Is the Apex of Apple Computer Now in Its Past? :: Monday Eluding-My-Grasp Weblogging
One of the many, many issues that I see is supremely important, but where my personal VAR is very limited...
One of the many, many issues that I see is supremely important, but where my personal VAR is very limited: how the fact that Apple Computer’s leadership keeps score by current profits and stock price rather than by changing the world for the better greatly limits its utility for humanity considered as an anthology intelligence, may well even limit its long-run profitability, and leads there to be a good chance that its apex is now in the past…
I am now up to a list of six different things that modern corporations are, or, rather, can be:
Technology forcers,
Production networks that create value for stakeholders—from raw material suppliers all the way to ultimate users—and so provide them with wealth and social power
Investment vehicles for transferring wealth through time and building it,
Strategic actors that manipulate the situation to grab the lion's share of the surplus from the current production network for their investors, their executives, and (some of) their skilled workers,
Bouncing balls in financial-market-casino roulette wheels, and
Meme-stock pledges of allegiance to some utopian, technological, or political-cultural movement.
In its history, Apple Computer has been all six of these. Its most important use for humanity, considered as an anthology intelligence has been, of course, (1). Its second most importance has been as (2). It's third most important has been as (3). As (4) and (5) it has been a significant minus. And what utility it has had at (6) has been a result of that aspect's providing it with a runway for (1), (2), and (3).
Today, I am thinking about (4): Apple Computer as a strategic actor that manipulates the situation to grab the lion's share of the surplus from the current production network. How that may bring the whole thing crashing down over the next decade. And I am wondering whether the extraordinary success at (1) and (2) of the Apple Silicon hardware project may turn out in retrospect to have been a true catastrophe. By masking the emergence of other weaknesses, it may turn out to have been a truly catastrophic success. That will turn out to be the case if the past decade has seen them grow to such a degree that by the time they became visible to those with the power to change them, they were too set in stone for that to be possible.
What were and are those weaknesses? I see them as twofold:
A belief that Apple Computer deserves to continue to see its profits compounding, via the squeezing of every single possible dollar out of Services revenue.
An enormous fear of losing control of the situation and thus becoming once again, as in the late 1990s, dependent for its very existence on the goodwill of other companies—companies that could and would squash it like a bug if not for the vicissitudes of short run, profit-potential and long-run antitrust-enforcement fear.
I see John Gruber and company as our best current guides to these issues:
Gruber, John. 2025. Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino. March 22, 2025. Daring Fireball. <https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_the_state_of_cupertino>.
Gruber, John. 2025. The Talk Show: “Podcasting Technology Cadence”. March 23, 2025. Daring Fireball. <https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/03/23/the-talk-show-419>.
Gruber, John. 2025. “Tim, Don’t Kill My Vibe”. March 24, 2025. Daring Fireball. <https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/03/24/irace-vibe-killing>.
Gruber, John. 2025. Apple Silicon Is Groundbreaking for AI. March 19, 2025. Daring Fireball. <https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/03/19/apple-silicon-is-groundbreaking-for-ai>.
Tsai, Michael. 2025. Rotten. March 13, 2025. Michael Tsai: Blog. <https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/03/13/rotten/>.
Irace, Bryan. 2025. Tim, Don’t Kill My Vibe. March 21, 2025. <https://irace.me/vibe>.
What is the bottom line from this?
I see two distinct issues here:
1) the overall status of Apple, as laid out by Prof DeLong. There is serious concern about Apple's future due to their seeming inability to find any significant new technology or market since the Watch, itself only a perfection of technologies pioneered by others. (*)
2) that fear that "Apple Intelligence" aka Apple AI aka {Apple LLM +hype} is a 'failure' as described by John Gruber. The thing is, the current generation of "AI" - the sixth since 1945 by my counting, although it could be more - isn't even close to proving that it isn't pure fraud. Even setting aside the massive theft of intellectual property that "AI" firms have engaged in their products are so far showing that garbage-in/garbage-out holds true on a massive scale as well as local, and that pumping meme stonks is the real road to riches. Not much there there.
And I suspect with respect to (2) the real problem with Apple Intelligence is that the Apple researchers and employees assigned to work on it have too much integrity and respect for their employer's brand to pump out nonsense and call it polished, or even working, product.
(*) the M-series and current A-series CPUs are incredible feats of engineering and beat the pants off anything close to level playing field competition, but Apple doesn't sell them to anyone outside Apple AFAIK. The fate of the Lightning connector, superior to anything else for eight years but never licensed outside Apple and therefore with no tech industry or political support, should be instructive on this point but probably isn't.
The only Apple product I own is an iPad Pro that I use for choral singing. There is nothing that comes close to FourScore on Android. I build my own PC workstation for half the cost that I would pay for an Apple Mac. My phone is a Google Pixel which is also cheaper than an iPhone with similar specs. Apple is 'maybe' great if you buy into their OS but this entails added cost. Whether Apple is on the downward slope, I don't know.