What precipice does Apple need to be walked back from? Certainly not the current one, where they rake in an amount of money roughly equal to the GDP of Luxembourg in a single quarter.
Money is a lagging indicator for product quality. When a company's built up a strong brand, it can take years (or sometimes decades - witness Sears and Applebees) of bad experiences or outdated products before it starts to show up in sales numbers. But when it does, it usually ends up cascading rapidly, oftentimes faster than the company can react.
Apple started its slide the first time around 1989 - that was when Mac models started proliferating, when System 6 came out, and when its first sales decline happened. Jobs didn't return until 1998. That's almost a decade in between.
It's similar for other dominant companies - the writing was on the wall for IBM when Compaq & Dell started selling PC clones in 1983/1984, but they didn't need a turnaround until 1993. Sun Microsystems hit its zenith at the top of the dot-com boom in 2000, but its stock price didn't start sliding until 2007 and it wasn't purchased until 2010.
But there is no great lagging indicator of products in development apart from this reorg on autonomous systems. What about the glasses? Tablet interfaces have obviously peaked, yet there is no stronger ecosystem to support an AR product than what continues to mature around iOS.
Apple has a ton of cash and the best HW/SW/Design on the planet. The company is not done making new things.
Financial performance during the biggest market bull run in history (which lasted almost 10 years) isn't that indicative of the future of company.
On the other hand, the declining quality, sloppier design, increased prices on already highly priced products, multiple conflicting product lines - all of those decisions will eventually have consequences.
Apple used to be about doing a handful of things really well and having a loyal customer base that would happily pay a premium for the quality/brand/premium-feel/coolness of their products - all of that has been slowly going away over the past 5-7 years.
Which product lines are conflicting, and is that conflict a really big deal or just a minor one? Apple has always been self-cannabilizing, see iPod v iPod Mini v iPod nano. The company is much much larger than all these fond remembrances of golden days, which means product lines are going to grow a bit to hit different market segments which each have millions of customers.
Agree on MacBook v MacBook Air. I think the intent was to kill the MacBook Air and service the market segment it once occupied with a combination of the MacBook and MacBook Pro non-touchbar. However that didn't seem to work out the way they planned because consumers kept buying the old MBA, probably b/c MacBook Air also was the low-cost entry point to Mac ecosystem, and there's a noticeable difference between a 12" and 13.3" screen.
I actually don't agree about the XR v XS. Apple's in a situation where much of the market sweet spot for new iPhones exists within that $700-1200 range with a set of preferences around a 5.8"-6.5" size and expectations of certain features and capabilities. The smartphone market is gigantic and if you want to be a player in it at some point you need to differentiate the demand into two or more products, which means drawing the line somewhere in terms of price and features.
XS is 33% more expensive than XR, and the XR drops the dual camera and OLED, while being roughly the same size as the XS, plus a few things to lower cost. I don't know if there are other features you'd realistically want to cut, so it seems to cover the low-end of that sweet spot. The only thing Apple could do with it is maybe lower the price to $699. Meanwhile, I'm not sure what other tech the XS could add to move it further upmarket from the XR. I'm not sure I would have done it differently this year, given the available tech.
My guess from reading lots of peoples thoughts on this is there's a confusion in the relationship between size vs price. It'd be clean and easy if demand for larger phones correlated with willingness to spend more, but that really isn't the case for a lot of segments of that market. E.g. in China there's a preference for larger devices at lower price points. And there's also the quarter miss which is bringing a lot of these discussion up, which was mostly driven by China's massive recession, but fingers are I think unfairly pointing at the XR/XS lineup.
I've been watching the Apple product lineup closely for many years with a particular eye to market segmentation, and my take-away is that while Apple always strives to make it as easy as possible for consumers to choose their preference in product lineups, the fact is both the shifting cluster of preferences consumers have and the technology available to ship means most years they're off the mark by a bit.
Shifting a product line is a multi-year exercise and it creates anachronisms along the way - for instance, see the transition to iPad Pro in 2016-2018. It took a few years to sufficiently move the consumer iPad downmarket ($329) and the Pro upmarket ($799) to have meaningful distinction, and that had to be done incrementally both in testing the market's interest and in delivering on the key tech to do so. The iPad lineup during those years wasn't as ideally distinct as it could have been, e.g. the 9.7" iPad Air 2 and 9.7" iPad Pro both being sold in 2016 wasn't a big distinction, and the 12.9" was far afield from both. Then the next year the 10.5" Pro selling alongside the prior year's 9.7" Pro was also a bit weird, but made sense from a clearing out the inventory perspective.
When they were a smaller company, it was easier to distinguish market segments (e.g. Jobs' famous 2x2 of pro/consumer and desktop/laptop in 97), in part because they had to simply ignore many parts of the market, and because the tech was simpler and changed more quickly. I think the situation we're in now is in part because they went all-out on the X last year to create a distinction between regular and 'pro' models, and because rate of change in tech in general is slowing down. My guess is if they keep this going, in the next few years they will try to draw a bit more distinction between the two lines. The challenge to that going forward is much of the tech differentiation possible is now in software rather than hardware, and the whole zero marginal cost of software actually makes product segmentation harder.
