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Opinion | The Incredible Shrinking

Apple
6-8 minutos

Steve Jobs wanted to put a ding in the universe. Today, Apple

wants to ding your pocketbook.

April 3, 2019

Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple, at the Steve Jobs

Theater in Cupertino last month.CreditDavid Paul Morris/Bloomberg

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Image

Tim Cook, chief executive officer of Apple, at the Steve Jobs

Theater in Cupertino last month.CreditCreditDavid Paul
Morris/Bloomberg

The Steve Jobs Theater on Apple’s spendy new campus in

Cupertino, Calif., is a majestic temple to pomp. An ethereal glass-
and-marble cylinder set high on a serene hill, the venue feels like
the architectural manifestation of the Apple co-founder’s famous
“reality-distortion field.” It is an edifice meant to recall those
moments when Mr. Jobs, smirking joyfully, would bound up to the
stage, teasingly pull a black shroud off some new invention and
instantly alter your picture of the future.

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And so it was meant to go once more last week, when Apple invited
journalists and celebrities to an event billed as “a Think Different
production.”

Some different thinking did seem in order. Since becoming the first
trillion-dollar corporation last summer, Apple has battled a souring
assessment on Wall Street. The iPhone is the most profitable
product in the history of business, but more than a decade after its
debut, pretty much everyone on the planet who can afford one
already has one, and many customers see little reason to upgrade.

So now, instead of selling better stuff to more people, Apple’s new

plan is to sell more stuff to the same people. “Today is going to be a
very different kind of event,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive,
taking the stage.

It was not. From start to finish, Apple’s affair was a brushed-

aluminum homage to sameness — a parade of services that start-
ups and big rivals had done earlier, polished with an Apple-y sheen
of design and marketing. Among other offerings, Apple showed off
a service for subscribing to news on your phone and a credit card,
and it offered vague details about a still-in-development TV service
involving Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey (who are not exactly
edgy or up-and-coming).

None of these efforts look terrible. Some, like the news service,
might be handy. Yet they are all so trifling and derivative. As the
analyst Ben Thompson noted, Apple’s crush of me-too
announcements falls far short of Mr. Jobs’s goal of putting “a ding in
the universe.” As I watched Apple’s event, I felt the future shrink a
little. In its gilded middle age, Apple is turning into something like a
digital athleisure brand, stamping out countless upscale

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accessories for customers who love its one big thing, a company
that has lost sight of the universe and is content merely to put a
ding in your pocketbook.

In an ordinary time, such an ordinary corporate vision might be fine.

But these aren’t ordinary times, and Apple is no ordinary company.
Here is a corporation with the resources of an empire, the mass
devotion of a religion and the operational capacity of a war
machine. Under Mr. Cook, Apple has cannily avoided every
minefield in tech and politics over the past couple of years, winning
a windfall from President Trump’s tax cut, avoiding getting burned
in his trade war — all while enjoying the loyalty of every moneyed
hipster and suburbanite on earth.

Yet, all around Apple, the digital world is burning up. Indirectly,
Apple’s devices are implicated in the rise of misinformation and
distraction, the erosion of privacy and the breakdown of democracy.
None of these grand problems is Apple’s fault, but given its
centrality to the business, Apple has the capacity and wherewithal
to mitigate them. But instead of rising to the moment by pushing a
fundamentally new and safer vision of the future, Apple is shrinking
from it.

Consider privacy. Mr. Cook is one of the tech industry’s strongest

champions of the sanctity of our private information, and Apple has
pushed for more stringent privacy regulations — which is just about
the least Apple could do. But what if it thought a little bigger? For
example, it could directly take on Google and Facebook — the
demons who rule our era of surveillance capitalism — by placing far
more stringent restrictions on their culture of rampant invasion, or at
least removing them from preferential places in the iPhone. (Google
will pay Apple an estimated $12 billion in 2019 to act as the default

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search engine on the iPhone.)

More than restricting the present, Apple could deploy its billions to
build a better digital future. In particular, I wonder why Apple isn’t
working feverishly to create new privacy-minded versions of social-
media services the world needs.

Take messaging, for starters. There is a strong moral case for

Apple to turn iMessage, its encrypted messaging app, into an open
standard available to anyone, even Android users, who currently
lack many privacy-minded messaging apps that aren’t run by an ad
company or aren’t friendly with the Chinese government.

There might be a business case, too. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s

founder, recently reoriented his company toward messaging. As
Will Oremus noted in Slate, the move brings Facebook into direct
competition with Apple. This presents an opportunity for Apple to
turn a cold war into a hot one; Apple could swiftly undercut Mr.
Zuckerberg’s ambition by freeing iMessage and bringing the gift of
privacy to the non-Apple world.

Here are some other big ideas: Apple could embark on a long-term
project to create a privacy-minded search engine to rival Google’s.
It could build an ad-free Instagram (its founders just left Facebook
in frustration). It could create a YouTube that isn’t a haven for neo-
Nazis.

Some (or many) of these may be dumb ideas — ideas that would
ruin Apple, or at the very least kneecap its short-run profits. But
they are at least big ideas; they match in scope and daring what
Apple was created to do. Let other companies handle streaming
entertainment. To paraphrase a wise man: Does Mr. Cook want to
sell prestige TV for the rest of his life, or does he want to change

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the world?

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Farhad Manjoo became an opinion columnist for The Times in

2018. Before that, he wrote the State of the Art column. He is the
author of “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.”
@fmanjoo • Facebook

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