Few tech companies are as influential, large and wealthy as Apple, a US company that produces billions in revenue every year largely thanks to its iPhones and subscription services to store files online, stream music and download applications. The decade that is about to end has certainly been dominated by smartphones, and Apple has been the protagonist (together with Google with its Android), but according to various observers it has not led to the birth of a new product that could even minimally repeat the worldwide success of iPhones, and this could be a symptom of a problem for society.
Walt Mossberg – one of the first journalists to deal with Internet and new technology issues, long-time Wall Street Journal reporter and now retired – wrote an article in The Verge lining up Apple's missed opportunities and successes in the past. last ten years, with a view to the end of the decade and the beginning of the next.
Mossberg compared some data to give an idea of Apple's importance and size. In 2019, the company generated revenues equal to six times those achieved in 2009. Its new headquarters, in Cupertino, California, are palatial and larger than the Pentagon, usually included at the top of the largest buildings ever built by mankind. . Each of Apple's top five divisions, when taken individually, could be included in Fortune magazine's list of 500 most profitable companies. But in addition to the economic results, there are those related to products and Apple's ability to be successful or not in promoting a certain way of doing business and seeing the world.
The decade began with Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, still at the helm of the company, albeit with the difficulties associated with his precarious health conditions. In January 2010, Jobs presented the first iPad, a few years after the presentation of the first iPhone, which was already changing the world of telephony and the way we access the Internet from virtually anywhere. The iPads were another huge success. The following year Jobs was forced to take a break from Apple for health reasons, which was then made official in the summer with his resignation as CEO of the company. Six weeks later he died, leaving control of Apple to Tim Cook, who still leads the company today.
Cook came from Apple's business coordinating global operations, so he was very familiar with the way the company worked, but – as Mossberg recalls – he was not very familiar with the concept of new product design and development. He therefore relied heavily on Jony Ive, Apple's designer and engineer who had contributed with Jobs to the creation of the company's most important commercial successes.
In addition to the success of the iPads, Apple had recently registered those of other products presented at the beginning of the decade: the iPhone 4, among the most successful smartphones ever made by Apple, and a new version of the MacBook Air laptops, which would be then imitated and copied by all the other producers. Under Cook, it would have taken almost five years before Apple presented a completely new product: the Apple Watch in 2015. However, it would have taken three evolutions of the same product, before the company found the right features to make it functional and appealing to part of a wider audience.
Mossberg writes that Apple's other great success in what is often referred to as “Cook era”, as opposed to that of Jobs, were the AirPods wireless earphones, popular in 2016 and which, especially in the United States, have sold a lot.
However, neither the Apple Watch nor the AirPods have achieved the impact or magnitude of the innovations presented by Steve Jobs. Some product categories also experienced a significant reduction in sales, such as iPads, following a saturation of the tablet market and less interest in their format. The drop in demand was certainly not down to Cook, and if you look around it, you probably won't find many great innovations in the tech sector for the decade, if you think that one of the most notable things was home assistants like Echo. by Amazon and Google Home.
However, Mossberg believes that Cook has played a significant role in some of Apple's failures, from the standpoint of product quality and lack of innovation:
The beloved and popular MacBook Air has been ignored for five years. On the other side of the scale, the Mac Pro – the pivot for audio, video and graphics producers – was first overlooked and then relaunched in 2013 in a way that put form so ahead of function that its maddened. reference users.
Some at Apple think that Cook has given too much power to Ive's design team by eliminating the balance that Jobs had managed to create between them and the engineers, at least until Ive left the company a few months ago.
This design setting first and foremost that took root under Cook has struck again with the MacBook Pro, leading to the production of laptops so thin they make their keyboards look bad and have USB-C ports. that require gleaming Macs to be used with horrifying adapters.
In his article, Mossberg still acknowledges Cook that he managed to better govern the company in a downward phase of smartphone sales, which is affecting all manufacturers in the main markets, especially in the West. Apple has diversified its offer as much as possible, creating products that respond to different demands and needs from its customers, while thinking of compensating for lower sales with higher prices. The company is also looking to push its services, such as streaming music, television, subscription video games, and online file saving, as much as possible to generate additional revenues from lower sales of its physical products.
In recent years, Apple has also chosen a very interesting path to make the protection of privacy one of its strengths, from a marketing point of view. Unlike Google, which for Android bases part of its model on the use of user data (for example for advertising purposes), Apple has made available to users options to minimize the use of their data and to better control who can access what, and how. Cook has called privacy a “human right” on several occasions.
Mossberg concludes his analysis of Apple's decade with a consideration of its future:
Apple remains what it has been for many years: the leading technology product company for individual consumers, a strong player not only in its industry, but in society at large. Now it is huge and rich too. But it is still unclear whether it will be the preferred provider of music, television programs or news services. And it's not even clear if he'll ever be able to make a hugely successful new product.
