Take

(Starting off with John Gruber's Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino – which is both right and aptly put – but followed by a crazy quilt of reactions.)

My thought after leaving this to fester a bit is that Apple today is focused on being Apple, and some might say on staying Apple. Apple before was focused on building products.

There's an NBC Brian Williams interview with Steve Jobs from 2006 which elucidates this; rather than quoting exact lines, Brian tries to corner Steve into seeing his silhouette as a captain of industry in the annals of history, and Steve is very uncomfortable because he just wants to go on to do the next thing. (And notes that a lot of products are just "technology in search of a problem".)

The things John Gruber noted, pretty much to a T, would not have been issues if Apple was all about just building the product. Most of the hot water that Apple is in, no matter what the reason, it wouldn't be in if it was not first focused on being Apple.

The Dithering contemporary episode to the article contains a good section by Ben Thompson expounding on how Apple has developed organizational scar tissue, about having tried giving less of a shit about what people do and then ending up having a near-death experience by their own third party app developers almost snubbing them in their moment of weakness; all of it worsened by an increasingly self-selecting roster of people to whom this was the original trauma.

I think this observation is astute and a lot truer than I would hope for it to be, and if nothing else, it's a reminder of how quickly the internally enshrined logic of an organization can turn into maniacal, self-harming nonsense. Soak in that and expose yourself to larger forces demanding things from you and it's hard to imagine a good ending.

(For one thing, what the hell kind of lesson is it to focus on that other actors behaved somewhat rationally when you'd been acting like a fool for years and giving them less and less of a reason to stick with you, and that therefore other actors should be avoided or are nefarious? A more valuable lesson might be: let's listen to our customers, let's work in their best interest, let's not get complacent, let's earn our support and our success, let's make supporting our platform something you would have to be a stupendous idiot to avoid doing. The mix of mostly incorporating those true lessons but still focusing on the scar tissue to the extent that it counteracts the true lessons is just baffling.)

Personally, I've thought about ways for an ineffectively-competing Apple to mount an effective position on generative AI and come up short many times, but both Ben and John again have the sensible angle of just going back to the roots and doing what they do best and leaving what others do best to them.

That said, the ratcheting pressure of being everything to everyone and fulfilling every demand for fear of leaving checkboxes unticked may leave that an even more dangerous position than "being left behind" in a war fought by prognosticators and largely ignored by actual people — but at least then, they might both catch a moment that yearns for technological behemoths to withdraw, and follow an authentic DNA strand of what they did so well.