We are a little over 2 weeks away from John Ternus stepping into the head role at Apple and despite Tim Cook’s best efforts he has a serious uphill climb to manage. Let me get the major thought out of the way, John Ternus won’t be able to keep Apple’s growth story going. The headwinds between the RAM and storage crisis as well as regulation coming on board across the globe will make it difficult for Apple to keep growing. Sure they could take over the rest of the mobile phone market and the PC market as well but that’s trench warfare nowadays, the big grabs are over.
The way I see it, John has two possible paths.
- Keep degrading Apple’s products with more ads, more services, and more penny pinching to try and keep the growth going.
- Keep Apple on the high road and provide a better experience.
The first is the path Tim Cook has already started down, degrading Apple’s products with bad ads and more of them. This has led to some, including me, to start to wonder if the costs are worth it anymore. Apple built a reputation on being the premium choice, but as they go down this road its starting to look like the BMW Spiderman situation.
The second path takes a lot of backbone. It would mean suffering at the hands of the stock market for the idea that your brand is worth more than the latest quarterly results. Providing the consumer with a better experience as the prices of all tech products rise would set Apple apart from the rest of the market who will no doubt double down on any method to improve margins. But John shouldn’t just look to be slightly better than the rest, he should look at this as an opportunity to entrench the Apple brand with consumers even more. Doing so could lead to Apple being in a much stronger position when these current crises subside. Is he willing to take the hit now for better outlook later?