Richard Spencer critiques Apple's post-Jobs era, noting Tim Cook drove value from $350B to $4T yet failed to match Nvidia's AI pace or Tesla's autonomy. He argues Project Titan was a wasted billion-dollar gamble and Apple missed the generative AI bubble by relying on third-party integrations instead of original models. With Apple TV+ losing billions on licensed content and the Watch feeling "cringe," Spencer concludes the company has peaked, shifting from a creative disruptor to a mainstream middle-class entertainment steward where the magic is gone. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, MahmoudAshraf/mms-300m-1130-forced-aligner, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.00, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Apple's Shift From Creative Roots00:15:13
This is just a rundown from ChatGPT.
When Cook took over in 2011, Apple was already large, but still heavily tied to the iPhone cycle.
Apple's market value rose from about 350 billion, that's something, to 4 trillion.
The market value is the total amount of equities out there.
If you were to purchase Apple through buying up stock, you would have to.
Gather together 4 trillion.
The iPhone still accounts for around 60% of revenue, but Comp expanded services, Apple Music, TV, Apple Pay into a major second pillar.
They have a massive installer base of 2.5 billion supporting services growth.
Stock is up 1,200% over Cook's tenure.
I mean, there are some.
Remarkable things.
Tim Cook came from the world of logistics.
He's not a design guy.
He's not a software guy.
He is younger than Steve Jobs and thus wasn't, not that much younger, but younger than Steve Jobs.
He wasn't really one of these tech kids doing some of the hijinks that Waz and Steve Jobs were up to.
Making free long distance phone calls and trying to hack banks through the telephone network and building computers in your garage and all of that kind of stuff.
I think he did maintain Apple at a very good rate.
It increased at about the same level of growth as Google.
Now, it didn't increase anywhere close as something like Nvidia, though Nvidia might be in a huge bubble.
Had some real problems that I think are worth pointing out.
The Apple car actually, it was called Project Titan.
And that took up billions of dollars.
They were first trying to make a car that would have the original idea was radical.
It would have, and this was actually Steve Jobs' idea, it would have no steering wheel, it would have no acceleration pedal, it would have no brake pedal.
It would be totally autonomous, affordable for a middle class family, and you just hop in and it would take you places.
And they worked on this and worked on this.
They spent billions on this and they wrote it all off.
Which, that alone makes me a little bit skeptical in terms of the Tesla model.
Now, the Tesla, the Apple car would have been an electric car, presumably.
But the Tesla model of autonomous driving, I have actually tested this out with three people who own Teslas that I happen to be in.
And it was pretty interesting.
It was very neat.
The car was driving on its own and it was using cameras to gain information from cars around it.
You also had to be paying attention.
So, the dream of you can just sit back, tell your car where you want to go, and it will take you there, I think is still very, very far away.
Because it might be a bit relaxing to kind of let the car go through traffic, but you can't really take your mind off the road.
And it will actually tell you to pay attention if you start looking down or fiddling with things or things like that.
So, We'll see.
Maybe this is a stepping stone towards total autonomous driving, or maybe not.
But notions that were talked about, even in like 2010, of, for instance, Uber purchasing fleets of Apple cars and they're just like moving around Austin or New York City or wherever.
And I still think we're far away from this.
Now, there are some autonomous Ubers, taxis in Austin.
I've yet to take one.
But we'll see about all of this.
It's very interesting.
But at the very least, Apple failed there.
Apple failed to jump on the AI bubble.
I mean, one thing that I've noticed with Siri is that Siri was released in 2011, and I'm not sure that Siri has really improved that much since the beta stage.
The idea of Siri set a timer for three minutes, that she is very good at that.
Siri play.
You choose the Joshua tree.
She can do that.
She's integrated with Apple Music.
More than that, I'm not sure Siri's capacity has increased all that much.
And Apple sort of lost out on the AI game and they're now integrating with these third parties.
They're integrating with ChatGPT.
I think they're actually moving to Google Gemini for AI, you know, LLM basically.
So they haven't done it themselves and they had billions upon billions of dollars to burn.
Now, Apple did get in during with Tim Cook, they got into the movie business and Apple never produced music.
I think there were a few Apple originals on iTunes where you could, you know, a band would play live at an Apple store or something.
I'm using this as an exception to prove the rule.
Basically, they never produced original content.
They now are.
And some of that content is pretty decent, actually, streaming content.
I've watched a lot of it.
They're using existing Hollywood studios.
I think Sony produced Pluribus.
F1, someone mentioned in the chat, is an interesting example.
There are other examples.
I saw that Presumed Innocence sort of, it was a remake of a Harrison Ford movie, which was a remake of a novel from the 1980s.
And I actually enjoyed it, it was good.
But.
I don't think they've really rethought anything in that direction.
And they have lost billions of dollars with Apple TV, ultimately.
Even if they are bringing in revenue streams, they have not really covered the cost in that direction.
The Apple Watch, don't you think that?
I don't want to insult anyone on this program, but don't you think the Apple Watch is a bit cringe?
Am I right here?
You know, when you see in 2007, if you had an iPhone, that really meant that you were an early adopter ahead of the game, or you were part of the cult of Mac, which I will talk about in a little bit.
I'm not sure you think that about an Apple Watch.
Now, some people might really like it and it's good for exercise or what have you, but I find it a bit cringe.
To be honest, I've only seen like working, like kind of like middle class type of people, like average people with them.
I've never seen like a rich guy with an Apple Watch.
Yes.
They're still wearing a Swiss watch, I presume.
If they're a rich guy, I think they use it for health data, basically, which is a huge market, but not the creative side, which is where Apple kind of made its name, which was more with the creative audience.
And they never, they did miss the boat on, All of the generative AI things and music and film, things like that, where they could have made a difference.
They kind of totally dropped the ball on that.
They could have just purchased the Disney company in cash and they didn't do something like that.
I, and I think Apple would probably, the thing that they are good at is being stewards of middle class, classy entertainment.
I think that would have been a good move.
Actually, why are you producing original content that you're just farming out to studios anyway?
Why don't you just buy Disney and integrate Apple stores into Disney World and so on?
Maybe they tried to do this and Disney wouldn't sell.
I don't know.
But I think that would have probably been a more interesting move than what they ultimately did.
The iPhone, I can't tell a difference between.
Variations on the iPhone.
It has reached peak.
We have reached peak iPhone, and I think we probably reached it more than 10 years ago.
Now, that doesn't mean it's not going to be a profitable business.
It's out there.
It still does have a little bit of the cachet, a little bit of status signaling, this left, but it also has been democratized to the degree that I don't know if it's really a status signal as much as it was, say, in 2007 through 2014, maybe.
Um, I don't know.
I think Tim Cook, I don't want to bash him.
I mean, someone who increased revenue to this degree, how can you really bash him?
He did his job.
But I think Apple has changed.
I mean, I remember my father owned a Macintosh.
It was not the original Mac, but it was very early.
And I eventually inherited it.
I believe it was a Mac SE.
And those were selling for something like four or five grand.
Which was, it's probably the equivalent of like 12 or 15 grand now.
It's like a Honda, a used Honda at this point.
I mean, pretty expensive is what I'm saying.
And I remember even playing on it when I was eight or nine, and it was pretty magical doing Mick Paint and so on.
That was real innovation.
And I also remember when I was a lot younger, the Mac versus PC Wars.
Where Mac was just easier to use, cooler, we liked the products, et cetera.
PC was lame.
What became the Mac versus PC ad campaign in the 2000s was prefaced by organic arguments between Mac users and PC users for like 15 or 20 years.
And the Mac guy looked like Keanu Reeves, and he was like a creative director, graphic designer.
Just a cool guy who like edited his own movies.
And it was cool.
iTunes was very cool.
Steve saw a problem, which was that the age of CDs was going away.
Vinyl was way dead.
CDs were going away because of Napster.
You could just download an MP3 at any point, and there's just no reason to buy a CD.
He recognized that problem and he offered corporations a solution, which was we can offer a price for a song that's so low that it's not worth your while to go steal it.
99 cents for a song, which also just disaggregated music.
It changed the notion of an album, where an album is sort of irrelevant, even though albums are certainly released and produced.
Albums are sort of irrelevant now.
You could download the song and corporations could make money.
And corporations, those record labels were reeling in the late 90s and early 2000s.
I remember this.
I mean, I think I've mentioned this before.
When I was at the University of Virginia, the computer lab would have it, it would be all PCs because Windows just dominated.
And it would be all PCs and there'd be like two Macs in the corner for the weirdos who wanted to use them.
But I also remember going to computer labs, you know, let's say at like 10 p.m. on a Thursday or something.
And Everyone, the computer labs were packed because everyone there was just downloading stuff from Napster.
It was a disaster.
And Apple sort of associated itself with cool pop music, even alternative pop music.
Coldplay was sort of the soundtrack of the iPod.
The iPod was using a solid state drive.
Eventually, it was originally the original iPod was using a spinning hard drive.
They eventually got to the point where they could use a solid state drive, and it was.
Minuscule.
Yeah, someone said U2 was also part of that.
It's this tiny little iPod with 500 songs that is so much more than a CD Walkman or a cassette tape from years past.
And it was just very cool.
And Apple was cool, but it was able to hang on to its sort of alt nerdiness as well that it maintained throughout the 80s and 90s.
Even when Steve had been kicked out, it was still interesting to use a Mac.
And I feel like post Tim Cook, Apple is just another company.
Is The Mac Losing Its Edge00:02:23
And it's not special or interesting to use a Mac.
I think they still use it in studios.
To buy aluminum MacBook Pros, but it just wasn't special.
Now, one thing that's very interesting Steve was around during the development of the first, I guess, like M1 chip, which was the Apple designed, built in Taiwan, but Apple designed microchip for the iPhone.
So they weren't using an off the shelf, like an Intel chip or something.
They were designing it themselves.
And they eventually got to the point where you can put that into a Mac.
And at this point, my Mac now, I guess, is going on, oh my, four years.
And I have no desire or need to get a new one.
It is, I don't know what to say.
We might have reached peak laptop where an aluminum chassis, minimalist Johnny Ive design is just it.
And you don't need to buy a new laptop for 10 years.
And actually, they introduced an interesting product called the Neo that I have no reason to buy, but it's a 13 inch laptop.
It's $500.
And what they were seeing is that the MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros, MacBook Airs you can get for like $1,000.
MacBook Pros are probably two and a half or something.
But basically, no one was buying new MacBook Pros because they lasted so long.
And so there was a huge market on eBay for used MacBook Pros that you could buy for $500.
So they said, We got to get some of that money.
We're going to release a cheap laptop, but it still is aluminum.
And that is, it's metal, it's not plastic.
And it works great and has a high definition screen and et cetera.
It's perfectly adequate for school.
You don't even need to ask your parents for money.
You can finance it on a firm or Clarna or whatever.
It's a very good product, but it is the total mainstreaming of Apple.
So I don't know.
I guess it's interesting.
It's a success story.
And I don't really have anything against Tim Cook, but I would just say that the magic is gone.