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Apple Has Lost Its Soul. But Who Cares?
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Steven Levy

Business
May 6, 2022 9:00 AM


APPLE HAS LOST ITS SOUL. BUT WHO CARES?

Plus: Jony Ive’s final Apple project, platforms without algorithms, and a major
NFT development.
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After the death of Steve Jobs, Jony Ive struggled to find his place at
Apple.Photograph: Lia Toby/Getty Images

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Hi, everyone. Can the person who leaked the Supreme Court’s draft opinion
overturning Roe v. Wade get their hands on a copy of Elon Musk’s plan to fix
Twitter next? The suspense is killing me.


The Plain View

Thirty-eight years ago, I sat across the table from a 28-year-old Steve Jobs,
both of us munching on pizza while a tape recorder captured our conversation. It
was the first time I met Apple’s cofounder, who was sprinting to launch the
original Macintosh and took some time to talk to a Rolling Stone reporter. At
one point he mused on his company’s future. “Something happens to companies when
they get to be a few billion dollars,” he told me. “They sort of turn into
vanilla companies. They add a lot of layers of management. They get really into
process rather than results, rather than products. Their soul goes away. And
that’s the biggest thing that John Scully and myself will get measured on five
years from now, six years … Were we able to grow into a $10 billion company that
didn’t lose its soul?”

I thought of that remark when reading After Steve, a new book about the last
decade at Apple, by Tripp Mickle, who for years covered the company for The Wall
Street Journal but recently joined The New York Times. It wasn’t much of a
stretch, because the subtitle of the book is “How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar
Company and Lost Its Soul.”



In 1983, even Jobs' grandiose imagination did not conceive of his company being
valued at a trillion dollars, let alone its current $2.5 trillion price tag.
(That’s 57 Twitters.) But the idea of “soul” was something he held onto until
the day he died. One might wonder, then, why he turned his company over to Tim
Cook, an executive who championed a bland efficiency, in vivid contrast to Jobs’
own showmanship. The answer might be that Jobs knew that his doppelgänger, Jony
Ive, would still be its main in-house influencer. What he did not intend was
that the partnership would be a tragic mismatch.

At least that’s the premise of Mickle’s book, which is a kind of dual biography
of the two men in the decade after Jobs’ passing. We don’t need a book to tell
us the outcome: Ive is gone, Tim Cook is more powerful than ever, and Apple is
one of the world’s most admired companies. Not to mention that the company is
now worth more than 10 times as much as it was when Jobs died. But in Mickle’s
account that historic success rings hollow. Essentially, he’s asking the
biblical question posed in Matthew 16:26 and later paraphrased by George
Harrison: “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world yet forfeits
his soul?”



Mickle’s reporting is tremendous: He documents the life stories of both men and
goes super deep on how they carried on at Apple post-Steve. Both were devastated
at losing their leader, but it affected their lives differently. For Cook, it
was a decade not just of professional success but also of personal empowerment.
(The confidence he gained as Apple’s leader helped him publicly and proudly
share his gay identity.) Ive, on the other hand, struggled to find his place in
the company, sometimes obsessing on projects that weren’t core to Apple’s
success. Neither comes off as a villain. Both are extraordinary talents. And
while Ive’s departure from Apple certainly was a symbolic moment, how shattering
is it really that an ambitious and brilliant designer left his workplace after
30 years? Plus he’d already gotten his gold watch—he’d designed a version of the
Apple Watch with that precious metal that sold for $10,000 and up.

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When Jobs died, the big question surrounding Cook was whether he could nurture a
product as groundbreaking as the iPod, the iPhone, or the iPad. In the 2010’s
the company tried and failed to produce an autonomous electric car (an effort it
has reportedly revived). But after a decade of Cook’s accomplishments becoming
the stuff of CEO legend, holding him to that standard seems wrongheaded. His
management of the iPhone franchise has been the envy of every tech company.



And Apple did have new products in that decade. Ive himself was the impetus for
the aforementioned Apple Watch, even though his original focus on ultra-luxury
was misguided. (Apple’s course-correction to emphasize the device’s fitness
features proved a winning formula.) AirPods, another wearable, added one more
beloved notch to Apple’s expanding belt. Even so, in the 2010’s Apple’s biggest
new driver of revenue was its growing services business, effectively milking
customers of its hardware to pay monthly fees for storage, music, news, and
video. Mickle makes fun of Apple for its overblown entry into moviemaking and
television production, but the last laugh seems to be Cook’s, whose company has
won the first best-picture Oscar for a streaming company. And while Apple Music
has gotten poor reviews, the company’s relentless distribution engine has made
it a financial success.



Meanwhile, Ive was struggling for most of the decade. Though he led the Watch
effort, a stint managing software design didn’t play to his talents. He wound up
spending inordinate time nurturing Apple’s new headquarters, a stunning monument
to Jobs but one that Apple’s customers don’t get to enjoy. Mickle also documents
how a burned-out Ive became a distant figure in the company, sometimes showing
up hours late for meetings. That’s a dramatic contrast to Cook, who runs his
life like a perfectly functioning, just-in-time supply chain.

The stark juxtaposition makes for good reading. But the story of innovation at
Apple in the 2010’s can’t be summarized by a Face/Off framing alone. It turns
out that just as Jobs had a guy with an alternative spelling of “Johnny,” so
does Cook. But his is not Jony Ive. It’s Johny Srouji, an under-the-radar
engineer who leads the company’s chip development. That’s the most significant
element of the company’s roadmap this decade—a transformation from a
design-driven company to one centered on custom silicon. Because Apple has made
its own innovative chips, it has not only managed to maintain its lead in phones
and boost its Macintosh line, but the company is now in a position to deliver
more powerful, and potentially more magical, products than its competitors.

When I asked Mickle why Srouji’s name doesn’t appear in After Steve, he insisted
that I could find it in there. But when he tried to point me to the passage
about Apple’s custom-silicon guru, he discovered that it had been cut from the
book. Maybe Johny will come lately, in the second printing.

I did learn a lot about Cook and Ive in After Steve. But as this century of Big
Tech barrels to its second quarter, we aren’t asking for soul from companies
like Apple. We want quality, innovation, and trustworthiness. That’s a challenge
for any company with billions of users. Even Mickle himself admitted to me that
there was no way that Apple could have maintained its soul—whatever that is—at
its current scale. “It had to shed the purity of its commitment as a consequence
of the pressures it faces from Wall Street to continue to deliver growth,” he
told me.

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If we’re looking for soul, we can fire up some Macy Gray. Tim Cook hopes we do
it on Apple Music.


Time Travel

In 2017, I got an exclusive first look at Ive’s final major project at Apple:
its new campus, anchored by the spaceship-styled ring. Ive was my tour guide,
and his responses provided a window into his design philosophy and what makes
Apple products so lust-worthy.

During my tour, when we pass through an aboveground parking garage, Ive quivers
with enthusiasm as he describes what we’re seeing. He points out how smooth the
edges are on the concrete beams and how carefully molded the curves are at the
rectangular building’s corners, like perfectly formed round-rects on a dialog
box. Further­more, infrastructure like water pipes and electrical conduits is
hidden in the beams, so the whole thing doesn’t look like a basement. “It’s not
that we’re using expensive concrete,” Ive says, defining what he calls the
transformative nature of this parking garage. “It’s the care and development of
a design idea and then being resolute—no, we’re not going to just do the easy,
least-path-of-resistance sort of standardized form work.”

Inside the Ring, Ive lingers on another feature that draws special pride: the
staircases. They’re made of a thin, lightweight concrete that achieves the
perfect white, and they have unusual banisters that seem carved out from the
wall alongside the stairs. “You can create a handrail by screwing on a railing
system that is essentially an afterthought,” he says, with unfettered contempt
at those who would. “But you actually solve it fundamentally with design.”



Ive opts to take me in through the café, a massive atrium-like space ascending
the entire four stories of the building. Once it’s complete, it will hold as
many as 4,000 people at once, split between the vast ground floor and the
balcony dining areas. Along its exterior wall, the café has two massive glass
doors that can be opened when it’s nice outside, allowing people to dine al
fresco.

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“This might be a stupid question,” I say. “But why do you need a four-story
glass door?”

Ive raises an eyebrow. “Well,” he says. “It depends how you define need, doesn’t
it?”


Ask Me One Thing

Dennis asks, “Since the owners claim they are platforms (passive) and not
publishers, why not accept that and demand the removal of ALL algorithms
(active)?”

Hi, Dennis, I don’t blame you for being confused. Elon Musk’s tweets are
confusing all of us, as he promises to allow all legal speech on Twitter without
turning the service into 4chan. But certain realities persist. Platform
operators might dream of just sitting back while vibrant speech takes wing. But,
for starters, there are legal limits they have to impose, like blocking child
porn, incitements to violence, and copyright violations. Those are in no way
optional, and they require effort to enforce. Then there is the fact that some
forms of legal speech, like hardcore adult pornography, graphically violent
content, hate speech, and public health disinformation can make a platform,
shall we say, less welcoming. That’s why all the major platforms do content
moderation of some sort, both algorithmically and through human vetting. Section
230 allows them to do this without being considered publishers. So demand all
you like, but algorithms are here to stay.

I suspect you are unhappy with algorithms that boost certain content and
downgrade other kinds of content. A lot of people are unhappy about the “black
box” nature of what gets spread and what gets suppressed and are calling for
transparency. My guess is that if we’d actually get a look at those algorithms
(and were able to understand them, not a small task) we’d find a mix of several
incentives: keeping people on the platform more, making the platform friendlier
for ads, making sure that people have plenty of content to see, and promoting
features that the platform owners want to push. They might also find some rules
that mitigate some of the harm fomented by the other rules. For instance, if the
algorithm boosts posts that spread disinformation—because people engage with
lies more than they do with boring truth—other rules might downgrade posts that
are identified by fact checkers as untrue.

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One problem with exposing algorithms is that bad actors will then have a clear
path to game the system even more effectively. Still, there’s enough of a clamor
for transparency, both in the US and Europe, that this debate will rage for some
time.

You can submit questions to mail@WIRED.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.


End Times Chronicle

What? You can use multiple slurp juices on a single ape? Stop the presses!


Last but Not Least

In a Q&A, former Apple exec and new author Tony Fadell dismisses the charge that
the company has lost its mojo. “They’re doing damn well,” he says.



A look behind the dirt-cheap prices of the breakout Chinese fast-fashion company
Shein.

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We need renewable energy—on Mars.

WeWork might have been a financial flop, but in the marketplace of ideas it’s a
winner.

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Steven Levy covers the gamut of tech subjects for WIRED, in print and online,
and has been contributing to the magazine since its inception. His newest
column, Plaintext, will soon only be available to subscribers; sign up here. He
has been writing about technology for more than 30 years, writing... Read more
Editor at Large
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