Last week's "It's Glowtime" event was very strong for Apple. It might have been the single strongest iPhone event since the introduction of the iPhone X. All three platforms are now in excellent, appealing, and coherent shape[...]
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But, still, flying home from California on Tuesday, I was left with a feeling best described as ennui.
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My dissatisfaction flying home from last week's event is, ultimately, selfish. I miss having my mind blown. I miss being utterly surprised. I miss occasionally being disappointed by a product design that stretched quirky all the way to wacky. I miss being amazed by something entirely unexpected out of left field.
I felt that, too, but I disagree with the framing. The product lines are indeed very strong right now, but the event itself was boring. I started multitasking instead of fully paying attention and even then felt I'd wasted my time watching. It just felt too long and too canned. The products themselves seem fine. I'm not tempted to upgrade my iPhone 15 Pro, though after so many years of iPhones I think it would be unreasonable to expect to be after just one year.
Mossberg correctly cites AirPods and Apple Watches as big successes of the post-Jobs era. Not coincidentally, they are two of the three platforms Apple featured in last week's event -- and two of the three that people carry wherever they go.
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What we're seeing is Tim Cook's Apple. Cook is a strong, sage leader, and the proof is that the entire company is now ever more in his image. That's inevitable. It's also not at all to say Apple is worse off. In some ways it is, but in others, Apple is far better. I can't prove any of this, of course, but my gut says that a Steve-Jobs-led Apple today would be noticeably less financially successful and industry-dominating than the actual Tim-Cook-led Apple has been.
I think that's probably right. I bet the software would be better, though. The more interesting question is the long term state of the company and its products, which of course we don't yet know.
Cook almost never reveals his true passionate self in public. But at least one time he did. At the 2014 annual shareholders meeting, Cook faced a question from a representative of the right-wing National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR). As reported by Bryan Chaffin at The Mac Observer.
I have a somewhat different take on the famous "bloody ROI" response. Everyone focuses on how Tim Cook stood up for doing things that are right, even if they aren't profitable. But the context is that Cook himself had started the ROI discussion by stating that Apple's environmental programs were good for the bottom line. He was then asked a valid question -- whether this was only true because of government subsidies. That would be interesting to know, but we never got the answer because he dodged the question and pivoted to accessibility and worker safety.
We know that Tim Cook loves data. But he wants us to believe that Apple has never run the environmental numbers, just like it has no idea whether the App Store is profitable. He's always on message. And here the message is that Apple has its priorities, which shan't be questioned.
Whenever an Apple developer or customer complains about something that sucks but could likely be fixed by the application of money, which Apple has, people respond that Apple's hands are tied. It has to look out for its profitability and shareholders. But a perk of being CEO is that you can ignore smaller asks like these while spending tens of billions on TV content and cars. The ROI only matters when you say it does. You get to decide whether a cost that would make people happy is frivolous or an important investment in the future health of the platform.
Riccardo Mori:
Ever since Apple switched to this pre-packaged delivery format, the novelty has worn down quickly and these events all look like sophisticated PowerPoint presentations and, worse, they all look alike. When I try to isolate one from the last dozen I've watched, I can't. They're all a blur.
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My impression that Apple is severely removed from how actual people use their phones is reinforced every time they show a short video to illustrate how certain features work. These videos are supposed to showcase how Apple products naturally embed in regular people's daily lives. What we see are slices from utopia. Impeccable people moving about in their impeccable homes living glossy-magazine lives, everybody fluidly relating to their personal tech devices.
Ben Thompson:
The lack of a price increase for the iPhone 16 Pro made more sense when I watched Apple's presentation; I found the updates over the iPhone 15 Pro to be pretty underwhelming. The A18 Pro chip is on TSMC's newest 3nm process, there is a new Camera Control button, and the screen is a bit bigger with bezels that are a bit smaller; that's really about it from a hardware perspective, although as always, Apple continues to push the envelope with computational photography. And, frankly, that's fine: last year's iPhone Pro 15, the first with titanium and USB-C, was for me the iPhone I had been waiting for (and most customers don't upgrade every year, so these and other previous updates will be new features for them).
What I find much more compelling -- and arguably the best deal in iPhone history -- is the $799 iPhone 16 (non-Pro). The A18 chip appears to be a binned version of the A18 Pro (there is one less GPU and smaller caches), while the aforementioned bump to 8GB of RAM -- necessary to run Apple Intelligence -- matches the iPhone 16 Pro. There is one fewer camera, but the two-camera system that remains has been reconfigured to a much more aesthetically pleasing pill shape that has the added bonus of making it possible to record spatial video when held horizontally. The screen isn't quite as good, and the bezels are a bit larger, but the colors are more fun. It's a great phone, and the closest the regular iPhone has been to the Pro since the line separated in 2017.
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Software, specifically AI, is what will drive differentiation going forward, and even in the best case scenario, where Apple's AI efforts are good enough to keep people from switching to Google, the economics of software development push towards broad availability on every iPhone, not special features for people willing to pay a bit more. It's as if the iPhone, which started out as one model for everyone before bifurcating into the Pro and regular (and SE) lines, is coming full circle to standardization; the difference, though, is its value is harvested through R&D intensive services that need to run everywhere, instead of unit profits driven by hardware differentiation.
Eric Schwarz:
I think this nails what a lot of the tech community has been complaining about for the last few years -- Apple is kind of boring now, but in a way that you can safely buy the current iPhone when you feel like it is time to upgrade.