Apple, once the gold standard of Silicon Valley, is navigating a challenging post-Steve Jobs era. The company is so far behind in artificial intelligence they’ve basically stopped talking about it, faces global regulatory scrutiny of its business model, and grappling with a prolonged stretch of weak iPhone demand, particularly in China, its primary revenue driver.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
The company is scrambling to catch up with rivals in artificial intelligence, and regulators are attacking its business model globally. Demand for the iPhone — Apple’s biggest moneymaker — also remains sluggish, especially in China.
Moreover, finding the company’s all-important “next big thing” has proved elusive. Apple killed a much-anticipated car project last year, and its push into smart home technology has been slow-going. The company has also struggled to find commercial success with what it calls spatial computing…
It’s all weighed on the stock, which has trailed shares of other major tech companies this year. Apple is no longer the world’s most valuable business, with Nvidia Corp. and Microsoft Corp. now well ahead.
Here are the challenges the company is facing around the world:
1. Artificial Intelligence
2. Finding the Next Big Thing
3. A Slow Move Into Headsets
4. Crumbling Google Search Deal
5. App Store Business and Developer Relations
6. Global Regulations and Government Scrutiny
8. Executive Succession
9. China Sales Slowdown
10. Lingering Smartphone Slump
MacDailyNews Take: If Apple can take care of challenge No.8 correctly (a big IF) – and promptly – then most of the rest of the issues, especially those related to vision and innovation, can be properly tackled.
Apple is boring because it is headed by a boring operations manager who should have been a 3-5 year stopgap following the untimely death of visionary Steve Jobs and its next visionary, product-focused CEO. Alas, operations manager Cook clings on well past his sell-by date. The good news is that time continues to tick on and Apple easily has enough in the tank to make it through this period of incremental iteration. This too shall pass. – MacDailyNews, June 11, 2025
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Tim Cook joined apple to assist Steve Jobs with supply chain not innovation or creativity
Johnny I’ve and others were innovative Wether it was Tim Cook or his policies that killed innovation we will never know but the amount spent onR& D and the lack of innovative products cannot and has not been explained
Tim Cook or some ones obsession with the car killed all other innovation
You need to promote and encourage the innovators and not suppress them with been counting
Time for new blood time for Tim to move and accept he is over cooked
As if the iPhone is something that comes along every 5 years? Get real, NO other company has released a similarly successful product this century. In the meantime Apple has locked down the tablet market, smartwatch market, earbuds market, Mac sales continue to grow and Vision Pro is the beginning of a new paradigm leading to AR glasses. If visionary, creative LEADERS (Ive was a follower of Jobs not a leader) grew on trees Jobs himself would have picked one. Cook is due for a replacement but I’ll take him over some non-existent mercenary maverick. Apple is way too big and important of a company now to have some Musk-like firebrand jerking around the golden goose that the OG genius created in the first place.
I think in spite of SJ instructions to the otherwise, it’s time to start asking a bit of “what would Steve Jobs do?” Because while Johnny had an over obsession with impractical skinny on the mobile devices and needed to have some override for battery life/usability and the complete failure of the 2013 Mac Pro “trash can” that were junk within a couple of years after into, plus why the hell is the charge port still on the bottom of the mouse? Things like that causing lots of friction probably led to Ive leaving. He needed to be brought back for the sake of thinking different. That is likely gone as a possibility now that OpenAI bought and paid over $6 billion. So who would be that “visionary” leader that could get Apple to innovate, and not repeat the late 80’s and 90’s meltdown it seems like it will slowly do again without a SJ to save them?
nuff said