Overall, looking at Apple profits, yes probably. Every business decision or product they make, no: just look at Magic Mouse ( ergonomics are awful), the butterfly keyboard, the cancelled Apple Car project or the Vision Pro, which is also not picking up as much steam as anticipated. And now they “cancelled” 8GB Macs, just when AI features , known for eating into Ram like it candy, are knocking on the door: coincidence? Apple makes some great products. But you are allowed to criticize Apple and their products. No need to worship a multibillion company as if it cured cancer and brought world peace.
I feel like a lot of the criticism aimed at Apple feels like a kid who scored 98% for a test, and he is being overly criticised for that one question he didn't get right, rather than being acknowledged for the other questions that he did do well in. And even if he did score 100%, my bet is that the critics would just find something else to find fault with, such as his handwriting or even the time he took to complete the test.
That feels like the state of Apple discourse today. People clearly have no interest in analyzing Apple as a company or having an honest conversation about how Apple operates Apple or what makes it tick. A lot of what I am reading here just feels very superficial and shallow and people just seem more interested in trying to explain away Apple's success, rather than explain it.
Something like the charging port of the Magic Mouse being on the bottom is being far given more oxygen than say, a discussion of the impact of the gray market on growing the active iPhone user base (in the context of rising iPhone prices and lengthening upgrade cycles) or a new Apple Store opening in a country (which should further help to boost sales and grow the install base), even though the former is really quite inconsequential and has practically zero impact on Apple's success as a company.
To put things another way, the signal-to-noise ratio here is pretty bad. A lot of noise, not much of a signal. All these nitty gritty little things like the power button at the bottom of the new Mac Mini? They just don't matter in the greater scheme of things, yet they are what account for the majority of comments (and most of it pretty superficial to boot as well).
The simple truth of the matter is - you don't run a successful business by giving users everything they want (not least because users almost always want more specs at a cheaper price, but will struggle to accurately describe what the next big thing will be). Rather, you should seek to emulate what Apple has done - create a unique user experience that people are willing to pay a premium for. Rather than sell a commoditised product that ends up in a race to the bottom in terms of pricing (like what we are seeing with android handsets and the PC market).
Apple is not perfect, but in all honesty, what company is, and I challenge anyone here to name me any other company who has been executing flawlessly all this time. The competition clearly has its fair share of issues, some appear flat out rudderless, yet only Apple seems to be subject to this ridiculous double standard where people here expect the sun and the moon, yet don't want to pay anything beyond cost price for them.
This is why I believe Apple will go on to proper in spite of all the criticism being levelled at it. For all their hiccups and missteps and tales of doom and woe (eg: DMA, lawsuits, patent issues), I continue to believe that Apple is headed in the right direction, generally speaking. They are not going to forget how to make great products overnight, yet this forum loves to position Apple as some special snowflake which is perennially one flop away from irrelevancy.
Why this narrative persists, I still cannot wrap my head around. I have thought about this for well over a decade, and the only logical conclusion is that people, for some reason, still want to explain Apple's success away rather than try to explain it. Perhaps it's all a mirror of today's 24-hour news cycle that's increasingly focused on keeping viewers engaged via rage-bait and manufactured outrage. Sure, it keeps Apple in the news, and it also gets frustrating when you realise that a lot of the news have very little traction, tend to lose steam within a week or two, and frankly, just don't really matter in the long term.
I go back to my guiding principle - Apple does a lot of things differently, and if all you are doing is simply comparing Apple to everyone else and then go “Hey, Apple isn’t following what everyone else is doing, so I don’t think whatever Apple is doing is going to work”, I think they go down the wrong path. The best way of covering Apple is to begin with Apple. You have to focus with Apple, and then you move outwards. You start with Apple, and then you analyse the industry that Apple operates in. Only then can we begin to actually have a productive and meaningful conversation regarding Apple.
