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John Ternus took over the reins at Apple this week, and while the company is by no means in danger, the truth is it has been gliding by on its reputation for far too long.
Yes, Apple’s consumer products were incredibly innovative in the ‘90s and (especially) the ‘00s, but since then it’s mostly been relying on its superior design and superior reputation along with the solid-but-not-spectacular successes of the Apple Watch and AirPods to keep it afloat.
All while clinging to a host of mediocre products it seems to have little interest in making better.
But the question is, for how much longer?
It’s possible that the rumored new foldable iPhone will restore the company to its former glory.
Though unlikely because a phone that folds in half is a party trick, not a revolution.
And Apple needs a revolution, or at least something that tells us that they stand for something more than “white.”
But as a service for Mr. Ternus (whose name Google Doc’s autocorrect keeps perniciously turning into “tetanus”) I will outline some of the key places where Apple has dropped the ball over the past two decades.
Why It Matters
Native Apps
It may be hard for some of you to believe, but if you were cool back in around 2003, you had a dot mac email account rather than an AOL one.
At some point though, Apple decided to change the .mac suffix to .me and then eventually to .icloud.
Which I am sure made sense to them, but was confusing AF for the rest of us.
They also did nothing to make their mail apps even slightly user friendly. Which was a shame given the sales pitch was that they seamlessly integrated with your iPhone and iMac. Which they sort of did, sort of didn’t, but they lacked so many of the more useful features of Google Mail, that people just gave up on it and started using browser-based email instead.
Apple’s other suite—Pages, Numbers and Keynote—never measured up to Google either, despite having the massive advantage of coming preinstalled on every phone and laptop. The lack of care put into the software from a company that prides itself on its hardware is, to be frank, mind boggling.
To wit, it’s 2026 and you still can’t turn a list into bullets on Pages in a single click.
And what’s most mind boggling is that they’ve kept at it all these years. It would have been one thing if they'd sunset the apps back in 2015, or given them minor overhauls.
But instead, they’ve kept pushing them, making minor tweaks here or there that do little to bring them anywhere close to parity with Google or even Microsoft. And that truly makes no sense to me as it’s a very un-Apple position to be in: number three and doing almost nothing to remedy it.
Or nothing that would make a difference, anyway.
Apple Music
If ever there was an app whose tag line should have been “Okay, Boomer”, it’s Apple Music. Beloved by fans of long guitar solos that they swear sound so much better than on Spotify, the app has never really lived up to its pedigree either.
Unlike Pages and Numbers, it’s not arguably “bad,” it’s just that there is nothing all that special about it, nothing that shouts “this comes from Apple.”
It was behind the curve in a lot of changes that swept music apps, personalization and discovery in particular. And there was always something about it that felt a little too corporate, especially for a music app.
So that all the kids wound up on Spotify and now YouTube Music is sweeping up the rest of that cohort, because of podcasts and because it comes bundled in with YouTube Premium, which, for Zoomers, is their number two app after Netflix.
Apple TV
The Apple TV device is not without its fans. But those fans don’t amount to anything resembling the sort of market share that Apple should have for a product it was one of the early proponents of.
Here the problem was that Apple thought they could follow their 2000s playbook and charge top dollar for a product that was sleekly designed.
The problem was though that the competition, Roku in particular, was not the wet hot mess that competing products were in the ‘00s, and consumers could not justify the massive price gap: the lower priced Rokus were around $30 while the Apple TV was $150 and up, a good $100 more expensive than any other device.
This was a huge miss, because owning the TV operating system has become a critical piece of who owns the overall TV ecosystem and Apple lost the ability to be the entertainment hub for everything from movie rentals to music to streaming and linear TV. Which is an area they could—and should—have easily dominated.
Homepod
This is another one where Apple’s greed got the better of them. They seem to have decided that the audio on their Homepod device was so superior that it demanded a price almost double that of the Amazon Echo device.
Consumers politely disagreed as anyone who cared about sound quality was getting a full-on multi-speaker system like Sonos, whereas everyone else was quite happy paying a third of the price for the quite decent sounding Echo.
That, and Alexa was just much, much better at everything than Siri.
Siri
Speaking of Siri… Apple rolled out their voice recognition software in 2011 and it’s been the source of much angst for both Apple and for users ever since.
For a while people were mildly amused by how badly it worked, mostly because there was no real competition so it came off as a novelty that was a work in progress.
But then in 2015, Amazon rolled out the Echo and one of its key selling points was how much better its Alexa voice assistant was than Siri.
Apple has had a decade to catch up, but, as with the software, has not made any significant progress. Siri still lags far behind Alexa, let alone all of the voice-operated versions of the consumer LLMs.
So here again, the same question arises: if Apple wasn’t going to take Siri seriously, why have they kept it alive for 15 years? And if they have been trying, why do they keep failing where others succeed?
The Siri screw up is part of a bigger screw up around AI in general that has left Apple playing catch-up to its peers. Granted, a new and improved Siri is allegedly launching this fall, but a decade of punch lines is going to be hard to erase.
Viewed individually, none of these screw-ups are all that significant on their own. But taken together, as part of a pattern, they show that Apple has not only not innovated much over the past 20 years, it’s kept mediocre products going for just as long too.
Versus just cutting its losses and sunsetting them and either giving up or buying a more successful startup in the space.
What You Need To Do About It
My last sentence is a clue: Apple tends to avoid buying the sort of companies that could move it to the next level, or at least move beyond the failed products it clings on to for decades.
Yes, it’s bought some small companies like Shazam, but not anything that can fix its problems.
And that is something you need to consider. I mean look at how well Instagram worked out for Meta and YouTube for Alphabet.
So you have three options: you can kill off things like Pages (I believe “sunset” is the preferred euphemism), you can replace them with a successful company you buy (if such a thing exists) or you can double down and actually try and make them better than the category leaders.
Because burying your head in the sand and pretending they are not a problem is not the way to go, and it will eventually damage your brand image—the cool factor of those shiny white stores and iPhones and Macbooks is only going to last for so long.
And you want to keep that “we’re the innovation company” thing going.
One last thing, though clearly a bit further down the priorities list: you really should figure out what you are doing with Apple TV+.
Is it just a marketing tool, so the fact that there’s no real library is okay? Or do you want it to be a full-on media company, something that will ultimately compete with Netflix and YouTube?
Either option is fine, it’s just the not picking a lane part that’s the problem.
Good luck!
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