Apple lacks strategic vision

They put the manufacturing and supply chain expert in charge, and that’s what they excel at now. But they lost Jobs and Ive, so now they don’t have the imagination, vision, and design expertise anymore.

They did make an attempt with the vision glasses, but it obviously flopped.

They succeeded for so long with top-down direction because the top had ideas. I think the best move would be to allow for more bottom-up direction. Give the engineers and designers license to run wild a bit.

It makes a lot of strategic sense but if you have so much money on the bank, then who wouldn't buy a silicon design firm to design your CPUs in house? I bet everyone here on HN would have suggested to do that if asked in a board meeting. The big surprise was how long it took Apple to bite the bullet.

Anyway, despite this, Apple still has their castle built in someone else's kingdom, namely TSMC.

Both of these products could be expected from any well run company. They are both very polished versions of something that already existed. The direction to optimize in was already clear. No one wants to compare Apple to a generic well run company, they want to compare Apple to itself a decade or two ago.

Others have said that if Jobs were still alive, AR would be ubiquitous by now, and everyone would have a stylish pair of Apple glasses. I think that is exactly right.

Instead there is an incredibly expensive VR scuba mask, with relatively little adoption. It's certainly not changing the way we use physical spaces and transforming society, which is something a previous Apple could have pulled off. Users and developers need to be shown how to get value from something radically new, and Apple hasn't done that recently.

> focussing on making the best consumer hardware of all time

Yes, but what use is the best consumer hardware when the software is degrading?

Considering the liquid glass thing, there's no one at Apple left who understands and cares about usability, for example.

Plus the iOSification of Mac OS for no good reason... maybe to make it less attractive to developers?

I think it's a combination of three things:

1) AI threatens to take-over how you use your phone, it threatens to reduce apps to an API that it will use on your behalf so you don't use the apps yourself

2) By doing that it commoditizes the hardware because the software experience is virtually identical across platforms, you say make a dinner reservation and it doesn't matter what calendar you use, what restaurant app etc

3) Apple is no longer assured to be able to gatekeep or ban these things so if they aren't producing the most useful or entrenched assistant someone else could become people's primary interface for iPhones

There's a lot of parallel with "super apps" -

> Apple’s fear of super apps is based on first-hand experience with enormously popular super apps in Asia. Apple does not want U.S. companies and U.S. users to benefit from similar innovations. For example, in a Board of Directors presentation, Apple highlighted the “[u]ndifferentiated user experience on [a] super platform” as a “major headwind” to growing iPhone sales in countries with popular super apps due to the “[l]ow stickiness” and “[l]ow switching cost.” For the same reasons, a super app created by a U.S. company would pose a similar threat to Apple’s smartphone dominance in the United States. Apple noted as a risk in 2017 that a potential super app created by a specific U.S. company would “replace[ ] usage of native OS and apps resulting in commoditization of smartphone hardware.”

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.njd.544...