I miss Steve Jobs. I miss him, and I find myself thinking or saying that a lot, and increasingly more often. My missing him is probably misguided—but I’m not (and can’t be) missing him as a person, as a businessman, or as a boss. I miss him to the extent that Apple hasn’t been quite the same since he died. Maybe it’s just correlation, and maybe Apple would have gone down the same path if he were still alive—we’ll never know. I also know one man doesn’t make a company, but it’s hard not to think that that particular man was able to do just that.
It’s not all bad on the surface. The Apple Watch has had me by the wrist for almost ten years. I have the fastest, quietest MacBook I’ve ever had, with a battery so good I’m surprised when I need to charge it. And, most importantly, the iPad has a calculator app, finally. So Apple must still be doing something right.
But every time I watch one of their product announcements I feel bored before they even get to the point. The shows themselves are slick and full of shenanigans that are supposed to be funny, but I no longer find them entertaining. They may have been cool and appropriate in 2020, but now they’re just another way in which Apple has isolated itself from its audience—literally. Gone is the thrill of a possible product glitch on stage, and gone is the excitement of having one shot at presenting the cool new thing, live.
The announcements are pure marketing events, even when they’re aimed mainly at developers, and marketing is boring—or, at least, whatever marketing has become is boring. The first half of the 2025 WWDC keynote was about veneer marketed as design. Everything they showed about the new look of the upcoming operating systems is a half-assed coat of paint. There may be a few neat tricks, but all the translucency seems excessive and makes a lot of details seem unfinished and unrefined. I think glass, whether or not liquid, is a bad metaphor for digital interfaces. People already perceive iPhones as having the wrong combination of fragility and expensiveness, so making the interface look like a crystal shop seems misguided.
They want to give their entire ecosystem a coat of paint because now they’re all about the Vision Pro’s layering of translucencies? Let their least successful product be the driver of their entire aesthetic? Fine, it’s not even what bugs me the most. What does is the fact that they need to present it as the main selling point because the next one—fucking Apple Intelligence—is dumb and nobody wants it. Jumping onto the “AI” bandwagon has poisoned the well. And maybe Steve Jobs would have done the same things in the same way, but there’s something deeply grating about the way it’s being rolled out, ungraceful and disgraceful, unsure as Apple seems about whether it wants to still be Apple or just a latecomer that’s scrambling to keep up with its peers.
But its peers were never its peers. Apple was always something else, even when it was gasping for air and making all the wrong decisions. Even when it seemed to be late in adopting some must-have feature, but in retrospect it was being cautious and deliberate. It was never truly late when it mattered. The iPhone came out just at the right time and blindsided everyone else. The transitions first to Intel chips, then to Apple Silicon came at the right time, and got the job done well and swiftly. And every single time the coolness on the surface was a wrapper for substance, for technology that people could relate to.
Now it’s a snooze fest. The coolness on the surface is detached coldness. The interface elements you could touch are now glazed and glossy, always feeling an extra layer away. Steve Jobs was an alien in many ways, and he may have been often incompetent at personal relationships, but oddly enough he also got what would get people interested. He facilitated making products that people would always immediately know what to do with. They’d buy them not just because they were cool (sure, also that), but because they made the underlying technology understandable and accessible. They’d be an extension of your brain and eyes and hands. He may not have been a designer himself, but let’s look at Jony Ive and see how he’s been doing lately without Steve Jobs.
I think Tim Cook did a great job steering the company when Steve Jobs no longer could, but he doesn’t see the world the same way, and that’s been showing for a while. I wanted to like him for who he is. I liked the idea of Apple being run by a queer person. But the queerness is, again, marketing and veneer. It’s a new Pride watch face and band every spring. It’s Cook standing under a giant rainbow at the end of the WWDC keynote. That’s a performance of queerness, sanitized signifiers that can appeal to allies without disturbing the assholes too much—because they should still want to buy the products. “AI” is not queer, and neither is Apple Intelligence. Having an avatar for video calls when using a Vision Pro is not queer, it’s just dehumanizing. It’s mistaking the uncanny valley for a representation of identity. It’s playing by the rulebook of the cultural oppressors who’d rather reduce humanity to a limited set of predictable variables, something that machines can easily try to reproduce while consistently failing at it.
It’s not like the Apple of Steve Jobs didn’t have its own contradictions. It did, and we’re still dealing with the fallout. Think Google as the default search engine—I would have burned that bridge a long time ago. But now it’s building more of those bridges. Integrating ChatGPT (or any other slop-manufacturing engine) with Siri is not going to make Siri any better, and is creating a dangerous external dependency. Even if you don’t turn it on, it’s always going to be nagging you.
Nagging is the other thing. The rollout of Apple Intelligence has been disgraceful also because it sounds like begging. And if begging doesn’t work, let’s resort to dark patterns and just turn it on, shove it down people’s throats. Gone is the time of interfaces that would genuinely delight you, not because they looked like they were covered in cartoonish dew, but because they made things work for you, and surprised you with thoughtful details that other software makers couldn’t dream of because they never gave a shit.
Apple no longer seems the design-driven company that Steve Jobs made it, the old intersection of technology and the liberal arts. I remember when Steve Jobs convinced the music industry to remove digital-rights management from tracks sold on iTunes. It seemed impossible, and only something that Apple could pull off that that time. I remember him being so obviously excited, because that was something that would make a lot of people happy, and it was a step in the right direction to allow people not to be stuck with iTunes or the iPod if they didn’t want to be. I remember how giddy he was when he announced that the entire Beatles catalog was going to be available in the iTunes Store, and I knew what it meant for him. And I remember his own little shenanigans on stage, like the “three devices” ruse or the Manila envelope. Those were not veneer, they weren’t overproduced sideshows, they weren’t trying to sell junk for a treasure. (Although, in fairness, the original MacBook Air could have stood to be faster, but its small and slow hard drive was bogging it down.)
My understanding of Steve Jobs is biased and largely limited to those few appearances on stage (and, I guess, by thirty seconds at a checkout counter, that one time). I’ve read the articles and the books (including Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s Small Fry), I’ve seen the various movies, and I know what he was on stage is not all he was. I’m not glorifying his bad sides, but I do miss what his good sides brought not just to Apple but to the world’s tech landscape.
Just like Sony two decades ago, Apple is starting to be too many things, and some of them can never get along. Some of them are amazing side projects it’s apparently running at a loss. But producing and/or distributing brilliant TV shows like Ted Lasso and Severance isn’t Apple’s core business—it’s just another way to get people to hang out in its ecosystem. There are worse ways than that, but all the marketing rhetoric behind every Apple offering is grouted with the same smarmy platitudes. Product announcements linger on pornographic renderings of shiny chips, as if the audience at home really cared, and as if they were supposed to get equally aroused by the new interface, by the number of transistors packed in a tiny chip, by a new camera’s ability to produce professional-quality video, and by the company’s latest venture in film production.
Please enjoy every Apple product equally, Ms Casey would say.
And it’s funny (but not funny) that the underlying theme of many Apple TV shows is the importance of human connection in these trying times, while the company at large falls for the latest dehumanizing trend. I love those circenses, but I’m afraid the panis is overbaked.