I don’t have any clever anecdote, opening, narrative, metaphor, or analogy for you. Apple is a big company, and big companies are hyper-fixated on their stock price, their profits, their growth, and above all else: protecting those three items by any means necessary. This is a universal truth of any company of any substantial size.
Finding exceptions to this rule is exceedingly hard, and the only exception which comes to my mind, is Patagonia.
So when Apple gets eviscerated by a US Judge for continuing to be willfully shady, even when ordered by a court to not be shady in that very specific way — well the only people who are surprised are those who bleed the kool-aid the company sells.
If you are out of the loop on this, here’s a good summary from Daring Fireball. But the closing of the order says all you need to know about the fight over charging fees to outside-the-App-Store payments:
Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover-up made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple.
The one disagreement I have with Gruber is this line he wrote in the above linked post:
Schiller comes across as Apple’s sole voice of reason, fairness, and dare I say honesty in this entire ruling.
This is, reading too much into it. It could just as easily be true that Schiller expected this type of response from the Court, and feared criminal charges and so he advocated compliance with the order on those grounds and only those grounds. There’s no evidence here that this was anything more than continuing to protect the company by thinking about the problem set another way.
From an organizational perspective, there’s a lot to be concerned about with Apple given their acts of late:
- They made the worst possible long-term decision, for what would be a paltry amount of money in the short-term. This is exceedingly worrying for any investor in this firm. Executives at Apple are not paid millions of dollars to be thinking in months or even years, they are paid that to be thinking in 5-10 year cycles.
- Layer this short-sighted thinking on top of the confusion which has been Vision Pro, and the failure of all Apple’s AI offerings (inclusive of Siri) — the outlook looks bleak as fuck.
- When there’s a disagreement with a chasm this wide at this senior of a level, then whatever path is chosen, has been chosen by the CEO. There is no punch to pull on that. Tim Cook had to break the stalemate and pick a side. He picked the side of charging these fees, and going against a court order. It does not matter what he was advised or who he was advised by.
- Apple has clearly failed to keep its executive ranks free from executives who will put the company in legal jeopardy. This would be a failing of their Apple University Programs, their executive recruiting team, and most certainly Cook and the Board to notice and correct it.
No matter how I look at this, the only happy path forward for Apple is if Tim Cook to resigns or is fired. These failings are his and his alone. Or to put it more simply: he’s literally paid so that the things above do not happen, and yet they did.
It is a straight failure of his ability to lead Apple today — regardless of his past performance or actions.
I would expect a new CEO to come in and clean up the top executive ranks.
It has been blatantly obvious to the world that Apple was in the wrong here. Both legally, and ethically — a double miss by a company not to see that.
It’s been blatantly obvious that the Vision Pro missed the mark for various reasons and was the wrong investment at the wrong time. It’s been blatantly obvious for years that Siri is lagging behind the industry. It’s been plain as day that Apple was, is, and projects to be, behind with Generative AI from some time to come.
That’s where Tim Cook has positioned Apple today and no shareholder should be happy with that.
I have been talking in the member-only Discord about my interest in alternative phone offerings. While minimalist concepts like the Light Phone and others are compelling for the flex that they appear to be, I’ve been vastly more interested in Nothing Phones, and GrapheneOS powered devices.
I do not consider myself anything but a lover of Apple gadgets. I have never seriously considered a switch to any other phone OS until 2025. And so when I say that it is feeling harder and harder to justify owning an iPhone, someone at Apple should be pretty fucking worried about that.
That I am shopping prices on a Pixel device to install a secure alternative OS — that’s not a small statement. Or drooling over a Nothing phone for the fresh feeling design and thinking.
I would have bought a Nothing phone already, but I heard it might be annoying to work with my carrier. I would have moved to a GrapheneOS powered Pixel, but I am not quite ready to give up my Blue Bubble status, nor am I quite ready to lose Carrot Weather.
But, I am close, as the bullshit engine at Apple is getting quite hard to ignore and when I bought my iPhone 16 a month ago to stay ahead of possible tariff’s, I did so with the thought that it might be the last iPhone I buy — which is not something I thought I would write on this blog.