Profiles in Courage: Apple Edition
We're about a week and a half out from WWDC – which will be an interesting one this year for a number of reasons that potentially have little to do with what is actually announced on stage. And, in fact, what is not announced, or talked about, may end up being the bigger story. And if that's the case, it will be Apple's own fault. Not only for the lack of execution on their end, internally, but also some of the curious choices they're making externally.
Case in point, here's John Gruber with an update about this year's version of The Talk Show Live, a taping of his podcast which has become a staple of WWDC, to the point where for the past decade, Apple themselves have unofficially sanctioned the event, by sending executives on stage to talk to Gruber. But this year:
Ever since I started doing these live shows from WWDC, I’ve kept the guest(s) secret, until showtime. I’m still doing that this year. But in recent years the guests have seemed a bit predictable: senior executives from Apple. This year I again extended my usual invitation to Apple, but, for the first time since 2015, they declined.
This is wild. Both because they declined – again, for the first time in a decade – but more so because they have to know the signal it sends in declining.1 At best, it looks like they're trying to avoid answering any non-staged questions about how things are going. At worst, it looks like they're freezing Gruber out for a few recent critical posts about the company – notably, his "Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino" post about the Apple Intelligence shitshow back in March.
Even if that's not explicitly what Apple is doing here,2 they simply must know that's what it looks like. And it's just about the worst look imaginable. It's something the Trump administration would do, not Apple.
But the truth is that this is what Apple does and has long done. Gizmodo was famously frozen out after the whole iPhone-in-a-bar situation. Later, Mark Gurman was persona-non-grata for all of his various Apple scoops (though Apple later started "playing ball" with Gurman again once he shifted to Bloomberg). Though both of those cases were around scoops that "spoiled" Apple announcements. This would be something slightly different. A freezing over an opinion. Albeit a strongly critical one, but still. Just words.
Can Apple really be that thin-skinned? Again, yes. While similar "bans" were never as explicit as it was around the Gizmodo one (which was undoubtedly dictated from Steve Jobs himself),3 anyone who has covered Apple knows there have always been less explicit bans – never really talked about, and more simply chalked up to the "sin of omission", that is, simply choosing not to play ball with anyone too critical of the company.
Unlike, say, the White House, Apple is a company and it's their right in this regard. That doesn't mean it's right, but it is what it is. But it also doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. It has generally worked for them as a strategy because, as the hottest and eventual most valuable company in the world, any publication was at a distinct disadvantage without such access.4 And so there was some level of access journalism as dictated by Apple in a way no other company could command.
But times have changed. Apple is now going the wrong way when it comes to their market cap relative to their peers. That hardly matters for anything other than to perhaps showcase that they're losing their luster in the eyes of many, including investors. And that's because investors read the same headlines and reports that you do. Apple is absolutely under assault right now on basically all fronts. The narrative is rather quickly spiraling out of control.
Some of that is their own fault. Some of it is not. But it doesn't matter. What matters is how they react to the situation. Do they regroup and get back to creating great products to silence the critics? Or do they simply silence the critics?
The latter is just so comically shortsighted. Again, I get that it has somewhat worked for them in the past. But the times have changed. Apple's complete and utter bellyflop in AI should be indicative of that, if nothing else.
They now need the critics. Junior people inside of Apple need them to push back against the bad ingrained habits of the senior people. And senior people need them as a gut and reality check with their own egos – especially at a company like Apple, where many now in charge have been there for decades. I'm not saying they're bad people, I'm saying they're people. Like anyone would, they can fall victim to thinking their shit can't stink after years of being told as much by the market.
When the market starts to tell them differently, the answer is not to only listen to the part of the market singing the same old praises. That may not be explicitly how companies fall, but it's indicative of their falling.
This is all obvious stuff. But it's also obviously not obvious to Apple at the moment. But it should be. Before it's too late.5
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
1 If Apple gave Gruber an actual reason, he doesn't state it. And it's certainly possible – perhaps even probable – that they didn't give him an explicit reason, beyond declining.
2 One could easily imagine them trying to blame being "too busy" as any "official" reason for turning down such an event. Not too busy for myriad other events though, including WWDC itself, of course. One thing to watch: do Apple executives appear elsewhere that week to talk about the event? I'm guessing they do!
3 Some may recall in an era long gone, when Jobs also froze out Time magazine over a profile he didn't like in the early 1980s. The author of that profile, in particular, was the focus on Jobs' wrath: one Michael Moritz. FWIW, it's also worth reading Brian Lam's look-back on the Gizmodo/iPone situation after Jobs passed away.
4 I would just note here this whole dynamic -- not with Apple in particular, but within the whole industry -- is why my general policy is not to engage with companies in most situations. Obviously, if I'm factually wrong about something, I want to hear that and correct it. But as Spyglass has grown, a number of companies/people have reached out with access to certain people/events/etc. I've turned such things down. And that's my general stance unless I feel like I need to say, see something, in order to better inform my opinion on it. But I also have quite a few luxuries that others do not, I recognize -- having lived on various sides of these worlds for a few decades now...
5 Sending someone to The Talk Show Live taping now after they've Steisand effected it, would take real... courage.