Awe Dropping event on Sept 9: Is iPhone 17 launch Apple’s last chance?

This Tuesday night India time, Apple will roll out another spectacle from its Cupertino, California HQ by announcing the latest in its flagship product, the iPhone, at the Awe Dropping event. Fanboys will rejoice, the Android loyal will snigger, while the internet will go to town any which ways.

But when it comes to the performance of the company itself, Apple, things are likely to be more muted. Once the world’s most valuable company, Apple is presently not even No.2, and while its value has seen grown (despite a lot of zigzag especially in the past months), its predicament can best be explained by the two companies that has pushed it down from its perch — at No.1 is Nvidia, the company that makes the high-power GPUs that today’s AI revolution runs on, while coming runner up is a company that has been more an enemy than a frenemy to Steve Jobs legacy — Microsoft.

Now the reasons why Microsoft is at its perch right now is very much the tale of everything that is wrong with the iPhone-maker, by contrast. Microsoft has a well diversified portfolio of products, ranging from desktop operating system, software as well as its extremely successful pivot in the 21st century into anything from cloud platform to artificial intelligence (MS is one of the investors in ChatGPT, a bet that is laying golden eggs for it now).

But for all its dazzling phones, laptops and watches, Apple is generally perceived to be a laggard when it comes to Artificial Intelligence. Its much-touted (at the iPhone 16 launch last September) ‘Apple Intelligence’ was not only delayed, but failed to impress when it finally debuted on consumer’s phones. Many didn’t bother to make it work or proceed with the setting up, anyway. The iPhone 17 launch on Tuesday will be one chance for the ‘first mover’ in anything from music players to touch-screen phones but an ‘also ran’ in AI to do some last-ditch damage control.

Having missed a step with AI is not Apple’s sole issue. General perception, even among fanboys, is that the iPhone has stopped being revolutionary, with the rate of new features slowing down in recent times. Sales in the last quarter in China went up, but it was the first time in about two years Chinese sales showed an upward trajectory. Apple has been desperately trying a two-pronged approach — trying to shore up its sagging sales in the mainland, even while expanding at a rapid pace in an equally big market, India.

Here at least, the company is on a winning wicket for the time-being. India being a price-conscious market and the sky high price of the iPhone had meant that when Apple offered easy loans and easy monthly instalment modes of repaying it, Indian users got hooked — according to a Bloomberg report, Apple sales hit a record 9 billion dollars in India last year, also helped by the fact that Apple has slowly moved a significant bit of its phone assembling, as well as the ancillary ecosystem, into the south of the country.

While the aspirational quotient of Apple will see the phone through in markets like India and other developing countries at least for some more time — whether or not the iPhone 17 is a dud, the company has a major opportunity to turn the wind to blow right with the new models. Rumours abound of an iPhone 17 ‘Air’ model, a light version of the smartphone akin to Apple’s MacBook Air laptop range. There is also speculation of improving the camera quality, especially that of the selfie camera, where the likes of Samsung and even some of the Chinese majors are miles ahead with pro features. Offering an updated — and working, version of its AI format ‘Apple Intelligence’, will then be the icing on the cake.

Apple’s problem in the past years since the iPhone became the ‘wonder kid’ on the block has been its excess of success. The iPhone became so successful that it now dominates the entire product range. Gone are the days when Apple could be described as a computer maker or the company that brought out the iPod — all other products now play second fiddle to the iPhone, and that comes with its own long term problems. Right now, the iPhone makes up more than half of Apple’s revenue, and as every wise sage would quip, putting all your eggs in one basket can be a very risky proposition.

Tim Cook definitely knows it too well. But the Apple CEO's mind is too preoccupied with a bunch of other issues. On the top of it would be US President Trump’s vagaries, with the tariff flip-flop leaving long term production planning in limbo. Then, there have been the antitrust court cases. A recent ruling over Google is said to have been a relief for both the big tech companies, since the worries were that the US courts may even have asked Apple to remove Google as its de facto search app (Google parent Alphabet pays billions every year for this home page privilege). That done, cases still persist, especially over Apple’s iron grip on the App Store. The writing on the wall is that something’s gotta give.

But the man is optimistic galore. Earlier this year, Cook tried to deflect all the talk of the ominous clouds gathering over the company Steve Jobs built and he made a global T-Rex when he said, “There is a lot more to come…I couldn’t be more excited about our (future) product pipeline.” This Tuesday night, we will get to know whether he can walk the talk, or whether Apple, like many other biggies who met their hubris at the crossroads of technology, will also set forth on a long laborious road to decline.