Apple’s string of failures shows just how badly things need to change

Truly, Apple’s rise from near-bankruptcy to being one of the most valuable companies in the world is a story for the business history books. But as legendary football coach/analyst John Madden frequently said, “Winning is the best deodorant.” (that’s American football, for our U.K. audience.) When you’re riding high–and have been riding high for a couple of decades–it’s very hard to notice the parts of your business that have begun to emit a bit of an odor.

To take another page from football, Apple has a winning playbook, and it keeps using it. But if you keep calling the same plays without adapting and reacting, a winning playbook can become something much worse. In the past year, two major Apple product launches show just how calcified the company’s strategy has become–and how much it needs to change.

The unnecessary product launch

It was clear as a bell to anyone who knew anything about Apple that the Vision Pro wasn’t going to be a mass-market product. More than a year before the product shipped, there were rumors that it would be priced at more than $2,000 (a full $1,500 lower than its actual shipping price). Even at $2,000, it seemed like Apple’s headset couldn’t find much of a customer base. For months, I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t just going to be sold as a Developer Kit.

I think the Vision Pro and visionOS have a lot of potential in the long run, but it’s the earliest of days right now, and it’s going to take many years for this bet to pay off, if it ever does. Developers and users can buy a Vision Pro to get some amazing tech demos and imagine the future, but I wouldn’t recommend one to any regular person today.

But Apple hasn’t shipped a weird, niche, early-adopters-only product in decades. (To Apple’s credit, this is a way in which it isn’t sticking to the usual playbook.) Since Steve Jobs came back, pretty much everything has been calibrated to reach a large worldwide market of potential customers. As a result, the company’s product roll-out engine–a legendary one, copied across industries because it’s so successful–revved itself up and prepared to introduce the Vision Pro.

What a waste of time, money, and attention. It took eight months for Tim Cook to tell the Wall Street Journal that “At $3,500, it’s not a mass-market product… it’s an early-adopter product. People who want to have tomorrow’s technology today—that’s who it’s for.”

He’s not wrong, but it took him eight months to admit it because Apple is just not wired to quietly release a product that’s not really for the masses. To be fair, the world is not wired to accept any Apple product announcement as anything but earth-shattering. We’ve all been conditioned by Apple’s success and marketing strategies to think that way.

That Vision Pro launch was counterproductive. Now, the product carries at least a whiff of failure, and it could have been avoided. They weren’t ever going to sell millions of first-generation Vision Pros. Apple could’ve shown it off as a tech demo or released it as a developer kit, and the narrative would have been different.

But again, Apple’s just not wired that way. It’s a splashy product launch or nothing.

The feature roll-out overreaction

Apple got caught flat-footed on AI, a potentially existential mistake. To its credit, the company reacted: June’s WWDC announcements were primarily related to Apple Intelligence. The company needed to send a message that it might not be ahead, exactly, but it was on it and there was going to be AI goodness in Apple products, too.

I have no complaints about any of that. But what followed shows that Apple’s too busy following its old playbook: In the fall, Apple began a full-court press of marketing for the new iPhone and other devices that focused on Apple Intelligence. It used Apple Intelligence to try to sell new iPhones, even though the features weren’t available! Over the ensuing months, it oversold many of the features while continuing to promise functionality that is still waiting in the wings.

Apple Intelligence, as currently constituted, is half-baked–and I’m being generous. Anyone who carefully follows Apple understands why it’s this way, and I’d even say that I’m optimistic that the company will get out in front of it given enough time. But right now, implementations of many features are slapdash at best, and some of the most dazzling features announced in June are unlikely to ship until it’s almost June again.

Foundry

Apple needs to flog new iPhones every fall, it’s true. But was it the right call to sell a not-quite-there (figuratively or even literally) feature? It doesn’t seem so to me. And it undercuts Apple’s response to criticism of its problematic news summaries that it’s just beta software. Sure it is–beta software that’s shipping in final software and being heavily promoted to customers.

Going through the motions

A lot of Apple’s biggest blunders in the last decade seem tied to old ways of thinking, not adapting themselves to changing times. It has reacted to design failures like the “butterfly” keyboard in laptops slowly and tentatively. The Meta Ray-Ban sunglasses seem to exist very much in a product niche occupied by AirPods, but Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman suggests that we shouldn’t expect an Apple response until 2026 at the earliest. Apple once was able to create the iPod in a crash program in a matter of months, but today’s Apple is apparently the kind of ocean liner that takes a very long time to course correct.

And then there’s the company’s reaction to regulation–and, indeed, many of its anti-competitive policies and product strategies. A lot of these strategies are straight out of the playbook built by Steve Jobs during his return to the company and inculcated into the corporate culture. In those days, Apple was an underdog that was fresh from a near-death experience and desperately had to scrape to survive. Today’s Apple is a titan, but it still behaves like it’s a put-upon underdog in danger of being taken advantage of by the cold, cruel world. It’s a real “are we the baddies” moment in the making if the company would have a modicum of introspection.

Success has been very, very good to Apple in so many ways. But many of the traits that brought Apple here have become weaknesses. For the company to make the next couple of decades successful, it needs to show more adaptability.