In the summer of 2008 Apple made a great launch, one colossal and one that was one of the greatest disasters in its history. You probably remember the first two (the iPhone 3G and, above all, the App Store), but perhaps not what was that disaster. It is normal: they got us almost forgotten about that.
That disaster was mobilemethe email platform that sought to compete with Exchange or with the Blackberry systems. However, its operation was An absolute disasterwith service drops and unexpected charges to user credit cards. So terrible was what David Pogue, an known editor of The New York Times, changed the name to Mobilemess (playing with “Mess”, “mess” in English “).
Two years later Mobileme was kaput. It was something later when we knew how that disaster was managed internally. In 2011 Fortune published an article in which they precisely told how shortly after the launch, Steve Jobs called the Mobileme team to a meeting:
“According to a participant in the meeting, Jobs entered dressed with his characteristic black neck jersey and blue jeans, gathered his hands and asked a simple question:
“Can anyone tell me what Mobileme is supposed to do?” After receiving a satisfactory response, he continued: “And why don’t you do it?”.
During the next half hour, Jobs rebuked the group. “You have stained Apple’s reputation,” he told them. “You should hate them for having disappointed you mutually.” Public humiliation especially enraged Jobs. Walt Mossberg, the influential gadget columnist from the Wall Street Journal, had criticized Mobileme. “Mossberg, our friend, doesn’t write good things about us anymore,” said Jobs. In the act, Jobs appointed a new executive to direct the group. “
History showed how for Jobs that ruling, now practically forgotten, had a capital importance.
But that was the Apple before.
Something smells in Apple
John Gruber, well -known analyst and responsible for the Dary Fireball blog, I published this week A worrying analysis of Apple’s situation. It was titled “Something is rotten in the state of Cupertino”, and in it explained how different this Apple is now to which at that time managed Steve Jobs.
This expert focused on what happened with Apple Intelligence in general and with the new version of Siri enhanced by the particular. In Apple they are clear followers in generativeand it does not seem that this will change in the short term.
Apple Intelligence functions are limited and very modest, and while the greats of technology and various startups do not stop surprising us with new advances and increasingly striking functions, in Apple they continue with an approach that seemed interesting (very focused on privacy) but that is being disappointing in its exasperating deployment.
But the really worrying thing is what happened with Siri. After the wwdc last year They announced that “Siri will be able to offer intelligence adapted to the user and the information of his device. For example, a user can say:” Play that podcast that Jamie recommended you, “and Siri will locate and reproduce the episode, without the user having to remember if he was mentioned in a text or in an email.”
But both that and other promising options of Siri were only part of an empty speech, because There was never a public demonstration of those options. The only place where we could see it was in a pre -recorded demo “Not live,” in which Siri did all that Apple said he could do. As Gruber explained:
“What Apple showed about the next” personalized Siri “in the WWDC was not a demo. It was a conceptual video. Conceptual videos are shit, and a sign of a company in disorder, if not in crisis.”
Not only that: in September They returned To promote that future theoretical with an advertisement in which Siri understood the personal context – in what situation we were – to respond to a request. A few days ago Apple announced without more than that option it would not arrive until at least next year.
Apple not only did not demonstrate in public these new Siri options, even in a preliminary version: the only thing we could see were conceptual videos about how the characteristic should work. And that announcement with Bella Ramsey – actress famous for her role in ‘The Last of Us’— has been withdrawn from YouTube this week without more.
Are Too bad signsand all point to the same: to a fiasco.
One worrying, because Apple did not do these things. He has rarely promised the launch of products and then back. It happened for example With the famous wireless load basebut this was a minor accessory. Siri’s dimension had, which is a theoretically crucial component for Apple to compete in the AI field.
And that leads us to ask what is happening in Apple. In the last 30 years the company has managed to build an enormously solid reputation and extraordinary credibility. People choose their products because they “simply work” – with many quotes -, and despite some more or less important slips –Hello, butterfly keyboardhello Throttling-, their products continue to stand out for their reliability.
Apple’s credibility begins to make waters
But that credibility staggers now and joins other signals that can be worrisome. We have been waiting for years for Apple to throw its new disruptive product, but They have never achieved it. It was not his Apple Watch – despite being a very popular product, such as the airpods – and of course They have not been the vision pro.
Supposedly They canceled their ‘Project Titan’ And its intentions – just officers – to develop an ‘Apple Car’, but it is even more striking that the fact that two years have arrived since Chatgpt arrived and the most powerful company on the planet can only boast an assistant who Rewrite the emails or that generates cartoons. It is terrible.
Source: Trendline.
Apple’s situation also seems to be reflected in sales that remain colossal, but also They seem to have stagnated either go down. The company has gone from the minimalist catalog to calculated maximalismand even changing his launch calendar saying Goodbye to the annual cycle For many products. They need something freshand now they seem to be looking for it in their software: There is already talk of a radical redesign in iOS 19 Next year, but everything is unknowns about this project.
Even launches are less exciting. Pandemia forced Apple to move to pre -recorded events, and it seems that the company He liked thatbecause the company has focused completely on pre -recorded videos for the launch of all types of products. Before One was excited To a Keynote to see Cook live and his speaking live of his releases.
Now you will see a movie movie.
Remembering Blackberry
Is there good news? Not too many. The iPhone 16 They are everything but excitingand the new 16e iPhone are of everything but promising (at those price).
The only ones that are saved, curiously, They are your computersprobably the great forgotten. The Mac Mini M4 has been A breath of fresh airand the new Macbook Air M4 is An excellent renewal For that “portable for the masses” if you like the Mac of a lifetime.
In fact, Apple’s last great revolution has probably been that of its chips for its desktop and laptops. The launch of the Apple M1 laid the foundations of a revolution, and although their successors have not been so overwhelming, they have consolidated that great advantage that the company continues to have in the performance per watt. There are more powerful processors, yes, but In efficiency Apple chips remain the envy of the sector.
Apple’s economic figures, yes, are still colossal. Your services division It goes like a cannon and the company It already presumes of 1,000 million subscriptions to its different platforms, a simply exceptional figure.
That economic achievement is of course Tim Cook’s merit, to which We have been looking for successor for some time but what has proven to be a prodigious manager. When he took the company’s controls, Apple had a market capitalization of 350,000 million dollars. Today that capitalization is more than 3 billion dollars, almost 10 times more. The value of the shares has been multiplied by five, and the growth of income has been consistent and sustained.
Source: Sherwood News
If one only looks at economic results, everything seems to be good, but the problem is that Apple could be at a crossroads. Saving the distances the situation reminds us of which Blackberry lived. One would imagine that after the launch of the iPhone the company collapsed immediately.
What’s up.
As they point out In Sherwood NewsBlackberry had his best years just after that launch, and in fact in 2011 he achieved his revenue record with 20,000 million dollars. In 2012 the thing was also quite well, although they went down a little. It was in 2013 when they began to collapse, and since then they have not stopped doing it. Blackberry took almost six years to be irrelevant. Is that what awaits Apple?
It is impossible to know, but one thing is true: just like Blackberry (or Nokia) never reacted properly to the revolution that the iPhone raised, Apple seems not to be reacting properly to what the artificial intelligence raises. What has happened with Siri is the best demonstration of those problems, but there is an even greater.
That in Apple does not seem No one who throws a good angeras Jobs did when I noticed that the thing was not going well.
Image | Rawatx With Midjourney
In Xataka | Apple has choked artificial intelligence. And the continuous delays of the new Siri are the best example