After years of no’s, Apple needs to start saying yes more

Apple has lots of sayings. “It’s better to be a pirate than join the navy.” “Think different.” “Don’t hold it that way.” And, perhaps most grammatically divisive, “A thousand no’s for every yes.” Some of them are just marketing spiels, but that last one is key to understanding the company’s approach to product development. And the areas where it is at risk of going astray.

Now, I will concede that Apple is good at the first part of the equation—it says no a lot. It said no to cars. It said no to TVs. It said no to overheating multi-device chargers (eventually). It said no to foldable smartphones, I would imagine, roughly 10 times per quarter. About the only thing it says yes to is “another smartphone/smartwatch/tablet/laptop that’s just like the last one, only with an extra button.” And Vision Pro, I suppose. That was a fairly big yes.

Still, I worry that worthwhile product launches are getting lost in the deluge of noes. (Please note the absence of an apostrophe in that plural.) Earlier this month it emerged that, according to Mark Gurman’s sources, Apple now has no plans to make the smart ring it was understood to be working on earlier this year. Maybe that’s the right decision; after all, the smart ring market hasn’t taken off yet, and the classic Cupertino stratagem is to wait for other companies to lead the way before swooping in and grabbing the revenue. But all the ingredients are there, and surely it would be worth a try?

I speak, as you may have guessed, as someone who has written an opinion piece on this subject and been roundly ignored. I argued back in February that a smart ring is an uncannily natural fit for the Apple ecosystem. It could be an additional controller for Vision Pro, a biometric unlock key for the Mac, or a data source for Health and Fitness+. And it could offer the same proposition as the Apple Watch—a miniature connection to your other Apple products–on a still smaller scale. It’s the logical extrapolation of the Apple Watch concept: the smallest possible device with which to access notifications and gather health, fitness, and sleep data.

But now it seems the Apple Ring won’t happen. Well, fair enough. But what happens if—and this is starting to look a bit more likely—the smart ring market does take off? As we’ve seen with AI, it’s not always straightforward to sit back and then join the party later. And as we’ve seen with foldables, sometimes Apple sits back for so long that it has to accept it can no longer catch up. Better hope that foldables and smart rings don’t turn out to be the next big things.

Focus is good. Focus makes sense in the world of technology, where projects cost a fortune to develop and the price of failure is steep. But it’s possible to go too far the other way and lock yourself out of markets whose future value isn’t yet apparent. Not every project absolutely has to involve millions of dollars of ad spend and a dedicated area in the Apple Store. You could always roll out a smart ring as an experimental beta product to a select user base and see how it gets on. You could always try to leave your options open for the future.

So sure, I can see why Apple believes in saying no a thousand times for every time it says yes. But if you do that, you’d better be sure that when the right opportunity comes along, you answer correctly. How confident are you, Tim Cook, that mixed reality is going to be a hit, and smart rings are not? That people are going to buy premium tablets, and not foldable smartphones? Because your devotion to focus means the stakes are horrifyingly high. And if you get the question wrong, the cost will be Apple’s relevance in the technology landscape of the future.

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

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