Apple’s Flight to Safety
At first I was confused by the opening of Apple’s iPhone event last week. Why trot out an old Steve Jobs quote about design for an event that was no more focused on design than any other Apple event? Sure, all of their operating systems were getting a fresh coat of paint, but those were outlined at WWDC months prior. And yes, the iPhone Air was a bigger design change than we get most years, but it’s seemingly more of an engineering feat as the overall look of the device is similar, “just” thinner! Anyway, subsequent press interviews that various Apple executives have done, and just thinking about it more, and I think I have my (obvious) conclusion. The usage of the Jobs statement about design was less about design and more about making a statement: that Apple was still Apple.
After months of hand-wringing and endless chatter about Apple’s position with AI — with internal turmoil spilling into the press — I think Tim Cook and the rest of Apple’s executive team decided to hit pause and take a step back. While Apple has certainly had trouble wrapping their heads around this new market — a sentiment the stock market has made pretty clear — at the end of the day, Apple still sells the devices that are the envy of the entire industry. From the iPhone to the MacBook, Apple still makes the devices on which much of the world uses the latest and greatest AI. That still matters — to the tune of billions upon billions of dollars in sales of said hardware.
Maybe it was time for Apple to stop apologizing that this is all they do and to go back to focusing on doing it.
That’s not to say they’re abandoning AI, clearly they’re not. But it’s also important to maintain perspective here. AI, for all the hype, is still incredibly early, technology-wise. When Tim Cook says that Apple still can be a key player here, I don’t read that as being disingenuous — despite the early struggles, he might very well be right. It sort of depends on just how early we are in the cycle and what elements end up mattering. On the extreme: if the continued race to build cutting-edge “frontier” LLMs asymptotes into an insanely expensive boondoggle, Apple will look incredibly smart having sat back and watched it play out. At the other end, if Apple is sitting on their hands — hands with access to near endless profits that is mostly being used to buyback stock at the moment — while others create the future technology that will end up vital to Apple… well, that would be bad.
The reality will probably be somewhere in between those two extremes. And because it’s all still moving so fast, there’s certainly a number of situations where Apple looks savvy for sitting back and waiting. I would argue that if they’re not learning during that “waiting” time, that’s a major problem. But they’ve made enough changes at this point that they seem to understand that. And now it’s just a question of if what they learn can lead to great products or if some of the internal cultural issues that have clearly led to the missteps to date keep holding them back.
We’ll see. But in the meantime, it’s not like Apple is just going to stop making iPhones, or MacBooks, or iPads, or Apple Watches, or AirPods, or even Vision Pros! And again, they shouldn’t be embarrassed that this is what they do! It’s important for everyone, including all of the players in AI, of course.
And so you couple this with various reports about robust hardware pipelines and the messaging this past week and I think we see an Apple not necessarily retreating to safety, but certainly flying back there! “Let’s remind the world why they need us!” you might imagine someone like Greg Joswiak saying from a marketing perspective.1 That doesn’t mean completely avoiding talking about AI, but talking about it tangentially. Talking about how the hardware is going to be insanely great at running such technology. And this will be underscored if and when they strike a deal with Google to bring Gemini power to their own software and services. Perhaps alongside models from OpenAI and perhaps even Anthropic too. Because why not offer your users the best? Apple hasn’t always done that — see: Apple Maps and ironically enough, NVIDIA chips back in the day — but generally they try to make that happen — see: the Google Search deal even after Jobs’ “thermonuclear war” threats.
If you can’t beat the best, why not offer the best to your user base while focusing on where you can be the best?
I mean, there are reasons, of course. The same reasons why Apple eventually replaced Intel chips with their own Silicon and more recently, Qualcomm chips — and yes, Google Maps, way back when. And the risk of being beholden to other technology is very real with AI, as mentioned. But at least for now, partnering seems like the better path forward. While you watch to see how important owning some part of the AI stack becomes…
Again, there are real risks there. And they’re probably more acute than the risks have been with other technologies in the past because AI is moving so fast. My mind also goes to Apple’s mantra of the importance of the marriage between hardware and software. There is a world in which AI sort of replaces the software element of this equation. What if a company, say one working with your former master of design (and much of his former Apple team), creates a new level of synergy between hardware and software — in the form of AI?
In the more immediate term, Meta is breaking all their piggy banks to come after Apple because they’ve been the one completely beholden to another company’s platform. Can smart glasses end the smartphone’s run of dominance? Undoubtedly not. What about AR glasses? I also doubt it. But Meta is going to try it all and AI certainly gives them more of a shot than they had before. If some other form factor starts working, Meta will do what it does and shamelessly copy the hell out of it.
Of course, one man’s “copying” is another man’s “perfecting”. And that has long been Apple’s general playbook. It’s interesting how these companies almost mirror each other at times, from AI struggles on down, no?
Anyway, the point is that Apple has a line to walk here, and it’s especially fine. But my read on their recent statements, from the Steve Jobs quote on down, is that they’re going to double down on their strengths at the moment — hardware and design — flexing to remind the world what they do. And that what they do, works.
Put another way, after months spent being on defense, I think this signals an Apple going back on offense. And I suspect we’re going to see a flurry of product launches over the next couple of years to back that up. All the while, AI will continue to shake itself out and shape itself up. And Apple will be there, watching, hopefully learning.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 Perhaps a bit too V for Vendetta? ↩