Is Apple at risk of becoming BlackBerry?
Noted developer Marco Arment said in a blog post this weekend that Apple is on track to fall into the same trap as BlackBerry.
Cue the sirens. As tech industry burns go, that’s a biggie. If there’s been a company that’s acted as shorthand for what a tech company doesn’t want to be — fairly or not — it’s been BlackBerry. To be compared to BlackBerry is to be told that you’re a bad combination of short-sighted, delusional and content to rest on your laurels.
The Canadian firm was on the top of the world as recently as 2007 and then lost it all (in terms of market share for phones, at least) after seemingly ignoring the signs of the iPhone revolution. In hindsight, it all seems so obvious that an Apple-led smartphone revolution with apps, rich messaging, full Web browsing and more would drive the old idea of a “smart” phone into the ground. Right now, BlackBerry’s in the midst of a self-described turnaround effort. Turnaround efforts are great, but it’s better to have weathered shifts in the market such that you don’t need one.
Now, Arment and others see a similar shift on the horizon and, they say, this time the dominant player ripe for a fall is Apple itself.
It should be said that Apple and BlackBerry are very different companies, with different histories and cultures. And Apple, at its peak, has hit much higher heights than Blackberry ever did. Yet comparing the two is not exactly like comparing apples and, well, blackberries either. There are certain similarities to consider. Apple now, like BlackBerry then, is on the top of its game but being criticized for not innovating as much or as visibly as its competitors. In an era that admires moonshots — heck, even Microsoft’s got crazy chatbots and the Hololens — Apple is looking downright staid. It’s possible that the firm, known for its perfectionist pursuits, is keeping something enormous and exhilarating under its hat until it’s ready.
It’s also clear from a recent rash of analyses as well as Apple’s own earnings reports that the iPhone just isn’t growing like it once did. That’s not necessarily the fault of Apple, but it’s still not comforting in the near- to mid-term. Much of it comes from the fact that there are just only so many people in the world and only so many of them want new smartphones right now.
Apple’s been managing to make large enough changes to the iPhone to keep sales up. Bumping the screen size up, for example, gave it an extra boost. Apart from that, however, it doesn’t seem to consumers like there’s a lot of exciting things happening at Apple right now. The engineering challenges of making a phone lighter and thinner are substantial, but changes like that don’t really rock innovation-hungry consumers. And that makes them willing to hold on to their phones for longer.
It is also true that if Apple has a plan for moving out of an era where the iPhone turns in massive profits, it’s been awfully quiet about it. Sure, there has been a greater focus on other projects — Apple TV, the iPad line, the Apple Watch — as well as whispers about VR headsets and an Apple-branded car. Every time there’s even a hint that Apple could revolutionize an industry such as entertainment, autos or music, there’s a lot of excitement over the fact.
But to date, the really big revolutions have yet to happen. And the company is just as reliant as ever on the iPhone for its profits. So Apple, which will host its annual developers conference June 13-17, is under increasing pressure to deliver a vision of its future.
And it’s also worth noting that Apple has a distinct advantage that BlackBerry did not — it already knows what happened to BlackBerry. In fact, it should know that lesson better than anyone — given that it hastened BlackBerry’s downfall. Not to mention, it’s never good to count Apple out. This is, after all, a company once left for dead in the 1990s, right before Steve Jobs came back to the company.
But whether it’s already heeding the warnings about Blackberry or will hear them too late remains to be seen.