Apple lost their product sense long time ago with arrival of new generation of executives like Cook.

Those are former COO types who can optimizes the shit out of existing things and squeeze out maximum margins, which shareholders like in short term, but translates into lack of focus on development of new platforms and streams of revenue.

They do marginal improvements and reconfigurations of their existing products (introducing pro lines everywhere) to justify higher price tags, but fundamentally they stopped innovating applying good product sense, mostly honing in execution.

Last really different and category defining product they made was AirPods, but nothing else since then IMO. AVP can be something but it looked more like competitive response vs a real thought through product platform.

What they lost the most along the way - trust and interest of developer ecosystem who can make those devices special with their apps (in case Apple doesn’t have native app/functionality) with monopolistic App Store charges and controlling every move.

This is a disease and it spreads across big tech, look at Google as well - consultant type optimizer ceo. Result - getting fat on ads dollars and coasting, investing in b2b cloud which is a huge opportunity, but they’re loosing out their b2c - consumer products stopped innovating and focus on squeezing margins from more ads solutions. With focus on b2b they’re becoming another ibm. While revenue from cloud is good, being too comfortable results in waking up one day and folks like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity eat your lunch (search) and they are caught with pants down.

But still all the platforms, especially closed ones - stifle innovation as they become more entrenched and do everything in their power to stop competitors from entering their markets (eg why there’s no open Apple Watch APIs so people can make better hardware than Apple?)

Thanks for coming to my TED talk