Why Apple is Done

by Jeff Klein

First, a disclaimer: I love Apple products. I’m using a Macbook Pro to type this blog.

However, I believe Apple’s days as an innovative company are over. I’ll explain why:

Let’s say you have a highly innovative company.

And let’s say the guy who made it all happen, le guru who led the company to greatness, is now gone.

And to further let’s-say, let’s say the accountants move in, and the shareholders start demanding blood.

What do you have?

You have Apple in the 1990s.

And it seems to be happening all over again.

However, there’s one huge difference between Apple in the 1990s and Apple in the 21st Century: There is no Steve Jobs to ride in and rescue the company.

With Jobs’ death in 2011 there has been a vacuum at Apple. Corporations, like nature, abhor a vacuum, so the vacuum is being filled — not by another brilliant designer/idea person, but by accountants.

The accountants are running the show now. Sure, CEO Tim Cook is “in charge,” but he has to answer to the shareholders.

It’s not Cook’s fault. Anyone brought in as CEO would have to answer to the shareholders, ultimately.

Jobs never did, and never cared to.

The only way Apple can resurrect itself creatively would be to tell any new CEO, “You have unlimited time to do whatever you think should be done. We will never remove you, no matter what the results.” Naturally, they can never offer that to anyone.

Back to the 1990s

While Apple is looking to find a place in the 21st Century, it actually seems to be returning to the 1990s, post-Jobs. At that time, Apple floundered; the company put out too many variations of its Macs, confused the marketplace, and lost market share. There were no innovative products. Even customer support, I recall, was unresponsive and lacking in helpful knowledge.

For the iPhone, there are design issues and failures that aren’t being addressed, such as text legibility and intuitive operability. No UNDO button. No BACK button. Users get lost or frustrated. This article describes how Apple is destroying design.

As I write this, some customer support has been outsourced to the Philippines, offering sub-optimal help and longer wait time to speak to a knowledgeable agent. Really not a good sign.

I wonder how long it will be before someone at the company says, “Y’know, we’re making these unibody cases out of aluminum, but there’s another way to do it that’s cheaper and just as good, and it’ll save us millions of dollars per year…” One tip-off will be when we hear about more and more product breakages.

Another clue will be iterations of the same product. In lieu of innovation, the company would only come up with alternate versions of their already-existing products, as it did in the 1990s.

Such a Shame

It’s sad on a few levels. Personally, I’m sorry to think I may have one of the last of the best Macbook Pros, and that the next generation or so may not be as great, though they may be faster and lighter and more convenient. Great technology, however, can be measured in different ways. Take the replacement of great-sounding vinyl LPs with the convenient but soulless CDs, as one example.

And it’s sad for the world, in this way: Companies used to be consumer-focused, resulting in the best products. But that changed post-1960, after Robert McNamara drove Ford Motor from a money-loser to a success, not necessarily through innovation (after all, a car is still a car, and an iphone is still an iphone, whatever extras you throw in it) but by extreme number crunching: improving the bottom line with more efficient delivery, products requiring less expensive production, smaller versions of the Lincoln line, and the like. That encouraged the rest of corporate America to follow suit and let the accountants run the show. The outcome has been a decline in real quality, and an increase in useless crap.

Accountants think, “What can we do to our products to sell more of them?” and play it safe.

Visionaries think, “Is there an alternative to what we’re doing?” and take risks.

McNamara was, basically, an accountant. Jobs was a visionary.

Simply building on Steve Jobs’ products won’t carry the company into the future. Therefore, without Jobs, I have doubts that Apple will ever do anything truly innovative again.

So when I say Apple is done, I don’t mean that it will somehow run out of cash, or that its stock will crash.

What I mean is, it will eventually become another Microsoft — a company not known for being a technology leader.

March 10, 2015

Addendum May 31, 2019: My post predated Hackernoon’s post from 2017 which touches on similar issues and has a much better top graphic.