These missteps highlight a deeper question about whether Apple still leads with innovation or if it has begun to follow.
Before Apple, another giant faced this moment of choice. Analyzing the parallels helps us understand how to keep the fire of innovation burning and the risks associated with failure.
Kodak’s missed future
In the mid-1970s, Kodak’s engineers built and patented the first handheld digital camera—crude, clunky, but revolutionary. Yet Kodak buried it, terrified it would cannibalize its lucrative film business. It was a textbook innovator’s dilemma: invent the future, then refuse to lead it.
A few years later, a mesmerized Steve Jobs stood before a Xerox PARC Lab demo of the first graphical user interface and mouse and famously remarked, “It was the best thing I had ever seen in my life.” That moment catalyzed Lisa and Macintosh, and birthed Apple’s transformation into a master of intuitive, human-centric design.
Apple’s DNA became vision-driven. Jobs whittled down product offerings, entrusted design to Jony Ive, and steered Apple to create the Mac, iPod, and iPhone. In his own words: “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
Innovation became Apple’s soul. Today, that soul is eroding.
Siri’s decline and the surrender of sovereignty
Siri, once a headline of WWDC 2011, has devolved into a stumbling shadow of its promise. Simple verbal commands are met with “I don’t understand.” The 2024 unveiling of Apple Intelligence felt more like smoke and mirrors than substance. John Gruber was blunt in his assessment:
“It was not a demo… it was a concept video. Concept videos are bullshit, and a sign of a company in disarray, if not crisis… Their credibility is now damaged.”
By 2025, Siri’s overhaul had been pushed to 2026. Craig Federighi admitted: “It just doesn’t work reliably enough to be an Apple product.” And we’re still waiting as Siri continues to inexplicably devolve.
Facing this internal vacuum, Apple took a step that would have been unthinkable under Jobs: it began negotiating to license AI models from its fiercest rivals. Reports emerged that Apple was in talks to integrate Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT into the very core of the iPhone.
Winston Churchill once noted that if a country sues for peace, it is done for, whereas if they fight it out, the nation endures. For Apple, the "fight" was always the arduous, expensive task of owning the entire stack (silicon, software, and services). Vertical integration was Apple’s fortress. In inviting Google’s models into the heart of the iPhone, Apple has dismantled the wall between its customers and its primary competitor.
By outsourcing the intelligence of the device, the company is suing for peace. It is an admission that they can no longer defend their own borders.
The cultural shift: From vision to operation
Under Tim Cook, Apple became the paragon of operational excellence—precise, efficient, high-margin—but increasingly risk-averse. The creative friction that fueled breakthroughs vanished. That shift in culture pummeled lead innovator Jony Ive. Once Jobs’s creative counterpart, Ive grew frustrated with Apple’s new ethos: conservative budgeting and caution over daring.
His departure in 2019 signaled a creative exodus. And now, the irony stings: Jony Ive’s creative genius now flourishes at OpenAI following a $6.5 billion acquisition of his AI hardware startup. The creative powerhouse Apple sidelined is now shaping tomorrow’s tech outside its walls.
While Apple "sues for peace" by renting Google’s brain, its former soul is fighting to build the next sovereign platform.
Lessons for businesses betting on AI
Apple’s missteps are a reminder to every leader that sovereignty cannot be rented. When you defer core challenges to partners, you are ceding territory.
Innovation must connect to real human needs, but it must also belong to the company that delivers it. Demos and concept videos are the terms of peace of a company in retreat. True leaders value their radical innovators and protect their creative friction, knowing that when visionaries are sidelined, they take the keys to the fortress with them.
Once, Apple didn’t wait for the future; it created it. Now, by choosing the convenience of a partner (that happens to also be a rival) over the struggle of invention, it must confront an existential question: In its long arc of time, is Apple still a sovereign leader, or has it quietly begun to follow?
Tim Cook has long emphasized endurance: “In the long arc of time, you are only relevant if customers love you.” But in the age of AI, relevance is tied to utility. If the utility comes from Google, the love for Apple will eventually run dry. The innovators who remember their history—and choose to fight for their sovereignty—will be the ones to define the next arc.
Inside Performance Advertising with Jason Fairchild delivers unfiltered insights, strategic perspective, and hard truths from inside the evolving world of adtech—cutting through the noise to focus on what really drives outcomes. Subscribe here.
