[FormerBandmate]

Apple has moved from being an incredibly innovative company under Steve Jobs to a much more corporate, mature company that relies more on incremental growth. They don’t really have any incentive to change because of their success, and this fundamental pattern happens to every company (see GE’s history after Edison). Apple simply isn’t the company it was before, and that’s a natural part of capitalism.

Other Apples are emerging all the time, and will continue to emerge

[paxys]

"Mature company that relies more on incremental growth" is exactly the stage where they get overtaken and fade into obscurity. It won't happen tomorrow, but slowly there will be new kids on the block who will make their tech look dated and uncool. It seems impossible to even think about but you'd say the same about IBM a few decades ago.

[gumby]

Yeah, too bad they don't develop new ideas like the watch or AirPods or design their own CPUs from scratch.

[smoldesu]

Yeah, real show-stoppers for a company that's quite literally the largest, most powerful corporation in modern history.

[agumonkey]

I'm sure Jobs knew about this. I'm sure he told Cook to milk the market cow wide and deep to ensure survival of Apple while maintaining a steady brand, in the event that somehow something real genuine emerges again from Apple and they're ready to fire with 200B of cash.

[smoldesu]

> Other Apples are emerging all the time

How so? Are other people creating closed software platforms where they charge 30% off the top for their developers? I agree that they've gone more corporate over the years, but it was only after the realization that they could exploit the market with their install-base. It's quite literally, step-for-step identical to Microsoft's old Internet Explorer parable that got them in so much trouble. They're taking advantage of a market without any other options, which is not something that an emerging company can do, much less at the scale Apple does it.