Apple’s innovation engine is slowing
Apple’s current designs are unexciting and iterative product updates don’t help its innovation engine, which has slowed down in recent years.
The good news is, Apple’s roadmap for 2027 and beyond looks exciting, with foldable devices, all-glass iPhones, smart glasses and other gizmos in the works. “Apple has other major new initiatives on its road map, including a product that will cross a foldable iPad with a touchscreen Mac.” However, it won’t launch until 2028.
The bad news is, the products the company released in recent years, especially in 2024 and 2025, are mostly iterative versions of existing hardware, like the iPhone 15, new AirPods, the Apple Watch Series 10 and new M4-based Macs.
Apple’s innovation engine is slowing
As Gurman notes in the latest edition of his Power On newsletter on Bloomberg, it’s been a while since we saw something fresh from Apple. The only exception is the Vision Pro headset, a marvel of engineering and a new category for Apple, but a commercial flop because of its high price, a dearth of spatial content to keep users engaged, usability issues such as being too heavy and other factors.
As Mark mentions, the headset’s future is uncertain because the industry is moving toward smart glasses that Apple is rumored to be developing for a launch in 2027 to compete with Meta’s upcoming Ray-Ban product.
Though the Vision Pro headset certainly qualifies as innovative, it never caught on with consumers. And now its long-term future is in question as the company pivots to glasses. The iPhone 16, meanwhile, is undoubtedly one of the best smartphones on the market—but not too different than its four predecessors. In laptops, Apple has rolled out industry-leading processors, encased inside hardware that remains much the same.
A multi-year downturn caused by iterative updates without a real breakthrough is reflected in sales numbers. iPhone sales are not growing and are lower today vs. two years ago. The Apple Watch is also in trouble because the last two years brought “chip-and-ship” updates, where Apple swaps the chip and calls it a day.
IDC estimated that the Apple Watch revenue fell by fourteen percent last year, with unit sales dropping from 43 million in 2022 to 34 million in 2024. The decline eroded Apple’s smartwatch share down to 22.5 percent. Jitesh Ubrani, a research manager at IDC studying wearables, said that Apple is in a “weird spot” because it makes “great stuff but, at least on the watch side, things are a little bit iterative.”
Apple’s marketing strategy needs to evolve
Mark, back to you. “It’s clear that Apple needs something bigger and bolder on the horizon. But the speed of its innovation engine is slower,” Gurman writes in the newsletter. “Whether it’s due to the company’s larger size, inertia or a cumbersome development process, things have changed.
I think it’s a little bit of everything. Apple is not the same underdog we know from the 1990s. Apple is now one of the biggest, greediest corporations in the world. Steve Jobs used to say that Apple is organized like the world’s biggest startup.
But when Tim Cook took over, he filled the ranks with various layers of management that have greatly contributed to the inertia issue, so here we are. I don’t think anyone following Apple will deny the fact that Apple’s development process is somewhat broken. Otherwise, it wouldn’t serve us buggier-than-usual iOS releases and fumble an AI-infused Siri so badly.
“The days of getting frequently redesigned devices and a major new product category every few years are long gone,” Mark summed up. Those days have been gone for quite some time now, since we stopped getting new iPhone designs every other year. It began with the iPhone 6, which brought a design that Apple reused with little tweaks for the next two generations. The current fullscreen design has been with us since the iPhone X (2017), with the only significant change being the iPhone 12 (2020), which replaces smooth edges with square ones.
Even my Android friends have noticed that the iPhones I’ve owned in the past few years have mostly looked the same, and some of them even ask me if I upgraded. I think this perfectly exemplifies the problem Apple has on its hands, and I hope that the 2027 product blitz Gurman mentioned will turn this around.
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