What is Happening to Apple?
Apple announced two new products this week (a 4" version of the iPhone dubbed the iPhone SE and a 9.7" inch version of the iPad Pro). They also slashed prices on the Apple Watch, which hasn’t particularly led the competitive wearable space with the type of margin that the iPhone or iPad have in phone and tablet.
My question is — what is happening to Apple?
Apple keynotes used to be widely anticipated events not just by the media but by consumers and fans of technology alike. They would contain part bravado, part show business, but were always a look into the keyhole of the future. An Apple event was water cooler talk around the office and the excitement on social media would be at a fervor as fans rushed to the Apple store to preorder items or proclaim that this was the “best event yet.”
This week’s keynote had a far different tone. It felt rushed and a bit as though the team at Apple were going through the motions. Sure they touted their previous successes and innovations in HealthKit and Apple TV, but overall the event seemed to fall flat with two product iterations that were expected and not much news on anything else. They spent about as much time talking about their new campus as they did on their actual products.
As a tech fan and investor in Apple, this makes me feel a bit weary. It harkens back to the story of HP. A once dominant PC manufacturer with innovative notebooks in the mid 90’s like the Pavilion, which then got too big and bloated by corporate infrastructure and mergers in the 00’s and lost more than half of its stock value by the Great Recession.
I don’t think that Apple is quite at the point of HP as a new Macbook design, Apple CarPlay success across major manufacturers, and/or integrated TV streaming experience to disrupt the cable box could all be major jolts of life for the company. What I am concerned about is that like HP, Apple has gotten to be a bit too big in the corporate sense. Last week I shared an article about reigniting growth in major organizations that had gotten stymied by their own process and infrastructure. I worry that Apple’s innovation under new leadership and in a global company that is very much under the microscope could be falling into a similar trap.
Microsoft Surface and Surface Book products are very good and Amazon has the biggest consumer tech hit on the market right now with the Echo. Facebook leading the charge in Virtual Reality and Google has made the most strides in AI. Nobody remains at the top forever (Microsoft can recently attest to that as well), but Apple is at a crossroads right now where they can either regain control of their own destiny or become another case study for business school students to pour over on what Cook should have done to stay dominant.
Adi Raval is a digital marketing consultant, entrepreneur, and tech enthusiast in Baltimore, MD
