<story><title>Apple: Ten Years Forward</title><url>https://mondaynote.com/apple-ten-years-forward-10dfabf00706?gi=665f5d3c344f</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheOtherHobbes</author><text>Apple is on the way to having the same problem as Facebook - becoming an uncool brand for older people.&lt;p&gt;The under-30s increasingly care about climate change and other more immediate threats. Unless they have Type 1 diabetes, blood glucose is not an issue for them.&lt;p&gt;Apple under Jobs did a solid job of making &lt;i&gt;cool&lt;/i&gt; lifestyle accessories for all ages and genders.&lt;p&gt;Apple under Cook has drifted towards a kind of white picket Disneyfied techtopia, where the sun always shines, people always smile, everyone is very creative and colourful but also professional, fit, and focused. And it&amp;#x27;s somehow very sterile and boring.&lt;p&gt;As a result Apple missed out on the user-generated content wave, which was owned by YouTube and then TikTok. Apple already had some of the basic infrastructure in place with podcasting, but a middle aged outlook meant it missed the (mildly but interestingly) anarchic possibilities.&lt;p&gt;And that&amp;#x27;s going to be a problem for the future. Jobs was anarchic enough to want to shake things up but stable enough to make the shaking work (mostly).&lt;p&gt;Cook is small-c conservative, safe, and suburban in outlook. And now Apple is too.&lt;p&gt;Asking what The Next Big Consumer Thing will be is already missing the point because it assumes a model where there is a Next Big Consumer Thing and it&amp;#x27;s important enough to matter.&lt;p&gt;Ten years from now that&amp;#x27;s going to look like a weird and dated assumption. There will be much more chaos and uncertainty, and I suspect Big Consumer Things will be less important to everyone than they are now, and the people who are in their 10s-20s-30s now will be looking for something entirely different.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rcconf</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t agree. Apple is definitely a cool brand because what is the alternatives in the phone space for being cool? I can guarantee you that no one thinks Android devices are &amp;quot;cool&amp;quot; amongst the younger generation.&lt;p&gt;Apple is doing a fantastic job right now and I believe they&amp;#x27;re going to do great in the next 10 years because of one really simple fact:&lt;p&gt;Apple makes great products that just work and look great. No other company has been able to do that. I was just gifted a Fitbit and it failed about 5 times to pair to my phone. I restarted both the device (5x) and phone and it finally worked. How easy do you think it was for my girlfriend to setup her Apple watch? That&amp;#x27;s when I was reminded why Apple is #1.&lt;p&gt;I think Apple should continue what they&amp;#x27;re doing, create great products that just work and look great. It doesn&amp;#x27;t matter what the next 10 years looks like if they can continue doing that and I really think they can.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple: Ten Years Forward</title><url>https://mondaynote.com/apple-ten-years-forward-10dfabf00706?gi=665f5d3c344f</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheOtherHobbes</author><text>Apple is on the way to having the same problem as Facebook - becoming an uncool brand for older people.&lt;p&gt;The under-30s increasingly care about climate change and other more immediate threats. Unless they have Type 1 diabetes, blood glucose is not an issue for them.&lt;p&gt;Apple under Jobs did a solid job of making &lt;i&gt;cool&lt;/i&gt; lifestyle accessories for all ages and genders.&lt;p&gt;Apple under Cook has drifted towards a kind of white picket Disneyfied techtopia, where the sun always shines, people always smile, everyone is very creative and colourful but also professional, fit, and focused. And it&amp;#x27;s somehow very sterile and boring.&lt;p&gt;As a result Apple missed out on the user-generated content wave, which was owned by YouTube and then TikTok. Apple already had some of the basic infrastructure in place with podcasting, but a middle aged outlook meant it missed the (mildly but interestingly) anarchic possibilities.&lt;p&gt;And that&amp;#x27;s going to be a problem for the future. Jobs was anarchic enough to want to shake things up but stable enough to make the shaking work (mostly).&lt;p&gt;Cook is small-c conservative, safe, and suburban in outlook. And now Apple is too.&lt;p&gt;Asking what The Next Big Consumer Thing will be is already missing the point because it assumes a model where there is a Next Big Consumer Thing and it&amp;#x27;s important enough to matter.&lt;p&gt;Ten years from now that&amp;#x27;s going to look like a weird and dated assumption. There will be much more chaos and uncertainty, and I suspect Big Consumer Things will be less important to everyone than they are now, and the people who are in their 10s-20s-30s now will be looking for something entirely different.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>The-Bus</author><text>&amp;gt; As a result Apple missed out on the user-generated content wave, which was owned by YouTube and then TikTok.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t disagree with your take on Apple&amp;#x27;s perception. However, I don&amp;#x27;t think UGC is the end-all be-all. UGC is only useful for companies in the sense that it drives advertising. By changing its Privacy policies, Apple has managed to triple its advertising revenue in the last six months, now at $5B, with expectations of reaching $20B in three years.[1]&lt;p&gt;UGC is nice, but so is having the hardware and OS that the UGC runs on.&lt;p&gt;1: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ft.com&amp;#x2F;content&amp;#x2F;074b881f-a931-4986-888e-2ac53e286b9d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ft.com&amp;#x2F;content&amp;#x2F;074b881f-a931-4986-888e-2ac53e286...&lt;/a&gt; ($)</text></comment>