Opinion: Apple can still return to its golden age

Editor’s note: Jeff Yang He is a frequent contributor to CNN Opinion, co-host of the podcast “They Call Us Bruce” and author of the best-selling book “Rise: A History of Asian American Pop from the ’90s to Now“and”The Golden Screen: Films that Made Asian Americans.The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. Further comments On CNN.

CNN
—

Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is just days away, and as always, techies are buzzing about what will be announced at the company’s annual cutting-edge tech event. The latest iPhone OS with an emphasis on AI? New Mac Hardware? “One more thing” wild card?

Naturally, Apple is keeping details of the revelation it plans to make on Monday tighter than Fort Knox, but the sense among many observers is that whatever it is, it has to be good, since there have been signs since earlier this year that the future of the fruit factory was looking bleak.

Earlier this year, the company’s sales in China fell dramatically as the iPhone faced stiff competition from local products such as the Huawei Mate, forcing Apple to aggressively discount its products in China. In 2023, the International Trade Commission ruled that Apple had infringed on medical device maker Masimo’s existing patents by including a pulse oximeter in its latest Apple Watch, forcing the company to stop selling those versions of the wearable in December and allow it to temporarily remove the feature pending an appeal of that decision. And in March, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Apple, alleging that the company has engaged in a wide range of anticompetitive practices in connection with its dominance of the U.S. smartphone market, a lawsuit that threatens the very foundation of the company’s business. (Apple denies the charges.)

Of course, by most standards, the gadget maker remains a massive global success: After plummeting earlier this year, its shares are now just shy of their all-time highs, putting its valuation back at around $3 trillion (just six years after it became the world’s first maker of smart home products). TrillionApple became a $100 million smartphone company in 2015. The driving force behind the company’s growth is, of course, the iPhone. While the iPhone has a 17% share of the global smartphone market as measured by unit sales, it accounts for a staggering 43% of global smartphone revenues. And Apple’s services business, which revolves around the sale of apps and content, continues to thrive and is predicted to account for a quarter of the company’s total revenues by 2025.

But the success of a tech company is measured not just by the products currently on the market, but by its ability to continue to innovate and stay ahead of the curve, which means Apple needs to make an announcement that recaptures some of the glory of its golden age.

Much of the initial attention has been focused on what Apple has planned for artificial intelligence, with rumors suggesting that the company is partnering with OpenAI (and possibly Google and AI company Anthropic as well). This could be an unusual move in a number of ways: it goes against the company’s policy of wanting to keep its most important technologies in-house, and it feels like at best a catch-up move rather than a revolutionary leap.

Others point to Apple’s recent release of OpenELM — a set of four scaled-down open-source language models — as an indication that the company is moving in a different direction, toward providing efficient AI capabilities “on the phone” without calling up servers in the cloud.

But the new features being discussed as a result aren’t exactly earth-shattering. Transcription of voice notes? Chat and website summaries? Photo retouching? Erm… custom emojis? None of this is likely to make the same impact as Open AI’s demo of GPT-4o, the latest large-scale voice-enabled language model.

The reality is that for all of the profitability and streamlined commercial muscle that Apple has gained under Tim Cook’s helm, it has yet to regain its unique ability to control the cultural narrative under co-founder and legendary CEO Steve Jobs, the ability to make people feel like the company still has the ability to change the way people think about technology and how it intersects with their lives.

It’s hard to argue now, given that some of Apple’s most promising bets on innovation have failed. In February, the company finally wrapped up Project Titan, the company’s 10-year, $10 billion internal effort to design an Apple-branded electric vehicle. And Apple’s Vision Pro, a mixed-reality “head-top” computer it unveiled last year, made waves initially with its arguably groundbreaking feature set and performance specs, but failed to gain immediate traction with consumers after its release.

The seeds of Vision Pro’s problems were already apparent during the WWDC launch, when impressive computer-simulated demos saw users wearing the visor meditating in front of a giant virtual mandala, wandering through floating windows scattered throughout different rooms of their home, and sitting and working surrounded by a bevy of apps all felt a little removed from what users would actually want to do.

In contrast, when Jobs lifted the curtain on the first iPod in 2001, he held it up and said one word that summed up his promise to users: “1,000 songs, right in your pocket.” All the music you love, at your fingertips, all the time. While the iPod was criticized by some as too expensive and unnecessary, the key benefits it offered were appealing to real consumers, and it ultimately propelled an entirely new category of portable consumer electronics into the mainstream.

What’s the Vision Pro’s equivalent of a song in your pocket? A spreadsheet on your face? That’s not enough of a benefit to entice anyone but the earliest adopters to spend $3,500 for the privilege of “spatial computing.” Vision Pro shouldn’t be taken lightly. The iPad, Apple Watch, and even the original iPhone all needed some time and iteration to find their footing. But so far, if Apple is looking to regain real-world relevance, Vision Pro isn’t quite there yet. Given the device’s power consumption, it needs to be connected to a clunky external battery that you attach to your waist, and it only lasts a few hours unplugged. Its most distinctive feature, EyeSight, which uses an outward-facing screen to present a ghostly image of the wearer’s eyes to the world, trying to remove the sense that a gadget is a barrier between the user and the world around them, has been the subject of much derision.

Yet Apple occupies a unique strategic position: the world sees it as one of the few true lifestyle brands in consumer technology, with products that are measured not by benchmarks but by changing values ​​and changing behaviors. And that’s because the seed of Apple’s incredible success lies in its ability to get people to reimagine the world around its products.

Though the 1998 all-in-one iMac’s specs fell short of comparable Intel hardware, its interior-matching design encouraged people to use the iMac as a computer to show off in their living rooms rather than hiding it behind a partition, thus integrating consumer computing devices even more deeply into media consumption, home management, and family interactions.

A decade later, in 2008, the MacBook Air became famous as the world’s thinnest laptop, thin enough to fit into a standard manila envelope, becoming the first laptop to feel like a fashion accessory — a “handbag PC.” Even the original iPhone, released the year before, had done away with most physical buttons, encouraging users to tap icons instead on a minimalist touchscreen, forcing users to rethink their relationship to both handheld devices and screen-based communication. The end result was transformative.

What’s important to note is that all of these cultural revolutions are fundamentally rooted in design choices, not technological advances: changes in form factors and user interfaces based on greater insight into how people want to interact with their digital devices and each other.

Thirteen years after Cook took the helm, and especially five years after former chief design director Jonathan Ive left Apple, the company has been unable to bring about a similar change in the human world. But to bring about cosmic change, big decisions have to be made. This may sound contradictory, but the very thing that should make Apple fans optimistic that the company will bounce back is also the thing that sparked widespread ridicule at WWDC 2023. EyeSight in its current form is goofy and creepy, but it’s a sincere attempt to address one of people’s major concerns about head-mounted devices.

Relying on unexpected means to socially integrate new technologies, even when those solutions are insufficient, is a heartening reflection of Jobs and Ive’s original commitment to the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, computing and humanity. Here’s hoping that this WWDC the company can boldly ignore last year’s ridicule and continue to see and think differently.