The fear of making a mistake is crippling Apple. It's not that it's a feeling that can't be understood. The market, public opinion and governments do not give Apple any discounts, on the contrary there is a bit of sadism towards the Cupertino giant and his missteps.
Let's take the market: Apple's price-earnings ratio (PE Ratio) is ridiculous: ten points below the average of the S&P 500 index. A sign that the market is much more than skeptical about Apple's ability to stay where it is: the moonshots X projects by Alphabet (PE Ratio 15 points higher than Apple) are preferred to her, projects that it is not yet clear whether they are the script for a science fiction fiction or something actually concrete.
Take governments: Apple's soft power over politicians has vanished. Like our Renzi, there are many Apple aficionados in private, but in public it is another matter. The European Commission, with a hint of Boninsegna, wanted to beat it badly, rebounding the most pro-European country in times of Brexit: Ireland owes an enormous debt of gratitude to Apple, perhaps equal to what it owes Europe, since Steve Jobs, in October 1980, cut the tricolor ribbon in Cork to inaugurate the first Apple factory outside the USA. now 6 Irish people work on the Hollyhill campus in Cork and Apple has announced that it will also move the Luxembourg branch that manages the Tunes business to the Cork campus. This is good news for Ireland, less so for Luxembourg. In the years following 1980, the other big technology multinationals followed Apple to Ireland and followed it for better, creating wealth, and for worse, exploiting that country's tax regime beyond an acceptable limit.
Americans are furious that Apple's money should fund Ireland's healthcare system instead of the US. “Our tax system must create jobs and business in America — period”; this is how Elizabeth Warren, the alter ego of Bennie Sanders, expressed herself in the “New York Times”, with an exaggerated following in the Democratic Party. In the same article, you called for the repatriation of Apple's profits without any rebates. Thus Warren concluded her speech in the New York newspaper: "they must pay their due as families and small businesses have always done". A cost for Apple that is worth the Apple Car project, which in fact was abandoned in the light of these developments.
Too much pressure, too many expectations
In reality, Apple's problem is not this. They are full of money like Scrooge and will eventually pay taxes to the Irish and repatriate the profits, which from 35% now will be taxed at 15% or less if Clinton wins the White House.
The real problem is what people expect from Apple and the consequences of the extraordinary success of the iPhone. For five years the world has expected from Apple that special something that Steve Jobs had accustomed it to. Five years is a long time and many are beginning to serenely question whether the post-Steve Jobs Apple is the same as the one that gave birth to the iPod, iPhone, iPad and MacAir.
It is happening that Apple's innovation is expressing itself in a different and more conventional way and this has finally left a bitter taste in the mouth: there has been a "mild disappointment" as the Financial Times writes in an editorial about five years of Apple without Jobs. It's not that Tim Cook did it wrong, far from it. The London financial newspaper, which is certainly not tender with Cupertino, in the same editorial praised Cook's work, recognizing his important successes: "Not only has Apple remained solid, but it has prospered and Cook has managed to keep his talents together senior,” he wrote.
Apple is overflowing with ideas and talents, yet it seems that this immense intellectual and human wealth is no longer channeled into explosive products. It is as if the current of innovation and explosive design of Steve Jobs' great river has lost strength, leaving a swampy delta where only a few branches reach the sea. It is the fear of making a mistake that ultimately causes all of this. The courage of Phil Schiller's speaker presenting the new solution for the iPhone 7 headphones is a term that at Apple cannot be used in that minimalist context, it must refer to a very different context.
Cook says there's a scary pipeline of new products, but when all is said and done they don't look like much more than Google's moonshots X.
What is happening at Apple and what to expect. Farah Manjoo discusses it in the "New York Times" in her Monday column "The State of the Art". We thought we'd bring to the attention of the Italian reader, the opinion of this insider who replaced the late David Carr at the New York newspaper. One can disagree with Manjoo, but his considerations deserve reflection, because they well express the opinion of that part of observers and consumers who think, without drama, that true innovation has stopped and that there is a need to do more.
Below we offer the Italian translation of his article “Never mind the absent headphone jack. What's missing is the dazzle”. Happy reading and you can certainly disagree with Manjoo as we do. After all, everything cannot be dazzled.
Too long a pause in Apple's creativity?
Admittedly, it's rather annoying that the brand new iPhone – 7 and 7plus presented in San Francisco last week and available to the public from September 16 – does not have a port to plug the headphone cable. But we will soon get used to this news.
The absence of a headphone jack is far from the worst shortcoming in Apple's latest product launch. Rather, it epitomizes a deeper problem that's starting to affect Apple's entire product line: Apple's aesthetic is evaporating.
Apple is squandering its edge in software and hardware design. Although the new iPhones have many interesting innovations, such as waterproofing and a better camera, they are too similar to the previous ones. The same goes for the new Apple Watch. As competitors have taken a lot from Apple's design and are even surpassing it, what was once iconic in Apple products - computers, phones, tablets and more - is now starting to appear commonplace.
This is a personal assessment that Apple rejects. The apple company says it can't change design for the sake of change; hundreds of millions of people have an iPhone with the current design; what is the need to change something that has been enormously successful? In a video accompanying the presentation of the iPhone 7, Jonathan Ive, Apple's design chief, called the iPhone 7 "the most conscious evolution" of his vision of smartphones.
A shared feeling
However, there are many signs that my critique of Apple's design is shared. Apple's design once delighted industrial designers and technology critics; today we see more disorientation than satisfaction.
Last year Apple released a charging case for the iPhone 6s that looked comically pregnant – “Something embarrassing in terms of design” commented “The Verge” (a technology publication of the Vice Media group) – and a rechargeable mouse with the 'connection on the bottom so that to recharge it you had to turn it over. And the Apple TV remote control violated the first rule of design for this type of device: you can't design it symmetrically because in the dark you risk not feeling which button you're pressing by touch. (A tip: better to put a plastic border on the bottom so you can understand which side is oriented towards the TV).
Then there's the UI design. The Apple Watch, also launched last year, looked well designed (and some of its bands are truly stunning), but its interface was so confusing that it took a long time to learn how to use it so much that Apple was forced to go back to the design table to build something simpler. In a quickly released update, the clock interface looked much simplified.
The same thing happened with Apple Music. After the new streaming service was widely criticized for its confusing array of options, Apple completely redesigned the interface this year.
Something wrong?
It's not just about the design and engineering flaws of some Apple products. The biggest problem is the lack of attractiveness. I recently chatted about Apple's aesthetic choices with several tech-savvy friends. I asked “What is the latest Apple product that has really impressed you?”.
There was a chorus in favor of the MacBook, the incredibly thin (if functionally problematic) laptop that Apple unveiled last year. But most respondents were torn between the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5 – two boldly designed smartphones that were instantly recognized as having no equal on the market.
The iPhone 5, in particular, is a gem; to me the flat sides, beveled edges and quality of materials has something miraculous as if ive been inspired by a god in his hermetic little white room. But the iPhone 4 and iPhone 5 were released in 2010 and 2012. One has to go to the past presidential election to find an Apple design that seduces the eyes; there is something wrong.
Difficulties in design raise two questions: How bad is the problem? And, how can Apple fix it?
The first: it's not serious, but it's urgent. Despite a slowdown in growth, Apple is still by far the most profitable consumer electronics company in the world. Customer satisfaction surveys show that consumers love its products. And even if tech pundits no longer rave about Apple's design, there are still very few signs their complaints are having any effect on sales.
Despite the criticisms, Apple Music had 17 million subscribers in just one year. Apple won't disclose sales figures for the Watch, but many analysts believe sales have been brisk and customer satisfaction is through the roof. And the iPhone has proven surprisingly durable; as I stated last year, the iPhone is the safest bet within the tech industry. The real danger lies in Apple's long-term reputation. Much of the Apple brand is built on design and the feeling that everything Apple creates is cutting edge.
Because Apple can't afford to rest on its laurels
Two years ago, designer Khoi Vinh, former creative director of the "New York Times" and now at Adobe, summed up Apple's uniqueness with these words: "If there is a common thread that runs through every single piece of Apple hardware , it is the belief, i.e. the feeling that its designers believe with every cell of their body that the form factor they create is the result of endless fine-tuning and corrections which ultimately produces the best and only choice on the shape of that particular product".
But in judging the iPhone 6, then the novelty, Vinh had the feeling that Apple has gone off course.
While the iPhone 5 had clean, sophisticated lines that set it apart from any other product, "the shape of the iPhone 6 seems uninspired, modeled on the outdated shapes of the first iPhone and barely distinguishable from the countless different phones that aped that shape." Vinh wrote.
It was 2014. Today, two years later, we have the same design of that iPhone. Apple has accustomed us to a redesigned iPhone every two years, but now we will have three years without a new iPhone. While Apple has slowed its pace of design innovation, its rivals have accelerated it. Last year, Samsung revamped its Galaxy smartphone line in a new glass-to-metal design that's virtually identical to the iPhone. Then it went further. Over the course of a few months, Samsung has put out many improvements in design that have culminated in the Note 7, a large phone that has been universally praised by critics and audiences. With its curved edges and edge-to-edge screen, the device is misleading: while it's physically smaller than the large-format iPhone, it actually has a larger screen. So thanks to intelligent design he could get more out of a smaller thing – exactly the kind of solution that was once expected from Apple.
One important caveat: Samsung's software is still pompous, and its reputation for building quality products took a serious hit when it announced it would recall and replace the Note 7 due to a self-exploding battery defect.
If making a device that doesn't explode is a sign of design expertise, then Apple is still ahead of Samsung. But the setbacks of Apple's rivals aren't going to last. Apple can't afford to rest on past laurels.
