Apple, long the envy of its Silicon Valley peers, is now facing one of its toughest times since the post-Steve Jobs era.
The race to catch up with rivals in artificial intelligence is fading as regulators attack Apple’s business model globally. Demand for the iPhone — Apple’s biggest source of revenue — has also remained sluggish, especially in China.
What’s more, the search for the “next big thing” is also proving fruitless. Apple has canceled a long-awaited electric car project, and its push into smart home technology is slowing.
Out of breath on AI, stuck in search of "the next big thing"
At WWDC 2025, Apple officially confirmed that a new version of Siri with deep integration with Apple Intelligence will not appear this year. Instead, this feature may be released in 2026.
While Apple spent much of the event talking about its suite of Apple Intelligence and iOS 26 upgrades, Siri was only briefly mentioned. Many people have wondered about the actual state of Siri after Apple promised a major upgrade last year.
Since OpenAI's ChatGPT exploded into public awareness in 2022, tech companies have been racing to add more features using generative artificial intelligence, technology that can generate complex text, images, and videos based on simple suggestions.
Meanwhile, Apple - a company famous for its pioneering work in technology, is unfortunately "absent" from the AI race.
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At WWDC 2024, Apple confidently demonstrated its new AI changes. However, the upgrade to the virtual assistant Siri was barely mentioned at this year's event. Photo: Apple. |
At WWDC 2024, the iPhone maker confidently demonstrated Siri with a new interface, the ability to remember conversations and perform many complex tasks. However, according to Craig Federighi, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, the V1 version still has many limitations after months of testing and is not ready to be released to the market.
Investors cheered after Bloomberg reported in February 2024 that Apple was shelving its electric car project, meaning the company would no longer have to spend billions of dollars on an effort that was seen as having a low chance of success.
But the end of the project also leaves Apple without a major source of revenue for the foreseeable future. As difficult as it is to build an electric car, the iPhone maker may have priced it at $100,000 .
Even though the profit margin will likely be very low, it is still a necessary factor in the context of Apple needing a sales boost.
More importantly, abandoning the electric car project also raises concerns that the iPhone maker is now sticking to its "safe zone", instead of boldly exploring new areas.
In fact, the electric car isn’t the only project Apple has recently canceled. The tech giant previously shut down internal efforts to develop its own smartwatch display, in addition to canceling the camera-equipped Apple Watch project.
Giant crack in the "closed garden"
Since its launch in 2008, the App Store has operated largely the same across 175 countries, including charging developers a 30% commission on every app transaction.
In 2021, CEO Tim Cook admitted that the App Store is an " economic miracle" when it brought in more than $1,000 billion in revenue, helped create more than 7 million jobs and contributed billions of dollars in profits each year to Apple.
In Apple's most recent fiscal year, that services revenue was nearly $100 billion , accounting for about 25% of the company's total revenue.
However, that monopoly may soon end this year, at least in the US. Specifically, after 5 years of absence, the game Fortnite officially returned to the App Store from May 21, ending the ban and the 5-year-long legal battle between Apple and publisher Epic Games.
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Fortnite has officially returned to the App Store since May 21, marking Apple's concession to the payment structure on the App Store. Photo: Bloomberg. |
According to Reuters , Apple's decision to return the game to its app store was largely influenced by a federal judge's finding that the company violated a previous antitrust ruling related to payment restrictions on the App Store.
In the 2021 case, Judge Rogers largely ruled in favor of Apple, but required the company to allow developers to offer other payment options outside the App Store.
The change is small, but Apple estimates that allowing developers to link out for alternative payment methods on the App Store could cost it billions of dollars.
To compete with third-party payment processors on the web, Apple will likely need to adjust its commission structure to keep developers coming back, but the change will likely cut into App Store revenue.
Source: https://znews.vn/ca-nui-thu-thach-cho-don-apple-post1560791.html
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