“In the phone market they are a little bit lagging,” Wozniak had told Germany’s Wirtschaftswoche back in February. “There is no real major cost difference in the parts of the current Apple products and the competition. Samsung is a major competitor and the reason is because they are making great products.” Though it was not printed, he had also suggested in the interview that Apple should incorporate some of Google’s and Samsung’s features to make their products even better.
Once again, Apple was revealing its true nature: The endless self-congratulation, the perpetual breeziness so obviously straining to respond to roiling doubts. And the blade behind the back.
To his credit, Wozniak did not give his attackers any satisfaction. When the camera closed in, his face betrayed only mild interest. One blogger, watching the live feed, thought Woz looked sleepy.
The keynote was peppered with other attacks, most of them expressed in coded allusions decipherable only to those who followed the company closely. The jabs were too fleeting to dampen the celebratory mood, and all were delivered with a smile. But the blade came out again and again as the speakers sliced away at the critics, at the doubters, at Android and Samsung and other rivals. Now that Scott Forstall had been banished from the empire, he too was considered fair game. The former chief of mobile software, long a fixture in the company’s inner circle before his firing, was never named in the snarky asides. But the initiated understood that Forstall was being mocked for his love of weaving skeuomorphic elements into earlier versions of the iPhone and iPad—the iBooks app that looked like a bookshelf, the calendar app that looked like a desk calendar, the game center app with the digital version of a poker table’s green felt. These touches were now deemed to be laughably cheesy. In the new iOS7 software, they would be deleted, just as Forstall had been.
Fathoming the motives behind the ridicule required the skills of a Kremlinologist. Why was Apple’s leadership wasting its time tearing down someone they’d already shoved out into the cold? Why so much animus over fake green felt? Did they really believe that the world recoiled under the tyranny of skeuomorphism? The put-downs may have been a kind of chest thumping, intended to trumpet the alpha ascendancy of Cook and Ive, who had led the overhaul of the mobile software. Maybe they wanted to underscore that they had won and that Forstall had lost. Even more intriguing was the possibility that the real target might not have been Forstall, but their visionary founder. In years past, Jobs himself had advocated introducing the virtual bookshelf and the other skeuomorphic elements into the iPhone and iPad. Was this Apple’s odd way of declaring independence from his legacy?
“There is a lot of subtle dissing of Jobs’s design philosophy going on here,” an editor noted during a live commentary on the ReadWrite tech site.
“Subtle?” wrote another. “I detect no subtlety.”
If Jobs’s successors had sought to ease his memory into the background, they failed. Watching Cook and his team that day, it was impossible not to recall the absolute mastery that Jobs had displayed so many times on this very stage. He too had indulged in his share of bullshit, but at least his bullshit had been mesmerizing.
Wisely, Apple kept this year’s presentation moving, shifting from Cook to Federighi to Schiller, from videos to songs to slides to demos. Throughout the shuffling, the audience declared its approval.
“We love you!” someone shouted at Cook.
The developers’ enthusiasm was understandable. To a large extent, their financial success depended on Apple’s. But for others, watching the keynote from around the world as it streamed to the Web, it was clear that Apple had not found its next game changer. For all the bragging about their innovative prowess, the truth was that the company’s newest offerings were hardly revolutionary. Many of the updates to both the Mac and iPhone operating systems were features that rivals already offered and that customers had been clamoring for Apple to adopt.
“This all seems . . . sorta marginal,” wrote the editor from ReadWrite, commenting on the Mavericks operating system.
“What exactly is original here?” wrote another, describing iOS7. “I am not sure I see anything really groundbreaking here. But hey, it sure looks pretty.”
The latest iOS looked sleek and modern, but the design lacked distinction, a cross between Windows Phone, Android, and Palm’s WebOS software. The black cylinder of the new Mac Pro was undeniably beautiful, even slightly dangerous-looking—like something Q might invent for James Bond. But the high-performance workstations would be expensive and were meant for professionals who needed server-level capacity and power. The majority of Apple’s customers had no use for the thing. Rumors of iTunes Radio had generated buzz ahead of the formal announcement, but despite the snagging of Led Zeppelin, it was unclear how it would compete with Pandora, Spotify, and other streaming programs that had existed for years. Most disappointing of all, none of the products Apple had shown were going to be available before fall. And no one had said a word about Apple TV.
Cook closed the keynote with a reminder.
“Our goal at Apple,” he said, “is to make amazing products that our customers love.”
The line always played well, especially since it reinforced the impression that Apple was somehow nobler than its competitors. But ultimately the argument was meaningless. Didn’t all companies seek to make something good? Did any CEO wake up in the morning, hoping to churn out products that customers disliked? For all the digs Apple had made at Samsung for its lack of originality, there was no doubt of Chairman Lee’s attention to quality and reliability.
Still, Apple was fundamentally different from its rivals. Its immense success had been based on something unique—a record of achievement that went far beyond the ability to make good and reliable products. Until the death of Jobs, the company’s fortunes had been made through its almost supernatural ability to create devices that were radically, irrevocably, inescapably new—machines so astonishing that they literally changed the daily lives of humans around the globe. Winning as the conference may have appeared to the audience, the entire event glossed over the fact that Apple seemed on the verge of forgetting how to do what it had done better than any other corporation. The high-tech evangelizing, the toys and the pretty lights, the insistence that the company was beginning anew, that its latest offerings were astonishing advances, that its wizards of design and engineering had retained their powers to remake reality—all of it was forced, overwrought, empty.
The final disappointment came at the end of the keynote, shining on the big screen at the front of the hall, when Cook previewed a new ad that would be the centerpiece of the company’s next marketing campaign. The commercial wasn’t about a particular product. It was intended as an assertion of the company’s values, an attempt to redefine itself after the death of Jobs.
A manifesto.
“This is it,” a man declared in a voice-over. “This is what matters.”
As a spare melody joined the words, the screen surged with glimpses of people using Apple’s products around the world. A young woman on a crowded New York subway, disappearing inside the music playing from her headphones. Elementary school children in a Japanese classroom, leaning over their iPads, their small fingers wiping across the screen, their faces lit with excitement.
“The experience of a product,” the voice-over continued. “How will it make someone feel? Will it make life better? Does it deserve to exist?”
The scenes flowed on. A young couple hugging in the rain, with the woman holding out her iPhone to snap an image of them together. A man at a sushi bar, laughing at something on his iPad mini. An ocean of people dancing at a rock concert, holding up the lighted screens of their iPhones in front of the stage.
“We spend a lot of time on a few great things, until every idea we touch enhances each life it touches.”
An older couple at a banquet, beaming and laughing as photos of their life together are projected from a MacBook onto a screen. A teenage girl in her room, the walls glowi
ng with Christmas lights as she checks her iPhone.
“You may rarely look at it, but you’ll always feel it. This is our signature. And it means everything.”
As the screen went black, a simple sentence appeared in white letters.
“Designed by Apple in California.”
The words were pretty. The images were moving. But the ad said nothing beyond what Apple had been repeating for years. The most striking touch was the designed-in-California slogan at the end, the tagline that would anchor all of the ads in the campaign. To some, the phrase was reminiscent of the made-in-America slogans and songs that General Motors and Chrysler had deployed in the past when confronted with competition from Toyota and Nissan. Was Apple slamming Samsung, reminding American consumers which company was based in Seoul? Or was Apple simply hoping to bank on California’s residual cool?
One possibility veered dangerously close to jingoism. The other was just lame.
When the “Our Signature” ads began to air later that day, the response was dismal. Ace Metrix, a consulting firm that gauges the effectiveness of TV ads through viewer surveys, gave the new ad the lowest score of twenty-six Apple TV ads in the past year. Adweek published a searing analysis titled “At a crucial time of transition, has the company simply lost its voice?”
The author, Tim Nudd, reminded his readers that Cook had talked about how much the words in the ads meant to everyone at Apple. “Here, though, they fail to do the trick,” Nudd wrote. “They aim for poetry in the classic Apple style. But maybe it really isn’t the same company after all.”
Those who liked the ads compared them to the “Think Different” spots, the first campaign that Jobs had worked on when he returned to Apple. The circumstances were certainly similar. Apple had no new product, but the company needed to convey what it stood for to grab the attention of consumers and give the employees something to rally behind during a time of turbulence. Yet there was a fundamental difference in tone between “Think Different” and the latest campaign. “Think Different” had been about Mac users. It overlaid Apple and Jobs’s crazy image, making the point that people who do great things are often misunderstood and labeled as troublemakers. At the same time, it celebrated trailblazers who made a difference in the world and drew a connection between them and Apple’s customers.
The new manifesto was about what Apple stood for, not what the customers stood for. Ultimately, it was another way of insisting that Apple was still great.
“I don’t care for manifestos that try so hard to be a manifesto,” said Ken Segall, a veteran copywriter who had worked closely with Jobs on “Think Different” and other campaigns.
In the past, Segall pointed out, Apple’s ad campaigns had conveyed their messages indirectly through imaginative, surprising images and words that made people identify their best selves with the company’s aspirations. The ads didn’t tell customers to buy Apple devices by claiming that the products were hip. That almost never worked in advertising. Instead, the ads allowed viewers to judge Apple’s appeal on their own.
Cool people rarely bragged about their own coolness or even spoke of it aloud. Great companies did not need to insist on their greatness.
In the months that followed, as the new manifesto wore thinner with each airing, the temptation grew to think back to that day two years before, when the masses had gathered at One Infinite Loop to remember Jobs. Sometimes, the service seemed long ago. Other times, it seemed like yesterday, each detail vivid in the mind’s eye.
The giant banners adorned with their emperor’s face, watching unblinking from above. His lieutenants, standing on that stage, trying so hard to act as though they knew what to do next. And then that unmistakable voice, washing over them all.
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.
He’d been the craziest of them all. The most arrogant. Matchless in his cunning. Both brazen and terrifying.
They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.
The truest of the true believers, he had seen straight into the heart of their creations. He knew what each of them wanted, what they feared. The minefields waiting down the road.
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.
Forgetting him was like trying to forget the sun. He still reigned over every hour of every day. That was his blessing, and their curse.
Epilogue
NOVEMBER 2013
Less than two years after the death of Steve Jobs, the empire he left behind at the peak of its influence now teeters at the edge of a reckoning. The more his successors insist that the company is stronger than ever, the less the public believes them.
Despite the best efforts of Apple’s propaganda machine, the response to the latest wave of upgrades and incremental advances has been tepid. In July, the company reported its second consecutive decline in profits and flat revenues for its fiscal third quarter. iPad sales had fallen 14 percent, and iMacs 7 percent. iPhones sold better than expected, but consumers were choosing the cheaper, older models, which meant that Apple was making less money from each sale. In early August, Apple scored a victory when the Obama administration vetoed the U.S. International Trade Commission’s ban on the import and sale of some of the company’s older iPhones and iPads. The ITC had found the devices to infringe on a Samsung patent, but the federal government stepped in because it was concerned about its impact on competition. Since most of the devices in question were no longer even on sale, the win was largely symbolic. The company did not triumph through the righteousness of its position. It won, sort of, because the administration wasn’t ready to publicly abandon a quintessentially American company.
From the start, Apple embodied this country’s idea of exceptionalism. Steve Jobs and his team trumpeted the notion that their company was fundamentally different—a moral enterprise, imbued with a desire to remake the world, destined for greatness with reserves of ingenuity and strength that render it immune to the failings of lesser rivals. In the halls of Congress and in the Oval Office, that presumption is still being argued for America. And in the winding corridors at One Infinite Loop, the concept still holds tremendous sway. Tim Cook and his senior executives clearly still believe that Apple is ethically and creatively superior to other companies.
The truth is, Apple used to be exceptional. Not necessarily in its behavior, which was often predatory. But certainly in its ability to inspire. Those days are waning. Outside the echo chamber of Apple’s headquarters, the notion of the company’s exceptionalism has been shattered. The revelations of worker conditions at Foxconn, of Apple’s strained relationship with its suppliers, and of the company’s elaborate attempts to avoid billions in American taxes have made it impossible to pretend that the company exists on a higher moral plane. In the e-books case, Judge Cote’s ruling dismantled Apple’s credibility.
In early September, Cote meted out her punishment for Apple’s transgressions in the e-book conspiracy. In her final ruling, the judge restricted the company’s ability to enter into new agreements with publishers. The injunction wasn’t as restrictive as the government had requested, but the judge ordered an external monitor—a watchdog—to ensure that the company complied with antitrust laws. The decision boiled down to a single conclusion: Apple cannot be trusted.
“Apple has been given several opportunities to demonstrate to this court that it has taken the lessons of this litigation seriously,” Cote had said in a hearing. “I am disappointed to say that it has not taken advantage of those opportunities.” Apple appealed the ruling in October.
In other courtrooms, from California to Germany, the patent wars continue with no end in sight. Speculation ebbs and flows about a settlement that would end Apple and Samsung’s global conflict, but so far the battalions of lawyers march on. Much of what the jury decided in San Jose in the summer of 201
2 has already been watered down. Both companies are now gearing up for a partial do-over trial later this month. Another trial, covering a different set of patents in contention between the two tech giants, is set for 2014. At this point, Apple’s unceasing pursuit of legal challenges is at best quixotic.
To some, the insistence on pursuing legal remedies points to a deep miscalculation. In a global economy that is rapidly evolving ahead of laws and jurisdictions, the market reigns supreme more than ever. Will the company go after every new rival that springs up around the world, selling cheaper phones that look like the iPhone? In this new century, innovation flows like water.
Whatever Apple’s future, China looms. The company’s hopes for increasing its profits are still pinned on selling more of its devices in the rapidly expanding Chinese market. For years, Apple has been negotiating an iPhone deal with China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile phone company in terms of its subscribers. But they have struggled to reach an agreement. The new reality is that Apple needs China Mobile more than China Mobile needs Apple. In a country with more than a billion people, the Apple brand is already losing its sheen. With earnings far below that of American workers, Chinese consumers are veering toward cheaper Android smartphones—products made not just by Samsung and HTC but by up-and-coming Chinese companies such as Lenovo, Huawei, and Beijing Xiaomi Technology.
Xiaomi’s rise illustrates the futility of crushing imitation. Xiaomi sells iPhone-like devices at a fraction of Apple’s prices. Lei Jun, the CEO, has long held up Jobs as his role model. In the past, Lei emulated the fallen CEO so thoroughly that he often appeared onstage in jeans and a black shirt. Today, Lei’s admiration has faded. Though Xiaomi was known as the “Apple of the East,” Lei now compares his company to Amazon. In a recent interview with CNN, he said Apple didn’t seem to care about what users wanted.
Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs Page 37