboards of all MacBooks. The insistence on a design that has repeatedly proved to be an utter failure. The unwillingness to admit they royally screwed up here. No, this is the right design, we know what’s best for our customers; we are the touchstone of computer hardware industrial design — the keyboard design must be right, we just need to perform some small corrections here and there. Three keyboard generations later, almost four years later, that design is as terrible and unreliable as ever. And the way Apple is handling this train wreck is absurd, infuriating and borderline masochistic. Some days I genuinely ask myself if they’re simply in complete denial, lost in a new Reality Distortion Field generated by the round structure of Apple Park. Or maybe they’ve painted themselves in a design corner and don’t know what to do. Or maybe they know what to do, are working on it, but it’s taking much more time than anticipated, but they can’t admit it because secretiveness, because oh man this is going to hurt the stock, etc. etc.
Meanwhile, in the trenches, where the laptop warriors fight every day with work, professional work that needs to be done often under tight deadlines, I’ve never seen so many people, even veteran Mac users, contemplating the switch to a different platform like in recent times. It’s either that, or looking for 2015 MacBook Pros, the last generation with a reliable keyboard. Professionals are willing to stick with – or ‘upgrade’ to — older MacBook Pro models in order to go on. I can’t stress enough how bizarre this whole situation has become.
The fact is that — exactly because of what happened with AirPower — I’ve lost another chunk of trust in Apple’s ability to fix these issues once and for all. I hope Apple realises how with AirPower it has set a dangerous and damaging precedent. From now on, whenever Apple says We got this — implicitly or not — the natural reaction is going to be Do you, really? Or at least it should be, because if something like AirPower happened with another company, every tech geek out there and their dog would ridicule that company for months on end. So, yes, I hate to sound like a broken record here, but if Apple truly put the customer at the centre of everything that they do, they wouldn’t announce a product before, er, knowing exactly how to build it. And they would prioritise solving the MacBook design above all else, because that is an issue that continues to metastasise.
Instead, it’s show time![1]
Coda
I want to end with how the event started. That movie title sequence was really well made, obviously reminiscent of Saul Bass’s work. I loved the visual style and the transitions. And I know, I know the whole opening credits were tongue-in-cheek and added a touch of self-deprecation. But they also reduced important parts of Apple’s past and identity to slogans, labels, hollow words: A Think Different production, In association with The Misfits, Rebels and Troublemakers, and then Edited by A Thousand No’s for Every Yes, and then Directed by The Crazy Ones. Rewatching this intro after the event finished, I was left with a bittersweet taste. Does Apple still represent all these things? Are they still the misfits, rebels, troublemakers who think differently, who can take the alternative path and show us what innovation really means, who can still say a thousand no’s for every yes and produce superior design as a result? I don’t know anymore. These misfits and rebels come with a suspiciously clean look, holding titanium, laser‑etched, credit cards.
