Dear John Ternus

Dear John,

You don’t know me, but I have been a major Apple fanboy for the past 40+ years.

I have always used Apple products for everything and once considered not taking a job because they were going to make me use a PC. (They wound up making an exception as long as I provided my own Mac.)

So I come in peace. 

But if Apple is going to succeed over the next decade then you need to make some serious changes.

Right now your biggest problem seems to be that you are wedded to a strategy that worked for you in the 90s, 00s and 10s: find a popular nascent technology where the products were awkwardly designed by engineers, give them a modern user-friendly interface and charge a premium for the result.

It worked for MP3 players and the iPod was a massive success. Ditto the colorful iMacs. The iPhone. And to a lesser degree, the iPad. 

But then it didn’t.

The Roku streaming device was well-designed and quite affordable. The Apple TV puck was slightly better designed but at 6X the price of the Roku, most users decided the additional cost was not worth it.

And while you managed to roll out the iPod Mini and Shuffle for consumers who could not afford a full-on iPod, you never managed to design a low-cost Apple TV stick.

The result being you are an afterthought in the TV OS market, an asterisk at best.

Then there was music.

Spotify was far from an engineering disaster and users seemed to actually like the interface. What’s more, it’s far more popular with Millennials and Zoomers than Apple Music, which never quite seemed to get past its Boomer roots. It’s not a bad product, it just never developed the “cool factor” that traditionally set Apple products apart. 

Then there was your biggest fail, the Apple HomePod.

Yes, Alexa can be annoying and somewhat dense. But mostly it does what it’s supposed to, looks good and is easy to set up. The audio quality is not perfect but it’s been improving. All of which is bad news for the HomePod, whose high price tag (twice that of Alexa and Google Home) seems to be based on its superior audio quality, something few consumers seem to actually care about. Or care about enough to pay an extra $150.

Finally, there’s Siri, which is another reason Home Pod is struggling.

Which is a real shame given that you were first to market with an AI-esque product.

But Siri became a punch line at a time when apps like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude were bulldozing their way into the world’s collective consciousness and while you’ve promised an upgraded version of Siri sometime soon, I don’t see anyone anxiously awaiting its arrival. 

And let’s face it: unless the new Siri does something to absolutely blow all of us out of the water, the press is unlikely to be positive.

Which is why I am writing to you now.

Because right now Apple is mostly running on past glory and iPhone sales. And that won’t last forever.

You need to take the consumer friendly part of your heritage and use that to innovate. Create devices that rely on AI but don’t seem like spyware.

Understand the world of Feudal Media and people’s lives inside these disconnected bubbles.

Create a new paradigm that does not rely on engineers not knowing how to design user friendly products

Reclaim your position as the cool kids tech of choice.

But doing the same-old/same-old?

That’s just not going to cut it.

Yours truly, 

Alan Wolk