"Slow innovation, timid ideas, process over imagination, small-minded thinking, diminished ambition: these are the signs of an abandoned future."- Futurist Jim Carroll
So Apple had their big developer conference the other day. This is the event where they lay out their plans for the coming year and the future about software, hardware, and new lines of business.
And it seems it was an entirely ho-hum affair - essentially consisting of a new software design (that many are panning), scaling back their AI efforts, and introducing a few new features here and there, This from the company that reinvented the phone, music, computer and other industries with bold visions, a fundamentally new technology that reimagined entire industries,
Apple finds itself trapped in what I call the "innovation plateau paradox" – having achieved such extraordinary success with revolutionary products like the iPhone and iPad that subsequent releases inevitably feel incremental by comparison. While the company continues to refine existing categories with better cameras, faster chips, and enhanced services, the absence of a truly category-defining breakthrough since Jobs' era is glaring.
Way back in 2014, I wrote a document - 25 Trends for 2025. You can find the post and PDF here.
What was trend #24 for 2025 on the list? I suggested this:
Apple is delisted
Once one of the world’s most innovative, cash-rich, highly valued companies, Apple enters a new phase in 2025 when it is delisted from most global stock markets.
Why?
Most industry leaders never survive; there is always someone with a better idea.
It’s the age-old rule of business: incumbency is not a guarantee!
Tongue in cheek, my main point was that eventually, unless they keep relentlessly focused on creative innovation, every company eventually fumbles, makes mistakes, loses its mojo, and starts to fall behind. (Check out trend #25 on my list from 2014 - it's kind of fun! And I did a full analysis of my prediction from 2014 in a post last December - read it here.)
What's the point behind the point? Relentless innovation and reinvention. Over the years, I've written about Apple a lot, such as this post from 2019:
Can you reinvent yourself at the same blistering pace as Apple and other hi-tech companies?
If not, you’d better figure it out - your market and industry are becoming part of that same reality.
At one time, Apple was in a situation in which 60% of revenue came from products that didn’t exist 4 years earlier. Once an aberration, that is increasingly becoming the norm in most industries. If you can't reinvent at the same blistering pace, you’re done.
I then noted:
If you can’t reinvent, you don’t survive. Your customers won’t put up with it. Their mind is already far ahead of you, because increasingly, they know what comes next, and that’s what they want!
Clinging to your legacy like the drowning seize a life preserver is not a strategy - it’s desperation!
That's where some people are pointing out how Apple seems to be drowning. Sure, it's had stunning innovation in the last few years, particularly with its staggeringly fast and extremely powerful new Mx-computer chips. But the rest? It's stumbled badly on AI, abandoned a long-running effort to get into the car industry, and failed with the mass consumer market launch of its VisionPro headset. It also lost the key design for many of its boldest initiatives, Jonny Ive, to OpenAI.
The real challenge isn't just about creating the "next big thing," but about maintaining innovative momentum when you've already transformed entire industries. Apple's cautious approach to AI integration and its fortress-like ecosystem strategy may be protecting current profits but is also constraining the very risk-taking that once made it legendary. The question isn't whether Apple can still innovate – it's whether it can rediscover its appetite for audacious bets that create the future rather than simply polish it.
When it's one big announcement is something like "liquid glass," you have to wonder. When you think about it and to be crass, it now seems to release a few new emojis, tweak its software, and ride to success on the back of its services revenue - things like music which essentially give it a guaranteed revenue and income stream without a lot of innovation. That's a rather simplistic overview, but when you get right down to it - what have you seen Apple do that matches the blistering pace of innovation that it saw during the period from 2000 to 2012?
The point is this - as soon as you start to see a company falling into the trap of "slow innovation, timid ideas, process over imagination, small-minded thinking, diminished ambition", you know you are witnessing the warning signs of an abandoned future.
Futurist Jim Carroll is working hard at working to make trend #25 on his original 25 Trends for 2025 list (that he wrote in 2014) come true.