I agree this is true, but Apple’s always done their best work when they’re the second mover. Smartphones, iPods, earbuds, good desktop PCs were all after they watched what was good and then made it better (if you like what they did, anyway).
The next hardware category is probably AR glasses if someone can make them good and cheap, nobody has so Apple won’t do anything but wait. I’m sure they have an optics lab working on something, but probably not full throttle (and the Vision Pro is an attempt to make the OS).
People say Apple does its best work as a “second mover,” but that misses the actual pattern: Apple builds great products when leadership is solving their own problems.
The Mac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad weren’t just refinements of existing products. They were devices Steve Jobs personally wanted to use and couldn’t find elsewhere. The man saw the GUI at Xerox and saw how anyone could use a computer without remembering arcane commands. So he drove the development of the Mac. He was using a shitty mobile phone, saw the opportunity and had the iPhone developed. Same with the early Apple Watch (first post-Jobs new product line), which reflected Jony Ive’s fashion ambitions; once he left, it evolved into what current leadership actually uses: a high-end fitness tracker.
The stagnation we're seeing now isn’t about Apple losing its “second-mover magic.” It’s that leadership doesn’t feel an unmet need that demands a new device. None of Vision Pro, Siri, Apple Intelligence or even macOS itself anymore appear to be products the execs themselves rely on deeply, and it shows. Apple excels when it scratches its own itch and right now, it doesn’t seem to have one.
This is one of those political things where people deny something right up until the minute when it happens.
How frequently do you expect a new major product category across the industry? Is there any company who launched one that wasn't ChatGPT in the same time frame?
It was amazing how much diversity in really well thought out hardware as well as software was happening at apple years ago, when it was a far smaller company in terms of manpower and resources than it is today. I guess when the business model is selling ongoing subscriptions instead of compelling new products in order to get money, you stop getting the compelling new products coming out.
Smart rings are booming. Apple has nothing, probably afraid that it can cannibalize their watch sales.
If we look at the wider industry, EVs and self-driving cars are coming. Huawei has its own car now, along with a battery research program.
The Apple Watch is newer and is where I'd say the cutoff is for Apple.
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At a higher level, I'd say there were two personal-computer-hardware revolution periods that Apple featured heavily in:
1) home personal computers and then the GUI-fication of them and the portable-ification - the wave the Apple II was part of, and then the one the Mac mainstreamed, then laptops where Apple was pretty instrumental in setting design and execution standards
2) mainstream general-purpose/software-defined mobile devices (vs single- or few-function gadgets). Initial failures or niche products (Newton from Apple, Palm/PocketPC more successfully as a niche later) and then Apple REALLY mainstreaming with the iPhone and the extensions that were the iPad and Watch. I'm leaving out the iPod here since "single-purpose MP3 players" were a transitional stop on the gadget->general purpose device trend. (But that general purpose nature also makes it hard to invent a new mobile device category.)
Of things that have been percolating for a while, maybe VR/AR takes off one day, I'm not sure there's mass appeal there. Are people going to get enough utility over a phone to justify pop-up ads in their field-of-view all day long?
It's possible the LLM/transformer boom could lead to some new categories, but we don't know what that would look like yet, so it's hard to penalize Apple for not being a super-early first-mover in the last 3 years since nobody else has figured out a great hardware story there either, and even in their prime they were less of a "first mover" than a "show everyone else how it could be done better" player.
No he isn't and no there wasn't.
Sure, there can be cultural things going on. But at the senior leadership level, the degree to which those would have to be bad, in the absence of major revenue problems, to cause this reaction is... unheard of.
What they point out is that a lot of Apple's senior leadership are of a similar age and are simply approaching retirement now. But they are also losing younger rising stars they desperately need to fill the ensuing void. At the moment, they are simply losing talent left and right, and that is unsustainable if they want to maintain their competitive edge and avoid completely turning into Microsoft.
The more likely explanation is that a certain amount of internal rot has set in. They haven't really launched a successful major new product category in years, and a lot of their initiatives have either stalled or failed. Something is clearly not right, and top tier talent doesn't will only tolerate that sort of thing for so long before moving on.