The buzziest, most exciting new product Apple has rolled out this month is … a list. Yes, the bulk of attention lavished upon one of the world’s most valuable corporations and one of the United States’ most innovative and important tech companies is around Apple Music’s weekslong rollout of its “100 Best Albums.” It’s a strange ranking with lots of familiar choices (Straight Outta Compton, A Love Supreme, Rumours) and plenty of recency bias (Norman Fucking Rockwell!, Un Verano Sin Ti, Take Care). Not an unusual project, necessarily, for a decades-old Big Tech giant whose modern-day success was premised upon its well-timed partnerships with the digital music industry.
But if the yesteryear visions afforded by iTunes, the iPod, and the indie rock–soundtracked ads for both products represented some real cultural influence and imagination, this “Best Albums” project feels far more shallow by comparison. Unlike the moment when an Apple commercial could launch the career of a once-underground artist like Feist or Chairlift, the choices made for this list are either predictable, bizarre, or self-serving (e.g., a top-10 position for Frank Ocean’s Apple-exclusive 2016 release Blonde). There’s little offered in the way of explanation per how the list was conceived or why it matters, other than a vague gesture toward a “panel” of unnamed “artists, songwriters, producers, and experts.”
For all the star endorsements and ensuing chatter—mostly complaints and memes about this or that album or artist being absent from the list—it’s striking to see a company once on the vanguard of popular music culture now resorting to the baitiest, blandest form of historicization and canonization so as to spur cheap discussion and, more to the point, get people hitting that sweet play button, sans context for why they should do so. (At least when your favorite music outlet publishes such a list, there’s usually … writing, and author/curator credits.)
Don’t misunderstand me; I’m well aware Apple’s 2000s-era indie ploy was also a cynical counterculture-sporting gambit to invite more discerning listeners into the iPod-iTunes ecosystem (see also: Chance the Rapper’s $500,000 deal for an exclusive two-week Apple Music release of his 2016 mixtape Coloring Book). But at least there was some level of creativity and consideration there. What’s actually there behind another list that consecrates the same albums that always appear on such lists, plus, for some godforsaken reason, Travis Scott’s Astroworld?
This isn’t the only recent Apple event to inspire recollections of what once was. It’s telling that, right after Apple released its widely derided “Crush!” ad to promote a megathin iPad Pro with a megapowerful M4 chip, many of its critics contrasted it with a different Apple commercial from 40 years ago: the aptly named “1984,” a Ridley Scott–directed Super Bowl spot used to announce Apple’s first Macintosh. There, the game-changing promise of that personal computer was to smash Big Brother’s authoritarian control over the sheeple. Forty years later, Apple employed an in-house team to conceive the visual crushing of a pile of things that included musical instruments, art supplies, cameras, TVs, record players, and books. Objects that foster creativity in a free society, now shattered, all to sell a machine whose only innovation is that it’s the thinnest Apple product ever.
The widespread backlash was so pronounced that Apple publicly apologized for the commercial and canceled a planned TV run, even though you can still catch the commercial online, with comments off. Rival Samsung catapulted off this partial retraction to release a tablet-promoting ad directly countering Apple, titled “Creativity Cannot Be Crushed,” in which a musician drifting through the wreckage of crushed instruments picks up a guitar and reads some music off a Galaxy Tab S9 With Galaxy A.I. Hey, fair play.
The iPad Pro ad debuted just weeks before the Apple Music list (irony?), but the mockery they both inspired wasn’t novel. One can think of these reactions as symptomatic of Apple’s precarious cultural pedestal in the current tech age. It’s one where the firm remains one of the world’s largest and most valuable companies, but is facing far more questioning about its purpose and what it’s actually for anymore—while staving off battles from governments and myriad other authorities.
It’s not just the thud from the Apple Vision Pro, the overhyped virtual reality headset whose rates of customer returns have been as high as sales have been low. It’s not just concerns over Apple products’ sourcing of cobalt and essential minerals from the conflict-riven (and child labor–employing) Congo regions becoming so prominent that even Dua Lipa is confronting CEO Tim Cook about them. It’s not just Apple’s much-touted trade-in and hardware-recycling processes amounting to, well, a whole lotta junk. It’s not just the Apple Photos bug that revealed to users how many of their deleted pictures may not be so permanently deleted after all. It’s not just the company slashing iPhone prices in China at a time when sales of the ubiquitous smartphone are plummeting there. It’s not just Apple dealing with the fallout of antitrust probes from both the U.S. and the European Union, forcing to adjust business-as-usual on everything from right-to-repair consumer access to charging ports to App Store surcharges (plus, an intellectual property dispute that led to a brief ban on Apple Watch sales). It’s not just flagship streaming service Apple TV+ arriving late to the game and then entering a bundling deal with other streamers that, as my colleague Scott Nover notes, is all but a return to the basic cable model.
It’s not just Apple TV+ also killing an already-approved series about the late digital outlet Gawker and forbidding Jon Stewart from discussing certain topics (or interviewing certain government regulators) on his exclusive show. It’s not just Apple facing credible charges of busting union efforts by both white-collar employees and Apple Store laborers, with some workers at those iconic retail fronts so aggrieved that a team in Maryland authorized a potential strike. It’s not just the guy who came up with the iconic “iMac” branding saying that Apple should now drop the i from all its stuff. It’s not just Apple plugging away at a driverless electric car model for a decade before suddenly dropping it months ago (while its CarPlay 2.0 software upgrade has been rejected by both Mercedes-Benz and General Motors). It’s not just Apple falling behind the rest of Big Tech on the artificial intelligence hype train to the point it’s teaming up with OpenAI to improve iOS 18’s A.I. capabilities.
It’s all these bits of bad news and more—namely, that Apple no longer carries the cachet, broader trust, and public adoration that it once all held. The corporation that could once transform both the worlds of advertising and of computing with a “Think Different” campaign is now the one playing catchup with the times, trying to emulate everyone else who once aimed to emulate Apple, and realizing it can no longer depend on squeezing profit from the locked intra-Apple hard- and software ecosystem it steadily built through its most exciting inventions.
There have been signs of this for years, of course: What if an iPod Touch, but bigger and wider? What if an iPhone, sans any headphone jack? What if streaming services, just branded with our bitten apple? What if earbuds, without cords? Still, there was a lot Apple could fall back on, both in terms of reputation and sheer distinctiveness, in the post–Steve Jobs era: a willingness to stand up for privacy against law enforcement overreach (albeit with some caveats), a competitive thrust that allowed Apple to leverage that privacy-image advantage against data-raiding competitors like Facebook and Google, and a principled, consistent stance when it came to advertising on the vapid hellhole now known as X.
At a time when Facebook and Google are suffused with spam yet rethinking their relationship with the news economy that propelled so much engagement on their platforms, Apple has continued to compensate and promote publishers—including the one you’re reading right now—through its News and Podcasts offerings. The quality of iPhone and Mac output remains excellent, Apple Music 1 has splendid online-radio shows, and the still-ubiquitous Apple Pay was a mighty step forward in establishing the wide world of mobile payment.
Yet Apple’s in a much different world than the one it helped to transform over the course of decades. At this point, it’s no longer the hippielike alt-platform that arose from California to present the world with a particular vision of what tech could be. It’s now just one more part of that tech world, with investors to please and a familiar suite of products it needs to keep pumping out as Big Tech continues to face a public reckoning, and as the imperative to keep up with the New and Novel being developed outside Apple’s labs (these days, all this A.I.) overrides everything else.
Next month, it’ll kick off its always-exciting Worldwide Developers Conference, likely with as many A.I. mentions as Google’s recent I/O had, if not more. But it’ll do so from a crumbling, damaged, and much less authoritative perch than it once had. As Jesus Diaz recently wrote in Fast Company, “Apple has lost its customer-first design vision on its way to becoming the world’s most lucrative company” and is now “a massive peddler of commoditized consumer electronics and services that are practically indistinguishable from the competition’s.” I’m not sure any WWDC announcements will fix that, even as a lot of Apple users inevitably hope that diagnosis will be proved wrong.
Source Agencies
