Apple: Bringing Shame to Steve Jobs
Apple has changed. Once known as the innovative and chic technology provider, it has now morphed into an investor’s mess, its stocks having plunged within the past three months. How could this technology giant be waning?
Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, and ever since then, Apple has come out with several flops that never had the charm and originality of the first iPod, iPad and iPhone. Instead, since the appointment of Tim Cook as CEO, we have seen the creation of devices like the Apple TV and Apple Watch which completely flounder in the market. They seem to have all the charms an Apple product needs—they’re stylish and efficient and come along with the prestige that accompanies all Apple products. So why do they fail?
What makes Apple great is its ability to redefine what we thought was set in stone—the iPhone did this beautifully. Jony Ives, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniack excelled at producing something truly incredible, but they definitely didn’t invent the cell phone. Other great portable phones existed before the October of 2007—companies like Nokia, Sony and Blackberry were all producing excellent phones that did their jobs well and efficiently. But what Apple did do was open the door for new technologies to take hold. Apple analyzed flaws in classics like the Nokia 3310 and the Blackberry Pearl 8100 and vowed to produce a device that wouldn’t be bogged down with any of the problems faced by successful phones.
But instead of having more revelations like this, Apple has been making devices without much source material to build off (the most infamous of these being the Apple Watch). To be fair, there were electronic watches before Apple made them. Were they good? Not really. Did people need them? Not really. As a result, did they succeed? Definitely not. Apple really tried with their watch. They made it fashionable. They made it small. They catered it to all kinds of buyers—the athlete, the businessman, the mogul. But all in all, they tried way too hard to invent something that we simply didn’t need. Who needs another expensive piece of tech that will become obsolete within a year?
Even the iPhone has lost its charm. As Apple fights to keep up with competitors like Samsung and Sony, they stray from their ideas of simplicity and elegance. Instead of making the mechanics of the phone better, they spend their time making the exterior flashier with expensive-sounding colors like “rose gold” and “champagne.” Instead of dealing with more pressing issues, such as durability, they focus on adding poorly thought-out gimmicks like 3-D touch and two-tone flash. Back when Steve Jobs ran the show, these ideas would never have made it past the drawing board, much less onto a finished product. These were definitely innovations, but they were the wrong kind of innovations—they were things that no one wanted or needed, but showed up anyway.
It’s a fact that Apple made more mistakes under Tim Cook than it did under Steve Jobs. But Cook hasn’t been completely incompetent—under his guidance, the MacBook and iMac have all taken leaps forwards in terms of processing power and design. Apple Music has been good competition for services like Spotify, and it continues to grow and thrive. iPads keep getting thinner and thinner. And, honestly, the new iPhone really does look nice. Apple has had some bad ideas, but this doesn’t mean that the future of the company is going down the drain. The falling stock prices of Apple only serve as a wake-up call, and hopefully, they will take it in stride and perfect things that are actually useful.