On Sunday I read a brilliant essay: The Fallen Apple by Matt Gemmell and I encourage you to read it fully… but as I read it, I noticed I had some thoughts of my own inspired by it, so I decided to write them down:
I used to have an admiration for Apple…
And I still use their products - I’m still writing these words on my M4 iPad Pro on my desk with M4 Mac Mini, wearing Apple Watch Ultra 2 while keeping iPhone Air in my pocket… but I’m not as happy as I used to be using their products:
The company seems to have lost the one thing it held onto so firmly during all of the ups and downs of its history: its ethos of values-driven, liberal creativity and intentional design.
The whole OS’26 rollout is a mess. Lots of silly bugs and even my trusty iPad needs to be rebooted periodically to work properly. Like a Windows 95 machine…
Apple is currently the GUI laughing stock of the industry (…) Liquid Glass is the sort of folly that was once limited to portfolio pieces and fanciful blog posts (…) Now, these missteps come from the company itself.
I’m running both my iPad and iPhone on iOS26 beta to get the latest fixes… but with them I get even “better” bugs… it’s awful.
Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, is addicted to dollars…
Sad but true. Matt describes him perfectly:
We have the ageing and increasingly disconnected CEO whose only north star is the dollar, (…) giving up his reputation in order to preserve not the company or its people, but rather the stock price (…) kissing the ring and kow-towing to a tyrant…
Tim Cook is cooked. And he’s boiling Apple alongside with him. Apple is rotten because of his actions…
Apple is losing talent, supporters, fans…
Liquid Glass is another example of Apple’s rotten culture. They put a guy in charge of design (Alan Dye) who not only broke Apple’s UI dominance, half-assed its new design direction and later left them dealing with that 💩 for Meta…
Apple is also haemorrhaging people and knowledge. Executives, experts, engineers, and designers are all leaving for more lucrative positions at even less scrupulous companies
From what I heard, Apple never offered great salaries, but instead opportunity to work on something great. When that’s gone and you’re focusing on milking your company’s services revenue by putting ads into people Settings screens, you might as well go to Meta or Google for more money doing the same stuff. Why else would you stay?
Putting aside the ugliness, and both inaptness and ineptness of the implementation, the largest problem with Liquid Glass is that it is so damned ominous. It portends, or perhaps reveals, a rot; an erosion in the core where Apple has always been distinct and steadfast.
By choosing between “stock price” or “greatness” as northern star, you get different people who are willing to do the work.
What’s the point of having “Fuck You Money” if you never use it?
As I’m writing this on February 2, 2026, Apple’s stock price is at close to $260 and the company is worth more than $T3.8. Yep, almost 4 trillion dollars. They seem to have more money than God.
I have to wonder if we’re not seeing the result of fear. Fear of messing up a stable, winning formula, especially when you no longer have the industry-leading specialists to help you confidently move in new directions.
Not only this, they also have no “cojones” (Spanish for “balls”, or let’s not be sexist - “courage” - remember that, Phil Shiller?) to do the right thing:
Apple removes apps at the request of repressive governments, busts unions, fights tooth and nail against consumer-protection laws, has to be strong-armed into allowing repairability, and so on.
Yep, when it comes to money, they have the courage to fight on all fronts:
none of this seems to matter, because the investors are happy. Apple is the gold standard for hyper-profitability and predatory monetisation. (…) software which pays its tithe to Cupertino at every stage. Leverage upon leverage, incompatible with our quaint old-world perceptions of ownership, so long as the money flows.
So yes, they fight for money and stock price but not for all the reasons why we admired this company in the first place - design, doing the right thing, not caring for the bloody ROI (remember that, Mr Cook?).
Apple is bankrupt to me…
I remember back in 2006 when I was building Nozbe on my ThinkPad and admiring the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” campaign.
📸 See photo above - I even put an “Apple” sticker on my ThinkPad!
I finally got my beloved MacBook Air… and Apple was all about innovation, design, progress, intersection of art and technology… it was a company I admired… and now:
The company feels like a performance of itself, diverging farther and farther from the original, shuddering with escalating dysfunction, and held together by the sheer, grotesque extent of its indentured income.
Matt put it plainly:
Heading for bankruptcy once more, in every sense except the financial.
Ditto. Apple, a company that I used to know.