{"id":143531,"date":"2025-09-14T22:20:16","date_gmt":"2025-09-14T22:20:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/143531\/"},"modified":"2025-09-14T22:20:16","modified_gmt":"2025-09-14T22:20:16","slug":"did-apple-reach-its-peak-with-the-iphone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/143531\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Apple reach its peak with the iPhone?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the tech world cheered yet another Apple product launch event last week, it was hard not to reflect on the strange place where the $3.4 trillion behemoth has arrived.<\/p>\n

An Apple product reveal \u2014 always slick and highly produced \u2014 used to be the most important day on the tech calendar. Yet these days they are a little more perfunctory: a procession of incremental improvements on a suite of products that has not changed in nearly a decade. <\/p>\n

The last mass-market device launched by Apple were the AirPods<\/a> earphones in 2016. Its virtual reality goggles \u2014 the Apple Vision Pro, announced in 2023 \u2014 have flopped.<\/p>\n

Big companies getting complacent is nothing new, especially big companies with a citadel-like business that produce a $105 billion (\u00a378 billion) profit, as Apple has this past year. In pure financial terms, the California giant is doing better than ever.<\/p>\n

And yet the world is in the grip of an artificial intelligence boom that promises to change how we live, work and do business. It is the biggest new thing since the dawn of the internet \u2014 and Apple is nowhere to be found.<\/p>\n

Siri, Apple\u2019s voice assistant, is good for setting a timer \u2014 and little else \u2014 14 years on from its introduction. Meanwhile, nearly three years since OpenAI fired the starting gun on the AI revolution with the launch of ChatGPT, Apple\u2019s efforts appear to be centred on a desktop AI \u201crobot\u201d that will resemble an iPad on a movable arm and is not slated for release until 2027. <\/p>\n

\"Tim<\/p>\n

Cook joined visitors at the event while they tried out his latest iPhones, but the company has become an innovation wilderness<\/p>\n

MANUEL ORBEGOZO\/REUTERS<\/p>\n

\"People<\/p>\n

JUSTIN SULLIVAN\/GETTY IMAES<\/p>\n

Other previously announced features, including a souped-up Siri, have been delayed until next spring. Amid the malaise, several top researchers have left in recent weeks.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Meta lures Apple AI expert with $200m pay offer<\/a><\/p>\n

How has a company that was once the quintessence of innovation drifted so far? One need only follow the money: $704 billion, to be exact. That is how much the iPhone giant has spent in the past ten years \u2014 not on engineers, nor big ideas, nor new products, but on its own shares<\/a>. Corporate buybacks can boost a share price by taking shares out of circulation, making them more scarce. Apple\u2019s is the largest such scheme in corporate history.<\/p>\n

To put it into context, the money spent by Apple since 2015 is more than the value of Britain\u2019s three biggest companies \u2014 AstraZeneca, BP and Shell \u2014 combined. It smacks of a business that has run out of ideas \u2014 and in tech land, this is very dangerous, especially at a time of violent disruption.<\/p>\n

What else, you might ask, could Apple have spent its money on?<\/p>\n

Wind the clock back, for example, to 2018. Apple chief executive Tim Cook was struggling with what might have been his crowning achievement: Project Titan<\/a>, the quest to build a self-driving car that was, for years, the worst-kept secret in Silicon Valley. Yet progress was halting.<\/p>\n

\"Apple<\/p>\n

The Apple Vision Pro flopped, and Elon Musk, below, was rebuffed \u201cduring the darkest days of the Model 3\u201d when he asked Apple if it was interested in acquiring Tesla<\/p>\n

YUI MOK\/PA<\/p>\n

\"Elon<\/p>\n

That was when Elon Musk, himself mired in \u201cproduction hell\u201d for Tesla\u2019s new Model 3 saloon, got in touch. \u201cDuring the darkest days of the Model 3 programme, I reached out to Tim Cook to discuss the possibility of Apple acquiring Tesla,\u201d Musk later tweeted. \u201cHe refused to take the meeting.\u201d Tesla was worth just $50 billion; that year, Apple spent $63 billion scooping up its own stock. <\/p>\n

We know the end of that story. Tesla became one of the largest companies on the planet; its market value now tops $1 trillion. Cook killed Project Titan last year after a fruitless decade. The world never caught a glimpse of an Apple car.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Musk offered Tesla on a plate to Apple<\/a><\/p>\n

What Cook has been very good at is squeezing every last cent out of the Apple brand and the 2.3 billion Macs, iPads and other devices it has in the wild. Of this total, well over a billion are iPhones.<\/p>\n

Apple\u2019s \u201cservices\u201d arm \u2014 which includes its cut of up to 30 per cent on sales from any app in the App Store, plus AppleCare, iCloud, Apple Pay and other services \u2014 is on track to bring in more than $100 billion this year. That\u2019s roughly triple the income that same division brought in a decade ago.<\/p>\n

The company has, in effect, turned each one of its devices into a cash machine, and then used much of that cash to financially engineer its stock price.<\/p>\n

Cook also made another pivotal decision: to take Google\u2019s money rather than fight it out for search supremacy. Unsealed court documents from cases against both Apple and Google over the past two years have revealed details of a wildly lucrative alliance between the tech titans. Google pays Apple at least $20 billion every year in exchange for being the default search engine on Apple\u2019s two billion-plus devices.<\/p>\n

\"Person<\/p>\n

Apple is very good at making very good phones, such as the new iPhone Air<\/p>\n

JUSTIN SULLIVAN\/GETTY IMAES<\/p>\n

Imagine if Apple had made the (very difficult) decision to turn down Google\u2019s billions and instead go to war over search. Even if it had lost, which is almost certain \u2014 no one has yet managed to knock Google off its perch \u2014 it would have gained something important. Ben Thompson, from the tech site Stratechery, wrote: \u201cApple completely forwent any sort of knowledge or capability accumulation in terms of gathering, reasoning across, and serving large amounts of data. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you put it that way, is it any surprise that the company suddenly finds itself on the back foot when it comes to AI?\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, taking Google\u2019s money came at the cost of surrendering significant expertise in data.<\/p>\n

The question is: what does the future hold for Apple? <\/p>\n

In the short term, the future is very bright indeed. The rapidly growing universe of AI therapists, chatbots (including ChatGPT) and productivity tools will all sell themselves via the App Store. Apple, as the gatekeeper, will get its cut of that income. <\/p>\n

And the company is very good at making very good phones. The iPhone Air, a new, super-slim, lightweight model, stood out in last week\u2019s show \u2014 which also included less exciting products such as a \u201ccross-body strap\u201d to hold the iPhone, and earphones that track your heartbeat.<\/p>\n

The long-term question, however, runs deeper.<\/p>\n

\"Black<\/p>\n

Sir Jony Ive, left, and OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman have forged a partnership that threatens to gallop ahead in AI<\/p>\n

In a world where our technology can understand and respond to queries in natural language, is the smartphone going to remain the primary portal to the digital world? Or will it be something else entirely?<\/p>\n

OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman this year spent $6.5 billion on scooping up io<\/a>, the hardware design start-up of Sir Jony Ive, the famed British designer behind the iPhone, Mac and iPod. Ive\u2019s team includes several of his closest lieutenants from Apple including Evans Hankey, who succeeded him as Apple\u2019s top designer only to leave in 2022. Since Ive\u2019s departure, Apple has eliminated the \u201cchief design officer\u201d, splitting the duties among a small set of executives.<\/p>\n

The goal of Ive and his band of Apple \u00e9migr\u00e9s is to build an entirely novel device for OpenAI that is centred on the unique capabilities of AI systems. In a video promoting their new partnership, Altman said: \u201cJony called one day and said, \u2018This is the best work our team has ever done.\u2019 Jony did the iPhone. Jony did the MacBook Pro. These are the defining ways people use technology. <\/p>\n

\u201cJony recently gave me one of the prototypes of the device for the first time to take home, and I\u2019ve been able to live with it. I think it is the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Apple has built an empire not by being first, but by being the best. It bides its time, as it did with smartphones, until it is ready to roll out a product head and shoulders above its rivals\u2019 devices. But a decade-plus of financial engineering has pushed the company into a dangerous place in the AI revolution: the outside looking in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the tech world cheered yet another Apple product launch event last week, it was hard not to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":143532,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-143531","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143531\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}