I stopped following what Apple was doing after November 2020.
It was the last time they truly innovated something. November 2020 marked the beginning of the transition from Intel chips to their own ARM silicon in Mac devices. I remember the pandemic was still happening, and there I was sitting in my room, muting my math teacher's voice on Zoom while fully fixated on the Mac keynote livestream.
It was also the last time I was excited about hardware technology. No hardware caught as much attention as this since that day, and Apple itself became a company I no longer cared about.
It's not that I stopped caring, but their product quality and innovation, both software and hardware, have dramatically declined in recent years.
Every single software update was a torture to my ocd brain. Swiping up the notifications in the notification center on my phone with iOS 18 (I wanted to keep using iOS 17, but because I got a new smartwatch, I had to update my phone to pair these two devices up) was too... slippery. It kept scrolling after I removed my finger from the screen. Apple Intelligence was also a mess. It took up space on my phone for no beneficial reason. A few days ago, I enabled it on my Mac because I thought it would help sort emails after I had switched my email client to the native Mail app. It was somewhat useful. Its only equivalent is the web + Gmail version of Grammarly. That's really it. And you can't even delete Apple Intelligence data from your Mac storage after disabling it.
Then, Liquid Glass came along during this year's WWDC. I have scrolled through X and Reddit and found so many beta users polarized about the design overhaul. Both Tahoe and iOS 26 are consistently inconsistent with their design, with Tahoe being more inconsistent. Some pop-ups are frosted, some are truly transparent. The sidebar is floating inside the window (wasted space). The buttons on every window get bigger, but when a Finder window is set to list view, the background on the top would never have any element on screen to float behind them, and because of that they are no longer floating liquid glass elements, but just big white bubbles on top of a white background, with a huge ugly gaussian blur behind the bubbles.
That's why I'm not updating my devices anymore. I don't want to buy a new phone. I don't want to buy a new laptop. I want to keep using the same devices and the same software, because, as they are getting worse every year, at least I have the power to stop them from getting worse than they already are.
iOS 17 was the last great mobile software shipped by Apple, and Monterey was peak macOS before the downfall started. And right now, I think I'm good with an M4 Pro, 24 GB RAM device with Sequoia! It's perfectly fine, and I don't want Tahoe to disrupt my workflow!
But now let's zoom out and look at Apple as a whole.
Why did my perception of their products change? Is it that I started having higher standards? Or did they fail to deliver year after year? I think it's the latter.
I don't have a lot of standards. I don't really care about hardware/software improvements because I like my technology as they are. I only expect the AI models I use to be better at solving coding problems.
Apple, however, has established a tradition of shipping new hardware and software every year. But both the smartphone market and laptop market are arriving at a plateau stage. There can only be incremental upgrades to their hardware configurations and software because they are only going to be... smartphones and laptops. These form factors of devices have already been fixed, and what other than spec bumps can they do? The answer is they can't. After transitioning from Intel chips to M-series chips for Mac, there was nowhere to bring new innovations. Hell, even that Intel to Apple Silicon transition is just a spec bump if you really think about it. It's revolutionary because it was a huge spec bump.
If you can't improve anything and you can't ship the same thing, the other choice is ruining it. And that's what Apple is doing. After Steve Jobs died, they are solely relying on price bumps to their most profitable product -- the iPhone. They don't expand to other markets to innovate on robotics, AI, and AR.
They don't have new form factors. Because they chose to stop innovating and focus on stock prices and investors.
That's why now I only care about LLMs and novel ML architectures. I think I've grown up from the lack of hype. I think Apple will stay as it is. They are already falling behind on AI, which is the only thing this country cares about at this point. They can still make AI glasses, but without their own proprietary AI model, they can't really bring anything more valuable than what Meta and Google are delivering. They are going to outsource AI, just like what they did with Apple Intelligence.
I will end my thought with a Steve Jobs quote:
"If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product."
Ironically, this happened to Apple.
And I hope this never happens to Chrysalis, or whatever I work on in the future.