Apple has the money but it no longer has the smarts

For the first time in my life, I’m considering buying a laptop that isn’t an Apple. I’m looking at the current range and seeing more minuses than pluses when it comes to memory, storage and connectivity. While we’re at it, the new iPhone is a bit of a disappointment. And don’t even mention that watch yoke. There is clearly trouble afoot in the empire.

The news that Apple is moving such operations as the iTunes Store, Apple Music, the App Store, and the iBooks Store from Luxembourg to Cork this month reminds you that the music part of the Apple galaxy is no great shakes either. We know this because of the dominance of Spotify, and because Apple has been unable to compete with its ease of use and convenience. When it comes to playlists, album and track embeds, Spotify bests Apple Music – and other would-be kings of the streaming hill – every time.

For those of us who have followed Apple’s adventures in the music world, this is a massive turn-up for the books. With iTunes and the iPod, Apple saw a gap in the market but, more importantly, a market in the gap. It cosied up to the record labels and gave them a solution to their digital download woes, thus allowing Apple to flog loads of hardware and dominate digital music with ease .

The problem now appears to be complacency. Apple was not the first to the streaming market, but the company reckoned it could push its way onto the pitch, like it’s done with the download market (where Apple was also a late comer), and wow all and sundry with Apple science and tech and fabled ease of use. But there was already a really strong player in the game in the form of Spotify, and Apple simply didn’t have the lustre or wowsome tech of old.

Music mindset

Much of how Apple has rolled this time around can be blamed on personalities. For instance, big cheese Jimmy Iovine spent much of his working life in the record industry, and he apparently arrived at the tech giant with a similar mindset.

Instead of creating both a great experience and an ecosystem open to widespread dissemination, Apple has played the record-label galactico card by spending big on a small number of acts, such as Frank Ocean. How the company has worked in the development of Chance the Rapper is commendable, but he is a one-off. Beats Radio? Let’s not even go there. It doesn’t take a JNLR survey to know that that one stinks like a rotting bale of silage.

Apple has the money but it no longer has the smarts when it comes to music. There is no sign that the company has come up with any innovative ideas to change how the streaming market works, other than to roil out old-school record-label shizzles with the company chequebook. Apple has emulated rather than innovated – and even then, it has gone about it all wrong. Apple has lost that winning feeling and now resembles Microsoft when it, too, went wrong.

Perhaps the move to Cork might change things, but I doubt it. The fear factor has taken hold and that’s hard to shake, especially when you’ve so much freaking money on the balance sheet. Instead of creating a streaming service that flips the script, Apple Music is a badly cloned me-too.

It’s a sad state of affairs, but Apple’s current predicament shows that all big beasts eventually succumb to mediocrity.