Apple’s One Infinite Loop campus in Cupertino — the place that once showed the world the way.
- A foldable that arrives seven years after Samsung’s
- An iPhone Duo at four and a half lakh rupees, a Pro Max that weighs a quarter kilo
- The Apple Car is dead; the Vision Pro never took off
- Siri now runs on Google’s Gemini — Apple is behind in AI
- The real test waiting for the new CEO, John Ternus
I have never seen Apple as just a phone company.
From Steve Jobs’ days, Apple meant something special. A company that guessed what we would need tomorrow before we did, and put it in our hands in the simplest possible form.
Macintosh… iPod… iPhone… iPad… MacBook Air…
Apple rarely went where the market was going. It showed the market where to go.
That is why a new iPhone launch never made me curious about what was in it. It made me wonder what new world Apple would show us this time.
But after this September’s launch, what I was left with was not excitement. It was disappointment.
Not an ordinary buyer’s disappointment. The disappointment of someone who has admired Apple, and Steve Jobs’ way of thinking about products, for years. The very first iPhone (2007) was never released in India. Yet I got one — as a gift from Apple itself. The iPhone 3G (2008) that followed did make it to India.
So the question will not go away. What happened to Apple?
A foldable, seven years late
Samsung brought out its first foldable phone, the Galaxy Fold, back in 2019. It was not a great phone. The screen had problems. The hinge broke. People asked how long it would last.
But Samsung did not back off. Every year it improved the Fold. It added the Flip. It made the Fold thinner. It reduced the crease on the screen. It reshaped its software for foldable phones. By 2025 it had gone all the way to a two-fold phone, the TriFold.
Now Apple has brought out its first foldable phone, the iPhone Duo.
It is not an ordinary phone. A 7.6-inch screen inside, a 5.4-inch screen outside, a titanium body, the A20 Pro chip, Apple Pencil support… all the Apple polish is there. I do not mean to belittle it.
But the real question remains.
Seven years after Samsung’s first foldable, Apple brings out the same kind of phone — and we are supposed to call it an “Apple innovation”?
This is not a new idea. It is an old idea, done a little better.
There was a time when a new Samsung phone was judged by how it compared with the iPhone. Now, when Apple launches a foldable, Samsung mocks it on social media. That a company with eight generations of foldables behind it has the nerve to do that tells you how much the perception of who leads and who follows has changed.
A four-and-a-half-lakh phone!
Then there is the price.
In India the 256 GB iPhone Duo starts at Rs 2,99,900. The 2 TB top model costs Rs 4,49,900. Nearly four and a half lakh rupees — on Apple’s own India store. No wonder social media joked that a small car costs about the same.
There is nothing wrong with a premium product carrying a premium price. Apple has always been a premium brand. But what justifies a premium price is something you cannot get anywhere else.
When Apple takes a foldable phone that has been on the market for seven years, polishes it, and asks four and a half lakh for it, the buyer’s question is obvious: why should I pay this much? What is new here? There is no answer.
One more thing. The phone weighs 254 grams. For something you hold in your hand all day, that is a lot. Samsung’s Z Fold 8 weighs 201.
The Pro Max… nearly a quarter kilo!
Leave the Duo aside. The iPhone 18 Pro Max is even more surprising. It weighs 249 grams. Almost a quarter of a kilo.
What is this? Are we training for a weightlifting contest?
The strange part is that the phone’s size has not changed by a millimetre from last year’s 17 Pro Max. Same height, same width, same thickness. But the weight has gone up from 233 to 249 grams. Sixteen grams more. Yes, the battery must last longer. The camera must improve. The chip must get faster. All of that is necessary. But is technological progress supposed to mean that every new feature makes the phone heavier?
Isn’t real engineering skill delivering the same experience in less weight?
The 18 Pro Max has a new chip, a better camera, a bigger battery. But once, you looked at an Apple phone and wondered how they had pulled it off. Now you read the spec sheet to see how many more camera pixels and battery hours you get over last year.
That is improvement. It is not novelty.
The car is gone… the Vision Pro never came
This is not just a phone problem. It has been going on for years. The whole tech world once waited for the Apple Car. If the iPhone changed phones, they thought, Apple would revolutionise cars. Apple worked on it for nearly a decade. At one point it imagined a car with no steering wheel. In 2024 it finally buried the project.
Then the Vision Pro. It was not a failed technology — the engineering was superb. But at $3,499 (it never even came to India), the ordinary person could not find an answer to a simple question: what do I do with this?
In Steve Jobs’ time, Apple’s strength was exactly this: use first, technology second. That principle was missing from both projects.
The real blow — AI
The biggest blow to Apple has come in artificial intelligence.
When Apple announced Apple Intelligence in 2024, the tech world waited eagerly. Siri would understand us personally, know what was on our screen, dig through our messages, mail and photos and get the job done — that was the film Apple showed us. None of it arrived on time. In 2026 Apple introduced a new Siri and had to admit it had been rebuilt from the ground up.
Starting over after fifteen years of Siri strengthens the criticism that Apple failed to read the AI shift in time. And even this Siri is not entirely Apple’s own. It is a hybrid.
Why did Apple need Google’s help?
This is where it gets uncomfortable.
Apple itself announced that the AI models behind the new Siri were built with Google, on Google’s Gemini. The deal was signed in January this year. Apple is reported to be paying Google about a billion dollars a year for it. Before this, Apple had used ChatGPT too.
One thing needs to be said clearly. Taking Google’s help does not mean Apple’s AI has been handed over to Google. Apple has its own on-device models. It has its own cloud. The privacy architecture is its own. But it has, in effect, conceded that its own AI is not as capable as Google’s.
Apple has always been the company that builds the technology it needs. It walked away from Intel and made its own chips. Its modem is its own. Hardware, software, silicon — all its own. For a company like that to need Google’s help with AI, the brain of tomorrow’s computer, is a warning. It means Apple has failed in AI. For a company like Apple, that is a humiliation.
Google is Samsung’s strength — and Apple’s weakness
The comparison with Samsung is interesting here.
Samsung has run on Google’s Android from the beginning. Everyone knows Android is not Samsung’s. So working with Google is natural for Samsung. But Samsung did not leave Android as it was. It built its own One UI on top of it. It gave its Galaxy phones software features no other Android phone had. It built special software for foldables. It brought the S Pen. It folded Gemini into Galaxy AI. Screens, memory, camera parts — Samsung makes them all itself.
The Samsung–Google partnership combines the strengths of both.
In a sentence: Google’s backing is Samsung’s strength. Needing Google’s help is Apple’s weakness. Samsung’s identity was built on partnership. Apple’s identity was built on “everything is ours.”
In security, Apple is still strong
Samsung deserves fairness here too. Security has always been a weak point of Android in general. But today’s Galaxy phones cannot be judged by that. With Knox, Samsung has built its own security layer on top of Android. Even so, Android security never inspires full confidence.
Apple, on the other hand, has a structural advantage. From chip to software, from phone to cloud, everything is in one company’s hands. When AI work happens in Apple’s cloud, the data is not stored and even Apple cannot see it — that is a valuable design. Apple is uncompromising on security. It does not give even governments a way into the data on your phone.
So Apple may be short on novelty. But nobody should underestimate Apple’s engineering. Those are two very different things.
How did Tim Cook do as CEO?
It would be wrong to say all creativity left Apple with Steve Jobs.
The Apple Watch came in Tim Cook’s time. AirPods became a worldwide hit. Apple’s own M-series chips are among the great achievements in computing history. The services business grew. The company’s value rose beyond anyone’s expectation.
Cook was not a failed CEO.
But running a company well and bringing out inventions that change the world are two different things. Cook ran Apple superbly as a company. What faded were the “here is what the future looks like” moments of the Jobs era.
Now John Ternus, a hardware engineer, has replaced Cook as CEO on September 1. This launch is the first big one on his watch. The Google deal was not his — it was already in place. Fixing Apple’s position in AI is the big test in front of him. He has to make a fully independent Siri possible.
So this is not the time to say goodbye to Apple. It may be a reset.
Put it all together…
The Apple Car was cancelled. The Vision Pro did not last. The first attempt at Apple Intelligence evaporated. In AI, Apple needed outside help. In foldables, it is seven years behind Samsung. That phone costs four and a half lakh. The Pro Max weighs a quarter kilo.
“Late, but the latest” — for how long?
Apple has a history. It did not invent the MP3 player. Or the smartphone. Or the tablet. Or the smartwatch. But it put every one of them into ordinary hands in a completely new form.
So there is weight to the line “Apple comes late, but brings the better product.” Who knows? The iPhone Duo may prove it again. The next foldable may turn it into a phone for everyone. If that happens, Apple will have proved its worth once more.
But here is the problem. “Apple comes late, but…” can be a strategy. “Always late” becoming a habit is the real danger.
What does Apple need to rediscover?
Apple does not need more megapixels. It does not need a heavier Pro Max. It does not need another expensive experiment.
It needs to ask itself its own old question again: which technology can give a person a genuinely new experience?
Steve Jobs’ magic was not in his stage presentations. Not in the black turtleneck. His greatness was in seeing technology not as convenience but as experience. The company absorbs the complexity so the buyer never feels it. A product must not just be powerful. It must feel natural. It must fit into a person’s habits.
That is in Apple’s DNA.
The real test is the AI era
Apple answered the PC era with the Macintosh, and the shift that came after the PC with the iPhone. Now another shift has begun. This time it is not the phone. It is artificial intelligence.
Which chip is in tomorrow’s phone? How good is the camera? Those are second-order questions. How much work does it do for me? That is the first. A phone that listens to you and finishes the job on its own — that is tomorrow’s smartphone. And then the contest will not be over cameras and processors. It will be over intelligence. Whose intelligence? Google’s? OpenAI’s? Anthropic’s? Apple’s? That decides who leads next.
However beautiful and however secure Apple’s phone is, if it must depend on another company for its intelligence, that is a big step backward. So what Apple needs now is not another upgrade. It is a new idea. A new road.
Steve Jobs does not need to come back. But one trait from his time must: not following others, but showing the road ahead.
Once, the world looked at Apple to imagine the future. We need that Apple again. Because what Apple needs now is not a new model.
It is a new direction.
