Sad to say, but there's not a lot of desire right now by Apple Desire. Sure the stock price is down 43% from September highs, but I'm not focused on the financials. I'm purely looking at Apple as the visionary leader we looked to for creating new and exciting products. Where have they been over the last year? Gone are the days of looking in awe at the original Macbook Air and asking "how did they do that?" And gone are the days of looking at the multitude of other different devices, even those that were incarnations of similar devices, and just thinking "how cool is that!". In the past year, I've barely visited the Apple store because there's been no reason to go. There's nothing new to see.
It's not exactly clear what's happening at Apple, but leadership must have something to do with it. When Steve Jobs starting pulling back from daily responsibilities I wasn't really concerned. I would talk with my peers and friends about how "deep" Apple was. The company is more than just one man after all. But behind the scenes there was more going on than I originally thought. It wasn't until the Scott Forstall firing did I realize that things at Apple may not be going as well as I thought. iOS 5 brought forth a now infamous Maps and Siri didn't deliver as promised. Even my kids will joke around about how slow Siri is to respond and that her favorite expression is the "I don't know what you mean by" response for sentences and instructions that are clear and easy for Google's Search app to understand. iOS, while simple and easy to use, is behind the times these days. Apple has long played catch up in the mobile space (remember how long it took for copy, cut and paste), but it feels like they are even further behind at this point. On the application side, we're seeing some amazing things from vendors, but the OS itself is a bit stale.
Apple promises to show off updates to iOS and Mac OS in June at the World Wide Developers Conference and the expectations will be high. Little has been released, but I will be very disappointed if we don't see some significant changes. Outside of iOS, Apple seems to struggle with their own applications. The Podcast application has long received poor reviews. At last look it had a two star rating in the Apple store. Game Center is flat out ugly and Find Friends app has a "stitching" design that leaves a lot to be desired. How can one of the most innovative companies in the world produce such average product?
That being said, I'm a huge fan of the existing Apple hardware product lineup. The iMac is great and the laptop lineup is stellar. The iPad products, all of them, meet the needs of various consumers and work great with iTunes. However, that enthusiasm is tempered by the lack of any exciting product announcements over the past year. Sure we'll see an iPhone 5s this Fall and some new incarnation of the iPad, but what will the next big thing from Apple be and how soon will it arrive? All Apple fans can hope for is a company that can develop a core group of leaders who can focus on the next generation of Apple products.