Apple Has Lost Its Soul. But Who Cares?

Hello, everyone. Can the person who leaked the Supreme Court's draft opinion get a copy of Musk's plan? The suspense is killing me.

There is a plain view.

Thirty-eight years ago, I sat across the table from a young Steve Jobs, who was munching on pizza, while a tape recorder captured our conversation. It was the first time I met Apple's co-founder, who was rushing to launch the original Macintosh and taking some time to talk to a Rolling Stone reporter. He mused on the future of his company. There are a lot of layers of management. They get into process over results. Their soul is gone. John and I will look at five years from now, six years from now, and see if we were able to grow into a $10 billion company.

Tripp Mickle, who for years covered the company for The Wall Street Journal but recently joined The New York Times, wrote After Steve, a new book about the last decade at Apple. The subtitle of the book is "How Apple became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul", so it wasn't much of a stretch.

In 1983, Jobs did not think that his company was worth a trillion dollars. That's 57 Twitters. He held onto the idea until the day he died. One might wonder why he turned his company over to Tim Cook, an executive who championed a bland efficiency, in contrast to Jobs' own showmanship. Jobs knew that Jony Ive would be its main in-house influence. The partnership would be a tragic mismatch.

Mickle's book is a kind of dual biography of the two men in the decade after Jobs died. Ive is gone, Tim Cook is more powerful than ever, and Apple is one of the world's most admired companies. The company is worth more than it was when Jobs died. Mickle's account of historic success rings hollow. He is asking the biblical question posed in Matthew 16:26, "What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world yet loses his soul?"

The life stories of both men are documented in Mickle's reporting, and he goes into great detail about how they carried on after Steve. The loss of their leader affected their lives differently. It was a decade of personal empowerment for Cook. He was helped publicly and proudly share his gay identity by Apple's leader. Ive was unable to find his place in the company because of his obsession with projects that weren't core to Apple's success. Neither comes off as a villain. Both have extraordinary talents. How shattering is it that an ambitious and brilliant designer left his workplace after 30 years? He designed a version of the Apple Watch with precious metal that sold for $10,000 and up.

The big question surrounding Cook was whether he could nurture a product as innovative as the iPod, the iPhone, or the iPad. The company tried and failed to produce an electric car in 2010. After a decade of Cook's accomplishments becoming the stuff of CEO legend, holding him to that standard seems wrongheaded. Every tech company has envy of his management of the iPhone franchise.

Apple had new products in that decade. Ive's original focus on ultra-luxury was misguided, but he was the one who came up with the Apple Watch. Apple's course-correction to emphasize the device's fitness features proved to be a winning formula. One more beloved notch was added to Apple's expanding belt. In 2010 Apple's biggest new driver of revenue was its growing services business, which allowed customers of its hardware to pay monthly fees for storage, music, news, and video. Mickle makes fun of Apple for its overblown entry into moviemaking and television production, but the last laugh seems to be Cook, whose company has won the first best-picture Oscar for a streaming company. Apple Music has gotten poor reviews, but the company's relentless distribution engine has made it a financial success.

Ive was struggling for most of the decade. He didn't play to his talents when he was managing software design. He spent a lot of time nurturing Apple's new headquarters, a monument to Jobs but one that Apple's customers don't get to enjoy. Ive was a distant figure in the company, sometimes showing up hours late for meetings. Cook runs his life like a perfectly functioning, just-in-time supply chain.

The juxtaposition makes for a good read. The story of innovation at Apple can be summarized by a Face/Off framing. Cook and Jobs both had a guy with an alternative spelling. His is not Jony Ive. Johny Srouji is an under-the-radar engineer who leads the company's chip development. That is the most significant element of the company's plan this decade, a transformation from a design-driven company to one centered on custom Silicon. Apple has been able to maintain its lead in phones and Macintosh line because it has made its own innovative chips, and now it is in a position to deliver more powerful, and potentially more magical, products than its competitors.

Mickle insisted that I could find Srouji's name in After Steve. He discovered that the passage about Apple's custom-Silicon guru had been cut from the book when he tried to point me to it. Maybe Johny will come in the second printing.

I learned a lot about Cook and Ive in After Steve. We aren't asking for soul from companies like Apple. Quality, innovation, and trustworthiness are what we want. That is a challenge for any company with a lot of users. Mickle admitted to me that there was no way that Apple could maintain its soul at its current size.

Macy Gray is a good choice if we are looking for soul. Tim Cook wants us to do it on Apple Music.

Time travel.

I got an exclusive first look at Apple's new campus, anchored by a spaceship-styled ring. When Ive was my tour guide, he gave me a glimpse into his design philosophy and what makes Apple products so sexy.

I quivered with enthusiasm as he described what we were seeing during my tour of the aboveground parking garage. He points out how smooth the edges are on the concrete beams and how carefully molded the curves are at the rectangular building's corners, like perfectly formed round-rects on a dialog box. Infrastructure like water pipes and electrical conduits are hidden in the beams, so the whole thing doesn't look like a basement.

The staircases are a feature that draws special pride. They are made of a thin, lightweight concrete and have unusual banisters that are carved out of the wall.

I chose to go through the café, a huge space that goes up the entire four stories of the building. It will hold as many as 4,000 people at once, split between the ground floor and the balcony dining areas. When it's nice outside, the caf has two massive glass doors that can be opened.

Why do you need a four-story glass door?

He says that it depends on how you define it.

Ask me one thing.

Since the owners claim they are platforms and not publishers, why not demand the removal of all the active software?

Dennis, I don't blame you for being confused. All of us are confused by Musk's promise to allow all legal speech on the service without turning it into 4chan. There are certain realities that persist. While vibrant speech takes wing, platform operators might want to sit back and relax. There are legal limits that they have to impose, like blocking child porn, and inciting violence. They require effort to enforce and are not optional. Hardcore adult pornography, graphically violent content, hate speech, and public health disinformation are all forms of legal speech that can make a platform less welcoming. Content moderation is done through human vetting on all major platforms. Section 230 allows them to do this. Demand what you want, but the software is here to stay.

I think you're unhappy with the way certain content is boosted and the way other content is reduced. A lot of people are unhappy about the black box nature of what gets spread and what gets suppressed. My guess is that if we were able to understand the algorithms, we would find a mix of incentives: keeping people on the platform more, making the platform friendlier for ads, and so on. Some rules might mitigate some of the harm caused by the other rules. Rules might be put in place to reduce posts that are identified by fact checkers as untrue.

Bad actors will have a clear path to game the system even more effectively if they are exposed. There is enough of a clamor for transparency in the US and Europe that this debate will rage for some time.

You can email questions to mail@wired.com. Write something in the subject line.

End Times Chronicle.

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