Why I’m skeptical about Apple’s future

Jobs’s tactics worked very well for him and he created the most valuable company in the world. But without Jobs — and given the dramatic technology changes that are happening, Apple may have peaked. It is headed the way of IBM in the ’90s and Microsoft in the late 2000’s. Consider that its last major innovation — the iPhone — was released in June 2007.

Since then, it has been tweaking its componentry, adding faster processors and more advanced sensors, and releasing this in bigger and smaller form factors—as with the iPad and Apple Watch. Even the announcements that Apple made Monday were uninspiring: smaller iPhones and iPads. All it seems to be doing is playing catch up with Samsung, which offers tablets and phones of many sizes and has better features. It has been also been copying products such as Google Maps and not doing this very well.

There was a time when technology enthusiasts such as me would feel compelled to buy every new product that Apple released.We would applaud every small new feature and pretend it was revolutionary. We watched Steve Jobs’s product announcements with bated breath. Yet I would not even have bought the iPhone a few months ago unless T-Mobile gave me a large rebate on my iPhone purchase to switch networks. There is nothing earth shattering or compelling about Apple’s new phones — or any of the products it has released since 2007.