Apple's Not Dying, but Fans Don't Like the Way It's Changing

Has Apple finally lost its cool? Is it, as one Quora questioner put it, “a dying company?” Well, no, obviously, but it’s also not the Apple that we used to love.

Apple makes tens of billions of dollars every quarter, and—most important for its shareholders—that revenue keeps on growing. And yet the shine is wearing off the one company in Big Tech that seemed like it was immune to corporate blandness and greed. Apple used to “Think Different.” It was looking out for its users, and it made the best products. But then the iPhone came and ruined everything.

“Apple’s a huge company, and they’ve always had this air of ‘we know best,’ which can work in certain areas, but not when it comes to government regulations,” Ronan Ye, founder of technology company 3ERP, told Lifewire via email. “Their battles with the EU over things like antitrust laws and the App Store’s tight control do give off a bit of an ‘entitled’ vibe, [and] risk damaging their reputation, particularly in Europe. Users might start to see them as the bad guy, rather than the scrappy innovator they were once known as.”

How It’s Going

The iPhone was a once-in-a-lifetime product. In a couple of decades or so, we’ve gone from nobody having a smartphone to almost everybody in the world having one. This is what led to Apple’s phenomenal growth, from a niche PC and iPod maker to the world’s most valuable company.

To begin with, Apple did its usual thing making the iPhone better and better from year to year, and integrating it deeper with the iPad, the Mac, AirPods, and iCloud. This beautiful ecosystem gave Apple users the best tech experience available, and at the same time, Apple protected us from creepy ads and protected our privacy.

But that iPhone money was never going to last forever, so Apple, under money man Tim Cook, looked for ways to exploit its huge ecosystem. If you look at any chart showing Apple’s quarterly earnings over the last few years, you’ll notice one very obvious thing: Services are growing. Over the last five years, services revenue has doubled from around $13 billion a quarter to over $24 billion. Meanwhile, the iPhone has flattened out. It’s still Apple’s biggest money maker, but only for a few more years.

The Slide

This focus on services has brought in the billions, but at the cost of Apple’s hard-won cool factor. By trying to squeeze more dollars out of every customer, the products have gotten worse. The TV+ app, for example, is just as annoying and hard to use as all the rival streaming services, thanks to Apple trying to push new shows on you. We also have ads in the Setting app, promoting various Apple services.

Apple’s love of control, shining view of itself, and recent success all seem to have gone to its corporate head. This has most recently shown up as its rather shameful petulance when it comes to complying with new laws in the EU, over which Apple is dragging its heels like a toddler that thinks having a tantrum over going home means it will be allowed to go back to the playground forever.

And now we have perhaps Apple’s biggest mistake yet: AI.

AI threatens to undo all the goodwill and aura of cool that Apple has long enjoyed. It goes against user privacy (the inclusion of ChatGPT), it breaks Apple’s environmental promises (those power-guzzling AI data centers), and it steals the copyrighted works of creators, the very people to whom Apple markets its high-end pro products, to train its AI models.

“There seems to be a bit of a disconnect between what Apple thinks the public wants versus what they actually want,” Edward Tian, CEO of AI-detection site GPTZero, told Lifewire via email. “That being said, I don’t think we are going to be seeing droves of people switching to a new brand for their personal tech devices, but I do think we may see people hold onto their older Apple models for longer.”

Nobody wants or needs AI other than the shareholders who have been duped into believing it’s the next big thing. This, more than anything else Apple has done to alienate its users or third-party developers, shows how beholden even Apple is to the fickle desires of Wall Street.

In answer to the Quora question at the top of this post, then: No, Apple is not dying, not as a corporate money-making entity. It will surely continue to be successful for many years. But its shine has already dulled, leaving some folks looking for alternatives. Apple had better hope that its services revenue is worth it because if it’s betting on AI or the white elephant that is the Vision Pro to secure its future, then it really might be doomed.