Apple has to climb the mountain – Computerworld

A new language for a new time

That aspect of the brand no longer seems to match the existence so many of its customers experience. And it’s arguable whether senior management, ensconced in the Silicon Valley bubble, is exposed enough to identify a product design and marketing language that resonates in our new, highly complex, polarized, conflicted reality. While Apple has done extraordinarily well as the ultimate aspirational brand and enthusiasm for its products will remain among those who can reasonably afford them. But declining sales means declining profits, and in a world set up to mirror Wall Street’s irrational belief that perpetual growth is possible on a finite planet, decline is unacceptable.

That’s true even for the most successful company in human history.

That’s a lot of pressure for Apple’s top brass to handle. Plus, of course, in every case, the answers they have available to them appear to be least-worse responses, rather than good ones. Adding additional complexity, the challenges are themselves intertwined as societies everywhere undergo significant structural change, as political forces of various hues attempt to hold things together with false narratives of a history that never really happened.