Apple is missing the leadership of Steve Jobs in a jobsthropic cascade kind of way. Like humanity, where the theory determines what can be discovered, in the words of Albert Einstein, Apple lacks a cohesive theory of how it aims to support humanity with technology. And it shows.
No Me Gusta
Developers at Apple, some of my friends from Silicon Valley, are not to blame. They merely execute the orders their overlords give them. Those overlords are the mice at play when the cat (Steve Jobs) is away. Tim Cook does not understand technology, nor does he use and install his own; from the glaring mistakes and inconsistencies you can detect within five minutes on any Apple device, Steve Jobs would fire people over. The race to keep revenue growth alive deflates the excellence of product innovation.
No longer is Apple’s technology being tested vigorously to ensure the price-point of excellence it demands is met.
AI
As you can see from the simple example in the included featured image, the weather could not be displayed for many days in a row. HomeKit is a mess, iTunes playlists suddenly disappear, files in iCloud disappear, Apple Monitor does not wake up, MacBook Pro touch bar flickers, Siri produces more false positives than is acceptable, Apple stores in a store, at Best Buy, Target, or Walmart, are a mess, USB-C cables turn yellow and break, and Interface design violates fundamental rules of consistency. Copy-and-paste from anywhere to anywhere, a gating differentiation of Apple usability versus Microsoft some thirty years ago, no longer works consistently.
Should I go on? Can you imagine technology, under the suitcase term of Artificial Intelligence, getting closer to ruling humanity when the company pushing that supposed advantage does not have its shit together? I would love to set Apple straight, first with a vision and then with diligent execution.
Golden Corral
The vector of Apple’s technology is missing, as you can see from the discombobulated product strategy lacking any tangible cohesion. Steve Jobs’ approach of simplifying and focusing the product line into a simple quadrant with four significant products has been blown to pieces with a smorgasbord of literally hundreds of products. Today, Apple looks awfully like a restaurant forced to make anything people want rather than should eat.
With an increasingly discombobulated product strategy, I feel for Apple developers who are drowning in the complexity of nonsensical consequences from a cause left ill-defined.
Revenue Lags
Apple still produces massive revenue from selling downstream and subprime renditions of Steve Jobs’ vector spread out into oblivion. But be forewarned; revenue always lags product reality. Positive or negative. The larger the revenue and the larger supply of greater-fools, the larger the lag. Warren Buffett be damned to keep the make-believe of Apple alive.
Apple no longer stands out by the excellence of the vector they aim to deploy. They are becoming a me-too technology provider, no longer the best at whatever they aim to achieve. You can clearly see how Apple lags Google and Microsoft on many fronts, and the embarrassing missteps to make up for being asleep a the wheel of improving humanity.
It is sad to see what Apple has become.
