> If they don't add big features every year, the tech press crucifies them as "just putting out another version of the same thing".
That's the bed they made themselves and lay in it willingly.
No one is forcing them to do huge yearly releases. No one is forcing them to do yearly releases. No one is forcing them to tie new features which are all software anyway to yearly releases (and in recent years actual features are shipping later and later after the announcement, so they are not really tied to releases either anymore).
I would argue the stock market is forcing them to do all that. Line must go up, but it's not sustainable. Like you said, they ship later and later after the announcement. At some point they're going to have to disappoint or move the goalposts.
I owned the tiniest sliver of a fraction of a percent of Apple, but I sold my shares due to a lack of technical leadership.
Lack of technical leadership?! I guess I must be missing something, because from the outside, they've got best CPU, the best battery life, the best VR system, the best privacy, and they seem to have gotten Intel's WiFi chips to work (which Intel couldn't). Probably the watch has some top-notch features, but I am not at all familiar with it. They also have a bunch of features that are unmatched by competitors due to their vertical integration (e.g. handoff, iOS apps on macOS, etc.). Maybe leadership are just a bunch of putzes who are only being saved by great engineers, but it seems unlikely.
Note how most of the things you listed are hardware. No one disputes that Apples hardware team is insanely good.
Their software side however is riddled with issues, delayed or cancelled projects, meandering focus, unclear priorities. They are increasingly overpromising and underdelivering.
Their product side is neither here nor there. Vision Pro is a technically marvelous bust. iPhones rely on gimmicks because there's really nothing to differentiate them anymore. Peripherals (Homepod, AppleTV) are stagnant. iPad suddenly saw signs of life this year with good functionality updates after a decade of "we have no idea what to do with it, here are meaningless and confusing hardware updates". Macbooks have been completed as a product years ago (not that it's a bad thing), so, again, they are just randomly slapping non-sensical names on upgrades and chase thinness.
Oh. Thinness. That is literally the only feature that Apple is obsessed with. You can't build a product strategy on thinness alone.
Stock value has no meaning at all. What matters is revenue and profit. If Apple doesn't release new devices every year, then they will still sell last year's model. What are customers supposed to purchase instead? A PC? Nobody is going to turn down a new Mac just because the model is 1,2, 3 or 5 years old.
you might want to look into how executives get compensated. it's equity (aka stock).
Good point!
Stock market is responding to Apple behavior. Stock market was perfectly okay with Apple not doing yearly releases before the iPhone. The stock market was perfectly okay with Apple not doing yearly releases of MacOS during the iPhone era. The stock market was totally okay with Apple not doing yearly (or predictable) hardware upgrades on anything but iPhone.
The stock market can easily be taught anything. And Jobs didn't even care about stock market, or stock holders (Apple famously didn't even pay dividends for a very long time), or investors (regularly ignoring any and all calls and advice from the largest investors).
You need political will and taste to say a thousand nos to every yes. None of the senior citizens in charge of Apple have that.