Is Apple Rotting?

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Sorry, Apple fans—he shine is fading

By Don Varyu

Oct 2025

 
 

fter yet another noisy and meaningless annual event announcing yet another iPhone model, questions should be asked about Apple.

First, a quick, techy one for you: in how many years have Apple iPhones globally outsold  all their Android competitors? The answer is even quicker: none. Android rules.

I know, this may seem impossible—after all, “everyone I know has an iPhone!” Well, that might say more about your world than the bigger one around you. Not everyone can afford an iPhone. And most of the folks in the rest of the world also can’t afford to be locked into the Apple ecosystem, with its universally high-priced products.

If you’re an Apple loyalist, you might be thinking this is kind of a trick question. After all, the USA is the place where global trends are set, right? On this point, I would not disagree. And in the end, trendy is what Apple conceptually is all about. 

The truth is that Apple isn’t really a tech company. At its core, Apple is the world’s leading lifestyle brand.

And that’s worth a lot. Forbes calculates Apple is actually the world’s leading brand—period. Forbes puts  Apple’s brand value alone at nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars. Plus, Apple does this by spending just a sliver on traditional advertising. Its marketing strategy is largely word of mouth…and if you’re an Apple acolyte, your mouth is really all they need.  

Undoubtedly, all that adulation has translated into orchards full of dollars. Apple was the first company in history to achieve a market value of $1 trillion…although today it modestly trails both Microsoft and Nvidia, who live in the neighborhood of $4 trillion.  

So, there’s no doubt: historically and currently, Apple is a global business behemoth.

But the real question is this: is it true that Apple’s just not quite what it used to be?

Warning Signs?

Since everything these days is instantly translated into stock price, let’s look at that first. 

Apple shares soared 49% in 2023, and jumped another 31% in 2024. That’s enormous growth. If you invested $1,000 at the end of 2022, those shares would have doubled by last New Year’s Eve. 

However, so far in 2025, while the NASDAQ overall is up about 17%. At the same time, Apple has inched up only 6%—only a third as fast as the average of other tech stocks. Consider similar performance for other consumer-facing tech concerns: Microsoft, +23%, anbd Google, +51%. Huh? How could this possibly make sense for a company that in July reported record quarterly benchmarks in several financial areas?

The answer comes from the fact that Apple is essentially an iPhone and iPad business. iPhones reached record unit sales two years ago, and have flatlined (at best) since. Sales last quarter for iPads were down, just as they were for the division that includes Apple Watch and AirPods. The presumed basic business-drivers are not bulletproof.

Personally, I’m puzzled how the iPhone nystique has lasted this long. With the arrival of iPhone 17 this fall, the company will have marketed more than 50 different models since the first launched in 2007. The sales pitch for virtually every one of those “upgrades” has been identical: “the display is sharper, the camera is better—and just look at those cool new colors!” That’s it. This year was no different. (Apple also used to tout its privacy settings…until it was discovered that users’ Siri conversations were being recorded by third parties—even when users hadn’t turned Siri on. The very quiet court settlment cost them nearly $100 million—and Apple doesn’t talk user privacy anymore.)

Yes, Apple loyalists are unquestionabley a devoted bunch, but it seems inprobable that their fealty can last forever—unless meaningful improvements actually surface.

So, let’s move beyond the dollars.


Product Whiffs

For a company this large and this ambitious, it’s inevitable that some of their ideas would flop. And many have. Apple’s record here is something they really don’t want to talk about. But we can.

Here’s a brief recap from a longer list:

  • Apple III (1983): This was the anticipated successor to the popular Mac II desktop. People hoped the technology would be much better. It was not; more than 20% of those sold had to be returned—often replaced with models that also didn’t work.

  • Lisa (1983): Arguably the most advanced desktop at the time. But it retailed at $10,000 ($25k in today money). Can you guess why it didn’t sell?

  • Macintosh TV (1993): Why not put a television right inside your desktop computer!? Technical glitches aside, maybe people preferred watching Seinfeld laying on the couch instead of sitting at a desk?

  • Newton (1993): Apple’s first attempt at a portable computer. No, it didn’t sell, but certainly it gave the company insight on what would work in the iPhone.
    Pippin (1996): Nintendo and Sony were printing money with their video game consoles. Why not market one behind the magic Apple logo? Outside game developers sat this out, so the magic didn’t work.

  • Mac G4 Cube (2000): Maybe the most dazzling Apple design ever (absolutely bathed in acrylics). Unfortinately, the dazzle made for annoying glare for users, and that shine couldn’t obscure the disappointing technology inside.

  • iPod Hi-Fi (2006): Remember those little bedside speakers where you could just plug in your iPod and project sound into the full room? Well, Apple was making some licensing money from all those manufacturers, but decided it could make more by building its own version. Too little, too late and too expensive.

  • Ping (2010): Apple decided not to be left behind in the social media explosion by forming its own “network”. It got left behind.

  • Apple Music (2015): Following the phenomenally popular iTunes, Apple figured it could clean up with its its own music streaming service. It couldn’t; Spotify has more than twice the market share.

  • Apple Vision Pro (2023): An “augmented reality” (not virtual reality) headset. Thus far its real-world promise has been more potential than reality. It’s done nothing to augment either the company’s reputation or bottom line.

Well, this is all in the past, right? So what about the brave, new future? Surely there must be more miracles on theway?

  • The long-rumored Apple Car project was finally shuttered last year, after a decade waiting to get off the starting line. The vision was electric and self-driving. To jump start things, Apple considered first buying General Motors…and then Tesla! But this new “engine” for corporate profits just wouldn’t turn over.

  • Samsung quietly announced recently a licensing agreement with a certain “North American” company to let said company use its foldable screen technology on new models. When and if those Apple models arrive, they will certainly be hailed in some quarters as earth-shaking. But Samsung has been making foldable screen phones for almost a decade.

  • Currently, Apple is a non-competitor in two white-hot tech spaces. The first is “web services”, the business of providing computing power, data storage plus a wide range of software via the cloud. This market is so big that Amazon’s Web Services actually makes more money here than for every last thing it sells to you, me and the rest of the globe. Microsoft and Google also make mega-bank with web services. Apple does not compete.

Similarly, Apple’s meager presence in artificial intelligence is a virtually non-existent. Its  Apple Intelligence is more promise than product. During its last investor call, the company said it may explore mergers and acquisitions to buy the necessary talent and know-how. But the AI  shelf has already been picked clean by the likes of Google, Microsoft and Meta. And at the recent iPhone 17 rollout, AI was hardly mentioned. 

don’t say all this to demean Apple. After all, they have introduced some of the most coveted, convenient and popular devices in consumer product history. It doesn’t matter that many of their key technologies were not developed internally, but rather purchased or borrowed from actual inventors. (For example, Apple just made big waves announcing a version of EarPods that translate foreign languages in real time, right into your ears. Cool stuff, but not new. The technology was invented eight years ago).

But the real story of Apple is how it turned existing technology into consumer compulsions. This is thanks to former chief designer Jony Ive. The things he created were beautiful; a lifestyle brand you simply had to own. The heart wants what the heart wants—and tens of millions of hearts throbbed for Apple..

 Yet, as a lifestyle brand, someday the Apple could spoil. After all, Compaq and Toys ‘R Us and Swatch watch once seemed unstoppable. For Apple, any such decline would not likely happen for a long time. Things seem pretty safe--at least as long as people keep convincing themselves they need a “better” iPhone camera.

Dirty Business

Well, let’s get down to more unpleasant stuff. Apple doesn’t just tower over corporate rivals in revenue and profits; it also stands alone in avoiding paying U.S. corporate taxes. America gave Apple its first nourishment; Apple has responds by dining and dashing. It records billions of its profits not in the U.S., but instead in foreign countries with much lower (or non-exisent) corporate tax rates. Thus, they happily contribute to the national debt.

Separately, Apple is an absolute glutton at buying back its own shares. Of course, this lifts the stock price, pleasing its current investors. But it also raises the question of how much of the company’s reported value is actually bloated by the empty calories of buybacks—  rather than actual growth in consumer demand. Would Apple have not been much better served by spending some of its fortune developing things like AI or web services?

I will acknowledge that both of these schemes—tax dodging and stock buybacks—are perfectly legal. But they also can become reasons for people to boycott Apple products—at least that did it for me.

Leadership

To close, I’m going to have to be a little less analytical.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has always presented himself as professional, meticulous and decidedly above-the-fray. 

And then he met Donald Trump. 

He bent the knee during Trump’s first term, then made sure he paid big time to be seated prominently behind Trump at the second inauguration--one he also helped underwrite.

Recently, he embarrassed himself at a preposterous White House stunt, where he pledged to return an incomprehensible (and probably impossible) amount of iPhone manufacturing to America. In return, Trump promised to exempt Apple (like some other big tech companies) from the 100% tariff he was supposedly contemplating for products brought to America; ones which used foreign-made computer chips. 

Cook publicly stated that this exemption could save Apple “hundreds of millions” of dollars. Well, that’s a lot of money to me, but let’s reduce that to a more understandable scale. For comparative purposes, let’s restate Apple’s market value from $4 trillion to just $10,000. And let’s say that $10K is the bundle Tim Cook is walking around with in his pocket. 

On this scale, the “hundreds of millions” Cook sold out for would be the equivalent of just $2.50 from the $10,000 wad in is pocket. It is literally pocket change. 

So Tim, what did you really lose by surrendering?

Your personal reputation? The shine off off your corporate brand? All this just because you don’t have enough gumption to stand up to a blackmailer threatening to put a very small dent in your bottom line? You negotiated with a terrorist. You bowed down to the most loathed man on Earth. 

Good job.

Shame on you—and on your company. You are not helping America—you are helping destroy it. 

You could start acting like a leader…pay your taxes…and say you’re sorry. 

But recently rumors started that yhou are considering stepping down from the CEO role.

Which would be fitting. Because nothing reveals your character more than running away.

Your Apple is rotting.