Quick, Tim, invent something

Apple has a problem. Not a big problem yet. Not big enough to notice really. It’s like petrichor – the smell in the air when it’s about to rain. You can’t quite place it, but you know there’s a change on the way.

Steve Jobs used to take a lot of credit for Apple’s innovations, with varying degrees of merit. He certainly took credit for the Macintosh, even though he had belatedly joined Jef Raskin’s development team only after the failure of Lisa became inevitable. During his ‘second coming’ after 1997, he was known to be very hands-on with the design and engineering teams, and the degree to which he took credit for the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad was probably more warranted.

The Power Mac G4 Cube was known to be a pet project of his, though he didn’t exactly shout too loudly about it.

In reality, all of these innovations were products of many, many people’s hard work and genius. Jobs actually invented very little himself.

But Jobs understood something about Apple that its other CEOs did not: it is a bit of a cult, and he was its High Priest. It’s not by accident that his return in 1997 was called ‘The Second Coming’. Nothing short of a Messiah was going to save Apple at that point, and he allowed that image to be nurtured. He allowed people to see him as the ultimate Creator of everything Apple produced.

As his health declined, though, he took a different tack. He didn’t step back from centre stage at product announcements and Macworld Expo keynotes only because of physical fatigue – it had become vital to demonstrate that Apple was more than just him.

As cancer took its toll, the question of his eventual departure from the company was asked more often, and it was necessary for him and for Apple to show that Steve Jobs – genius and visionary though he may be – was not a one-man show.

Since his death, Tim Cook has continued to follow the latter-day Jobs template. He strolls out on stage with his shirt untucked, drawls in his charming Alabaman way about how successful Apple is, then steps back and lets the various luminaries of Cupertino enthral us with what they have wrought. 

At the end, he strolls back up with a boyish grin and drawls about how he’s as enthralled as the rest of us, and thanks the fantastic team he leads for making such cool stuff.

And that’s kind of the problem. At first, it may have seemed like it would be disrespectful to take Jobs’ place at centre stage, but we’re heading on for four years now. Apple is still a bit of a cult – granted, a very, very big one – and it needs a High Priest, not an MC.

The nearest it has is Jony Ive, the design guru who’s probably most responsible for Apple’s move into wearables. He doesn’t even come out on stage – appearing only in those terribly sincere videos the company makes, talking in his terribly sincere way about the stuff he’s designed.

Why is this a problem? Well, the Apple Watch hasn’t had quite the impact the iPod, iPhone or iPad had, has it? If it is talked about at all, the absurdity of its top-end price tags (and therefore its design, not its function) is a central theme. Not good for a company that was founded on the principles of making powerful technology available to ordinary people.

The marketing for Windows 10, by contrast, does a great job of making it seem like it makes power accessible to ordinary humans. Can you smell petrichor?

Tim Cook needs to start being on stage for more of the product announcements.
He has to do more of the demos, and not leave them to others. He has to start acting like he’s driving more of what the company does.

Note that I’m not saying he isn’t in charge; he’s a terrific CEO, possibly better than Jobs in the business sense. But Apple is a company that makes things. More than that, it’s a company that invents things. Its leader has to be an inventor.

Even if it’s just pretend.

Matthew JC Powell is a technology commentator, philosopher and father of two, in no particular order.