Apple has never made more money, and I’ve never been less excited about what it’s selling.
The numbers are real. The holiday quarter brought in $143.8 billion, an all-time record, and the June quarter was the best June quarter Apple has ever had. iPhone set an all-time record, and so did services (the subscriptions, the App Store, iCloud and the rest). So before anyone asks: this post is about the products. I’m not reviewing the stock, and nothing here is advice about Apple shares.
Record revenue tells you people are still buying. It doesn’t tell you whether Apple is still earning it, and for the past several years the products just haven’t been very innovative.
I’m about as deep in Apple’s ecosystem as a person gets: an iPhone 17 Pro Max, an Apple Watch Ultra 4, the latest 13-inch iPad Pro, and two MacBook Pros (one personal, one for work). I’ve upgraded my iPhone every single year since Apple launched its upgrade program. This is the first year I haven’t, and I’m not going to. Price was never the issue. I’ll pay when the product justifies it. This year, it doesn’t.
The $2,000 phone with the lesser camera
Start with the most expensive iPhone Apple has ever made. The iPhone Duo, Apple’s first foldable, starts at $1,999 for 256GB. That’s $700 more than the iPhone 18 Pro Max. For that money you get a folding screen, and you don’t get a telephoto lens. The Duo’s rear cameras are just a 48MP main and an ultrawide, and Macworld says the main sensor looks closer to the one in the cheaper iPhone 17e. By Apple’s own numbers, battery life trails the 18 Pro Max too: up to 31 hours of video with the Duo unfolded, against 45 for the Pro Max.
So the $2,000 phone has a lesser camera and less battery than the phone $700 cheaper sitting next to it. That’s flagship pricing without flagship features. Apple watched Samsung work through foldable tradeoffs for seven years before shipping its own, and the whole argument for waiting was that Apple would get it right. A $2,000 phone missing a lens I’d expect on a $1,199 one is not getting it right.
That’s flagship pricing without flagship features.
A flagship with last year’s modem
Then there’s the Pro Max, which Apple sells as its flagship. Apple finally has its own cellular modem worth bragging about. The C2 adds mmWave 5G support, and Apple says it delivers meaningfully faster uploads than the C1X while using 15% less energy. The 18 Pro gets the C2 worldwide. The Duo gets it worldwide. The 18 Pro Max gets it everywhere except the United States, where a TechInsights teardown found Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X80 instead. That’s the same modem that shipped in last year’s 17 Pro.
For me it’s even more absurd. My 17 Pro Max already has the X80. Upgrading to Apple’s newest flagship would get me the exact same modem I’m carrying right now, for $1,299.
Apple hasn’t explained why. The best guess going around is that Qualcomm’s supply deal covers iPhones through 2026 and Apple needed to put its modems in something. That may be a perfectly good reason for a supply chain team. It’s a lousy one for the person in the US paying $1,299 for Apple’s flagship, who ends up with older silicon than the cheaper Pro. Apple’s own spec page leaves the modem line blank for the Pro Max. That tells you how proud they are of it.
HomeView: built for Siri, without the chip to run it
On Tuesday, Apple announced HomeView, a $299 smart display that Apple built around Siri AI. This is a product that sat on a shelf for years waiting for Siri to be ready, and it still doesn’t have the right chip to get the full power out of it. Apple put an A18 in it, not the A20 Pro from the new phones, and the personal stuff (pulling from your Messages and Calendar, taking actions across apps) only works if you pair it with an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone or iPad. Siri AI on HomeView launches in beta, with daily usage limits on some cloud features. Apple built a device whose entire reason to exist is the assistant, then shipped it without the hardware to run that assistant on its own.
The $299 Apple TV
HomeView wasn’t the only thing Apple launched that day. There’s also a new Apple TV 4K, and the price is insane. For almost four years, the Apple TV 4K started at $129, or $149 for the 128GB model with Ethernet. On June 25, Apple blamed memory costs and raised those to $199 and $249, on hardware first released in 2022 with a chip from 2021. The new model comes in exactly one configuration, 128GB, for $299, and it’s now the only Apple TV that Apple sells. The cheapest way into an Apple TV went from $129 to $299 in less than four months.
To be fair, you do get something for it: an A19 chip, Siri AI, and far-field microphones so you can talk to it without picking up the remote. But $299 is the same price as HomeView, a device with a 7-inch screen, a camera, and speakers built in. For a box whose main job is streaming, I don’t see $299 worth of product here.
Siri AI, two years late and built on Gemini
Which brings me to Siri AI, which has been an epic failure.
Apple showed off a smarter, context-aware Siri at WWDC in June 2024. It took more than two years to ship. In between came missed dates, a slip past iOS 26.4, reports of testers getting cut off mid-sentence, and Siri handing requests to ChatGPT that it should have handled itself. Then came the tell: a multiyear deal with Google. Siri AI is built with Gemini models, and Apple is reportedly paying around $1 billion a year for it. When it finally shipped with iOS 27 on September 14, you had to join a waitlist to get it, it carried a beta label, it only runs on an iPhone 15 Pro or newer, and it isn’t available on iPhone in the EU.
It also broke things that worked. Macworld points out that Siri AI took over the gesture that used to open Spotlight, which was one of the best tools on the iPhone, and made it worse. Two years of waiting, and the result is a borrowed brain sitting on top of a worse search.
I spend most of my working days on agentic AI, and the part everyone is fighting to own right now is the intelligence layer: the thing that understands what you meant and acts on it. That’s the part Apple rented. The company with more cash than almost anyone on earth spent two years trying to build it, then licensed it from its biggest rival in mobile. Apple has completely dropped the ball in the AI race, and it’s the one race that’s going to decide what a phone is for in five years.
Great business, slipping product
Tim Cook did an amazing job growing the business side of Apple. The record numbers at the top of this post are his. But the product side has been in decline, and you can see it in the keynotes. Every WWDC for the past couple of years has been hyped up and has missed the mark, and the 2024 Siri promise is the clearest example.
We used to be able to say Android rushed stuff out and Apple did it right. I don’t know if that can still be said. Siri AI took two years and Google’s help to ship, and it still landed as a waitlisted beta. That isn’t Apple waiting until it’s right.
None of this shows up in the revenue yet. It might be starting to. Nikkei reports Apple’s October component orders for the new Pro phones are at least 15% below plan.
Ternus’s first real test
Which puts it on John Ternus, who took over from Cook on September 1. There are reasons to be hopeful. He’s a hardware engineer who oversaw iPad, AirPods, and Mac hardware for years and led the Mac’s move to Apple silicon. Early reports say he’s spending his days with Apple’s engineers instead of on the business side. He was reportedly skeptical of the Vision Pro, which tells me he has the taste to say no. And when he talks about technology, he sounds a lot like Jobs: you don’t launch a technology for its own sake, you use it to build a great product.
What Jobs was known for, though, was one person forcing hardware, software, and services into a single vision, and killing anything that didn’t fit. Apple’s biggest problem right now is AI, not hardware, and AI is the part Ternus is least known for. Most of what’s on shelves today was locked in before he took over, so his real report card comes later. WWDC 2027 will be his first keynote as CEO. If it’s hyped up and misses the mark again, that’s my answer. If he treats AI as something Apple has to own instead of rent, Apple might finally build something that justifies what I’m more than willing to pay.
Where that leaves me
I’m not going anywhere. Everything I own still runs on Apple. But as an advocate and a user, Apple let me down this year. My 17 Pro Max stays in my pocket for another year, and if Apple gives me a real reason to upgrade in 2027, I’ll happily pay for it.
