I like Matt Gemmell a lot, especially his books, but also I like his takes on technology. He publishes a lot of tools so if you have a chance go and check out his Github and see his contributions.

If you want a taste of his stories there's also his "Once Upon A Time — Stories" that are always a pleasure to read.

But today I want to focus on his article "The Fallen Apple". It's an amazing article and I recommend you read it, but there are some points that I would like to add my own opinion.

The article

I've been feeling exactly like him for a while. Apple as a company has shifted a while away from the values that were, amazing and refreshing a while ago. A company focused on privacy and "doing the right thing". That's one of the things that Steve Jobs told Tim Cook when he took over.

"Never ask what I would do. Just do what's right"

But unfortunately we've seen that this hasn't been always the case.

It’s a troubling time to be a long-term Apple customer.

Matt hits the nail on the head right from the start.

It’s a troubling time to be a long-term Apple customer.

I have an iPhone 15 Pro that is already showing some signs of wear and tear. It's been 2 years since I bought it. Previous phones lasted me 4 to 5 years and even after that I managed always to find someone that could use them. Previously having a phone that is failing and the prospect of buying a new phone was exciting. Now, I don't want to. They are horribly expensive and the cost to benefit ratio is not there anymore.

...The company seems to have lost the one thing it held onto so firmly during all of the ups and downs of its history: its ethos of values-driven, liberal creativity and intentional design. Apple’s past periods of turbulence relating to profitability, marketshare, compatibility, and governance seem quaint now...

What made the company great is what has been ignored over these years. The design department being pushed from one leader to another as if it was a "utility" department, the 0 interest in getting the most amazing and user friendly things out the door and the ultimate failure with "Liquid Glass" that made people frustrated.

Missing values

...clearly having chosen himself as a corporate sacrifice to the appalling present government of the US. Tim Cook is giving up his reputation in order to preserve not the company or its people, but rather the stock price. Is that noble? I’m sure that it’s seen as such in the context of American capitalism, but Cook at this point is so utterly contaminated and compromised that I think it’ll be as much of a relief to the man himself as to Apple’s employees when he finally bows out after weathering the remainder of this darkest chapter in modern US history. If, indeed, that chapter does come to an end on schedule....

Tim Cook was and still is one of the best CEOs of all time.

He brought Apple, from $364.4 billion market cap to almost $4 trillion (source CNBC, but updated with today's value) and this is incredible.

But at what cost?

Well we can see now that people are starting to become clients of Apple instead of being fans. This is a huge difference. Clients go to where they are best served. Fans stay and bring people to your platform. Fans build apps to your platforms, even for free, clients go where it's more cost efficient. Fans stand in line to buy iPhones. Clients wait until they can validate if the phone is good.

Tim's financial efficiency was incredible but it also made so that the people who buy their products not like them.

People leaving

Executives, experts, engineers, and designers are all leaving for more lucrative positions at even less scrupulous companies. Apple is currently the GUI laughing stock of the industry, a position once firmly held by Microsoft for decades, and the walking-back of poor decisions in followup point-releases has become normal. Liquid Glass is the sort of folly that was once limited to portfolio pieces and fanciful blog posts, complete with clumsy attempts to replicate Apple’s style of marketing copy; pretty little animations that showed as much inexperience in UX as they did proficiency in Photoshop. Now, these missteps come from the company itself.

In some cases this is a good thing. Alan Dye's legacy at Apple was disastrous and, as I said before, "Liquid Glass" has made people confused, frustrated and made a product that should be "just works" to "where can I find X"?

But all the other people that are leaving, the ones with unique and incredible knowhow, are going away as well, not because they don't like Apple, but again, they think "financially" not "emotional". They are not fans and want to work for the company that is changing the world. They are going to a company that pays them more.

The LLM and governing by numbers

There are other concerns besides. Apple is by no means free of the LLM madness that has been strong-armed into all discourse, but it is seemingly free of the ability to effectively execute in that area. The company appears to be walking the worst possible line between a Nintendo-like generational caution, and a panicked casting-around to try and leapfrog its own false starts. Siri is widely known to be the most primitive of its ilk, despite presumably having unequalled privilege of access to the systems it runs on, and there’s the unsettling feeling that Apple is losing ground logarithmically while its competitors steadily improve.

Apple's hit and miss in LLMs is something that will be studied for generations. Companies were releasing amazing technology while Apple released a fake demo and Genmoji, all because they didn't want to invest when it became time to do it. Now they are catching up and forced to partner with Google to get something working.

At the time the numbers were not there, but anyone that has been using Siri for a while knows that even if the numbers are not there, for Apple, having a tool like that is embarrassing, especially for a company with the money that they have.

Things will probably turn

The thing is, for now at least, none of this seems to matter, because the investors are happy. Apple is the gold standard for hyper-profitability and predatory monetisation. Huge margins, hardware which runs only their own operating systems, operating systems that run only approved software (with even the Mac creeping ever-closer to an iOS-style lockdown), and software which pays its tithe to Cupertino at every stage. Leverage upon leverage, incompatible with our quaint old-world perceptions of ownership, so long as the money flows.

Markets are false friends. They will support you when you're up but as soon as there's another "shiny" or you're in trouble they will drop you. Fans won't drop you even when you're down. So focusing on "clients" and "market growth" is something that works when it works but it turns on you quickly.

Bankruptcy

I hope very much to be wrong, but I fear that Apple’s skyrocketing revenue masks a steep institutional decline that is already well underway, propelled by the fact that success itself, improperly managed, is a poison. The Apple I see today is eating itself; fat and comfortable, acclimatised to compromise of principle, having lost both its edge and its wary memory of what facilitated its ascendance.

Heading for bankruptcy once more, in every sense except the financial.

The notion of bankruptcy of one of the biggest companies in the world is absurd, but Matt's point is spot on. There are a lot of bankruptcies and Apple is currently going through their second one.

Some people are hopeful

A lot of people are asking for Tim Cook to step out, and people are hopeful that it will change things. It might but not in the short term. Apple is patient to a fault and careful as well. Also Tim will step onto the board, meaning that the CEO will still have to be accountable to him.

Again, Tim Cook has been an amazing CEO on paper, but for the fans that hoped to continue to get an Apple that once shared our values of privacy and "doing the right thing", seeing this erosion doesn't feel good.

So I'm not hopeful that the new CEO will change things, at least not undo the reputational damage that was done.

Final Thoughts

As Matt, I'm really hopeful I'm wrong, but for things to go back on track we would need something close to what Steve did when Apple was almost bankrupt the first time.

Photo by Anna Zakharova on Unsplash