In Summary
- About a decade ago, Apple was known as a brand with a compact yet distinct portfolio. Apple products came with premium pricing but were distinct in their own right and easy to choose.
- Today, while Apple’s revenues have gone up exponentially, its product portfolio has changed beyond recognition, and its products no longer stand out from the crowd the way they used to and actually are not as intuitive to use as they once were.
- As a new year dawns, we yearn for the old Apple – the one that released a few products, did not believe in incremental annual refreshes, and believed in keeping matters simple while thinking different.
The year 2025 is here, and techies around the world are hoping and wishing for futuristic gadgets and never-seen-before technology. While we are also hoping for “never seen before,” there is something from the past that we wish would make a blast in the coming year. It is not a specific product or a feature but a brand. A brand that we miss and reminisce about almost every year.
We are talking about Apple.
This may have many of you confused because Apple is very much present in the market. In fact, it not only is present but is actually one of the biggest tech names in the world. But it is not the Apple of today that our hearts long for. It is for the Apple of the not-too-distant past.
The Apple of today launches four iPhones, two AirPods (one Pro, one non-Pro), a new Apple Watch, refreshes the Apple Watch SE, and adds new colors and a USB Type C port to AirPods Max, all in one event. And these are just phones, earphones, and watches. Around the year, Apple also updates its iPad lineup and its MacBooks, introduces accessories, launches products like Apple Vision Pro, and tweaks all its software platforms to list just a few things.
All of these factors make for a very crowded product portfolio. While this is routine for other tech brands, it is certainly a very contemporary Apple phenomenon.
Barely a decade ago, Apple is said to have believed in the “less is more” kind of philosophy, a sort of tech minimalism. The brand was known to focus more on the quality of its products and user experience rather than launching products left, right, and center. The Apple ethos that we have experienced in the past revolved around making picking a product and using it easy for its consumers. Choosing an iPhone for the longest time was as easy as picking the storage option you wanted (even colors were limited). Today, the same task can seem a little overwhelming as it involves choosing from at least four different models (more if you include the still-available ones from previous years), each with its own hardware and design specialties.
This is not limited to just phones. There was a time when people could name and keep track of Apple products without having to look them up. The Apple section of a retail chain or an Apple franchise store often was marked by a few products on display – a phone, a tablet, a couple of notebooks, and a desktop. Switch to today, and these stores are packed as Apple has four different types of iPads (with different accessory support), two types of MacBooks, two types of Macs, three kinds of watches, four kinds of AirPods, and we are sure there is something we missed out too. Even the accessory space has become cluttered with different kinds of covers (at least four types of iPad covers), styluses (three), and keyboard setups. Round that off with a whole series of operating systems, and the Apple product portfolio could give the Marvel Universe some serious competition in expansion terms. It is so complicated and so diverse that it is hard to keep track of what Apple is doing anymore and for whom.
It is a classic tech portfolio. But it is not a classic Apple one. Because Apple was never a classic tech company, was it?
Apple was a brand that took pride in delivering excellent experiences bundled with simplicity and functionality. That idea, however, seems to have taken a back seat in recent times. It is even seen in individual products. At one time, the iPhone was considered the easiest and most intuitive phone to use. Today, it seems that the simplicity that once defined iOS has been traded in for customizations, layered setting options, multitasking features, and modes that make an iPhone almost feel like Apple’s version of Android. They certainly might allow people to do more but in a manner that seems very un-Apple-like. And this is not limited to the iPhone – we actually had to look around to find out how to forward an email from an iPad, the volume controls on AirPods remain a little iffy, and Apple Intelligence on the Mac certainly needs a fair bit of human intelligence to make the most of it. We still love how much Apple’s products do; it is just that they now come with a new feature – a learning curve.
The brand’s ever-growing device portfolio also does not really go hand in hand with its pro-environment ideas. Apple’s initiatives to reduce its carbon footprint have cost many of us adapters with our new iPhones, but what about the extra packaging and waste generated by a much wider product portfolio Simplifying its product line-up means processes like manufacturing, marketing, stocking, and distributing would surely reduce the overall impact Apple has on the environment and would lead to less mindless consumption.
We understand that more products are needed as a company expands to new markets and addresses larger audiences and that these would also result in more sales and revenues, but as any marketing professional will tell you, refreshing product line-ups frequently (often without making significant changes) can actually alienate loyal customers and give them the impression that the brand is only interested in making them purchase more products rather than actually improving their quality of life.
Right now, many Apple products feel like new iterations of older devices with perhaps the odd change of material and design and with new (and more expensive) hardware. These products may be marked as new and revolutionary, but often, the improvements they bring feel marginal rather than exceptional. Take the Apple Watch, which has gone from being a computer on our wrists to a sort of health and fitness monitor with “better” and more sensors but still largely does what it did when it was launched more than five years ago.
We are sure there are wiser heads than us at Apple and that there are very good reasons behind its recent product portfolio expansions, but while variety is indeed the spice of life, we miss the days when an Apple product was almost intuitive to use, easy to choose and very different from anything in the market. As 2025 comes around, one of our biggest wishes in the New Year is for the old Apple. One with simple but distinct product offerings, with a less cluttered line of products, and one that does not launch slightly improved versions of all its products every year.
We want the OG Think Different brand back in 2025.
