Apple’s “Plateau™ Principle.” The Doomsday Cycle, Lazy Journalism, and the Real Test for 2027’s $400 target

Prologue: The Peak Apple Echo Chamber

“An Apple product reveal, always slick and highly produced, used to be the most important day on the tech calendar. Yet these days they are a little more perfunctory: a procession of incremental improvements on a suite of products that has not changed in nearly a decade.”

The Times of London, 13th September 2025

You know you’re living through another “Peak Apple” news cycle when even The Times can’t resist another round of doom-mongering.

This is an old game. Every five years, the financial press decides it’s time for a hit piece, usually timed to a product launch that’s left them feeling as flat as the Apple Park spaceship. What’s new this time? For once, I almost agree with them.

This weekend it was the turn of The Times of London:

Did Apple reach its peak with the iPhone?

The tech giant is very good at buying its own shares and squeezing every last cent out of its products, but it’s in danger of missing out on the AI revolution

The Sunday TimesDanny Fortson, West Coast Correspondent

… to which I might ask in return,

Did “The Times” Reach It’s Peak 25 Years Ago, When Tony Blair Was Still Prime Minister?

(and Steve Jobs was running Apple, for a curious triumvirate)?

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been writing, and reading, these pieces since the Jobs era, and every “Apple is doomed” story has, so far, proven to be a career-limiting move for those who actually bet on it. I used to write to mock them.

Now, I have half a foot in each camp. But if as a finpress writer you’re still penning “Apple is finished” stories in 2025, you better bring more than an “Apple is Doomed” death-counter courtesy of the Macelope, and not just recycled nostalgia and a spreadsheet of buybacks stories un-earthed from the same speculation, several years on. Otherwise, editorially-speaking, a bit like Apple’s iPhone engineering team, you may well have “peaked.”

(or “plateaued,” as is fashionable to say since iPhone 17 Liberation Day.)

Section 1: The Eternal Return of Apple’s “End of Times”

The Times sets the scene as only a British broadsheet can:

“The last mass-market device launched by Apple were the AirPods earphones in 2016. Its virtual reality goggles — the Apple Vision Pro, announced in 2023 — have flopped.”

That’s true, and it isn’t. Yes, AirPods are now eight years old, Vision Pro is boxed up in warehouses next to the Apple Car’s blueprints, and the last thing Apple truly “created” for the masses was probably the M1 chip - hardware so good even the competition wanted to license it. But the problem with the “no new products” story is that it misses Apple’s real trick: iterating so efficiently on hardware and silicon that the market lets you rebox the same idea, every September, and call it progress, with itertive upgrades, complemented by mammoth buybacks and a booming services sector solely boosting enormous gross margins by an almost exponential increase. How? By insurance re-fi productsand iPhone subscriptions, selling massively high-margin insurance services and Apple Financial Services profits, mainly responsible or the company’s growth (as covered in my Q3 earnings report)

Apple’s Q3 of Quiet Arithmetic: Growth Without Momentum. A “Good” Quarter. If You Ignore What Made It Good.

Apple’s Q3: solid on paper until scrutinised. iPhone strength? US tariff and China subsidy-fueled, and Services grew but without acceleration thanks to financial services. No new growth engine. Just some existing lines doing their job. Except iPads wearables: pigs, with no lipstick. Here’s why.

tommo.fyiTommo_UK

AppleCare, profitable thought it might be, is definitely not what Jobs would have had in mind as his “One More Thing,” if he was around.

This is the same “camera bump as feature” cycle that let us rename battery-driven necessity arguments in the same breath as a new feature called a “plateau™,” and turn the physics of optics into a design statement which frankly, I call “Brutalist.”.

This was called Apple’s “Yawn Dropping” strategy in my last article for a reason.

Yawn Dropping: Cupertino’s Annual Apple iPhone Re-Boxing Spectacular. No Awe or Intelligence. No AI At All.

Quick Take: Apple’s 2025 “Awe” event delivers another round of recycled superlatives: thinner phones needing battery packs, a camera “plateau” that’s more chin than chisel, and “must-have” features on permanent repeat. No AI, no innovation, just another year in Cupertino, “Waiting For Godot.”

tommo.fyiTommo_UK

It’s not that Apple is incapable of surprise; it’s that they’ve become masters of making less sound like more. Which makes ”being iterative“ more of a sin than an accident, for a company with an innovation heritage like Apple’s.

You can only pull that off for so long before people start to notice that the magician is all sleeve and there’s not really a rabbit, just the actual hypnotic-suggestion of one through hyperbole and mass-distraction CGI abuse.

In fact, Apple tries to insist there‘a not just one rabbit being conjured up – but a quantum rabbit. Or Rabbits. A Schrödingers Rabbit. Rabbits.

“In fact, there are 8 rabbits, if you look, or none if you don’t.. or is it the other way round,” wondered Alice as she pondered on six impossible things before breakfast while curiously looking through Liquid Glass at the view from her plateau overlooking Wonderland.

These rabbits, not just one, all co-exist, and yet, are invisible, all at the same time (the way Apple manage to define 9 lenses as existing in the 3 lenses of the Pro Max). If that doesn’t make much sense, neither does a “plateau-as-a-feature” or “Liquid Glass” (not to be confused by “Ceramic Glass”), or wondering whether Apple adopting “Vapour Cooling” is ok for your teenagers’ health.

Section 2: Buybacks, Behemoths, and the Missing “Why”

Here’s where The Times gets their numbers right, but their thesis wrong:

“$704 billion… That is how much the iPhone giant has spent in the past ten years. Not on engineers, nor big ideas, nor new products, but on its own shares… Apple’s is the largest such scheme in corporate history.”

Let’s not pretend this is some smoking gun. Buybacks are what every mature monopoly does. Microsoft, Exxon, even the old AT&T all played this game: when you can’t outgrow your market, you buy your own float and juice the EPS until the next “big thing” comes along. Apple is just the most efficient at it and it certainly was driveling I was arguing for back in 2005 onwards along with many other investors.

This scheme has its place and has done much to stabilise the stock over the years (not to mention put a floor under it) but when the a company’s premiere engineering achievement become financial (or insurance sales), then most companies would be called out as having jumped the shark.

Not Apple. Yet. It is still coasting on BOTD – benefit of the doubt – otherwise known as “hope and pray” – because, in the words of those fooling hopium and sat on massive dividends-yielding shares bought decades ago and benefitting from an 11,000% price rise since 2001, why would they care? Sadly, the can’t be said of anyone who invested since about 2020. Apart from the post-COVID spurt, AAPL – comparatively speaking – has just turned into a frump.

But here’s the real tell: buybacks are a holding pattern, not a strategy. They work for as long as the market believes that Apple is “between acts:” waiting to spring a real innovation, not just managing the smoothing of the plateau, like the act of a careful gardener in a Walled Garden.

The $704bn in buybacks isn’t the indictment The Times makes it out to be, but it is a form of confession, and The Times is right in this one respect:

Apple seems to think it has run out of mountain to climb, and is content to circle the plateau while it waits for the weather to change, not realising that it’ already being outpaced and outflanked on all sides, unlike the past. Because these days – like climbing Mt Everest - everyone can do it. Apple just has slicker (although increasingly more boring) keynotes, and “plateaus™ “

And to be fair, it’s been a profitable wait for the company, even if disappointing for fans and increasingly, bored and impatient investors, and especially rumour-peddlers who seem to have had to resort to reporting on Apple AI lay-offs as their primary bottom-feeding material in the absence of anything meaty.

I hear Mark Gurman is trying to create an “Apple is rediscovering its industrial design roots” mantra, elsewhere on the web. I don’t think their industrial design skills are in question, just their vision about what to pack into it.

In pure financial terms, the California giant is doing better than the Federal Reserve at printing money.

Of course it is. That’s what monopolies do right up until someone else ships something you actually want, like crypto, for example.

Section 3: Innovation, AI, and the Real “Show Me” Problem

 Here, The Times actually lands a real punch:

“And yet the world is in the grip of an artificial intelligence boom that promises to change how we live, work and do business. It is the biggest new thing since the dawn of the internet  and Apple is nowhere to be found.”

This is where the story diverges from the usual “Apple is doomed” script. Historically, “doomed” just meant “not the first to market.” Apple missed 3G, 4G, even 5G, but shipped when it mattered. This time, though, the AI window is not just a features race but a platform shift and since lobotomising Siri in 2011, Apple is now 15 years late to the party..

Apple’s obsession with privacy, on-device processing, and ecosystem lock-in - once a “moat” - now risks becoming a set of handcuffs. The privacy “bunker” that kept regulators at bay is also what keeps Siri locked up in solitary, aging backwards while Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity learn to play football (not “American football,” real football) in the yard together.

In my own archives (see “#FreeSiri”) I’ve been calling this out for years.

Apple’s 15-Year AI Odyssey: From Siri’s Promise to “Apple Intelligence.” Featuring Siri, the world’s first backwards-evolving assistant now aged -15.

Apple’s AI journey reads less like a roadmap and more like a séance. For 15 years, the faithful have insisted a grand plan exists—somewhere, someday—while Siri stumbles on, lobotomised. The real mystery? Why Apple, once the master of interface revolutions, keeps mistaking silence for strategy.

tommo.fyiTommo_UK

It’s no longer enough to ship a thinner phone, slap in a C1X modem, and add a “plateau™” monicker for what was, for years, called a camera bulge and make it seem like a “feature” by giving it name. The world has moved to agentic browsers, persistent assistants, and cross-app orchestration. Apple keeps promising “real-time intelligence,” but all we get is more “machine learning” a term as dated as “Retina Display,” even though Apple excels at it in consumer electronics and has absolutely deployed it to enormous and under-appreciated effect across its devices and apps.

If Apple doesn’t ship something that feels like a platform leap in the next 6 months, The Times won’t have to write another “Peak Apple” piece. The market will do it for them, the PE multiple will collapse, and AAPL will shed 20-30% in a flash.

Section 4: The “Yawn Dropping” Test: Is It Just You, or Is Everyone Bored?

Let’s be honest,

“These days [product launches] are a little more perfunctory: a procession of incremental improvements…”

It’s not just you. Even the die-hards are starting to sound like they’re reading last year’s keynote in a new accent. My most recent “Yawn Dropping” analysis was written as a challenge: prove me wrong, Apple. Or any reader.

I still have free a Perplexity Comet code worth $2400 to give away for a good argument. No takers? Come …. I’m not that good.

Why does every keynote now feel like a postmodern performance of “Groundhog Day”? Why does every “breakthrough” come pre-packaged with a battery pack required but not included, and a charger not in the box (unless you live in Francem where they mandate all devices must ship with power adapters), and a waiting list for whatever “AI” actually means next June?

Let’s call it like it is:

Plateau™ ≠ Progress

Apple is living off the interest on its own legend. The magic is still there but only in the memory of what it used to mean to ship “one more thing.”

The new “plateau” is more than just a camera bump, it’s an insult to consumers’ intelligence. Why not just call it a “Liberation Bump” - under the monicker “setting your camera skills free?”.

“Plateauing” - or “boxing-up|, like AI, Siri, the AVP and many other promising innovations is now the business model: “rebranding” ugly, bad or uncommercials design choices as features.

Maybe Tim will re-brand “Genmojis” and give them another lease of life? After spending two years talking about them on every earnings conference call, the focus on them – or rather the lack of nary a mention of them – was, “astounding.” In fact, perhaps the most astounding aspect of the entire Q3 earnings call.

Section 5: The Doomers, the Die-Hards, and the Disappointed

This is where The Times, and most of the financial press, always get lost.

Doomsayers see every plateau as the edge of the cliff. “AAPL forever” farmer-types see every delay as a buying opportunity, as if the company’s gravitational pull will always bend reality back in its favour. But here’s my read, as someone who’s been accused of both bull and bear heresy, often in the same week, and an AAPL commentator and investor of 25 years:

Apple is neither finished, nor firing on all cylinders. It’s coasting on battery-conserving over-drive in full “vapourware cooling mode” (no active A/C needed, no product needed). Velocity does not equal momentum, though. Eventually, entropy becomes a drag,

Apple is a cash machine, yes. It still has the best supply chain in the industry. It can outlast a couple of flops, Vision Pro included, without breaking a sweat, except by investors. Free cash flow, flows like water from a waterpark in desert-bound Las Vegas as Apple buys itself back after selling its soul, year after year, to engineer its bottom line. And yet, we know this can’t go on forever, because a “Buyback Queen” can’t carry on winning beauty pageants forever, maintaining a PE of 30+ with real growth in the low single digits. In that direction, lies Ma Bell.

However, the “show me” moment is here. My path to $400 by Q4 2027 (read the full thesis in the archives) is still open, but it requires Apple to do something it hasn’t done since the M1: ship a genuine, platform-defining leap.

AAPL Q3 Preview: $160, Mediocrity, or $400? The Uncomfortable Truths Wall Street Won’t Model.

A confession: I don’t care how many iPhones Apple claims are “installed.” Nor “dormant users,” or the parade of stats rolled out every ER call to assure us the Apple ecosystem is, in some metaphysical sense, expanding. The proof is in the earnings growth and that’s all the Street really cares about.

tommo.fyiTommo_UK

The risk isn’t bankruptcy. It’s boredom. Apple can “iterate” its way to irrelevance faster than it can buy back the entire float. If it becomes just another carrier-bundled subscription, the magic will fade not with a crash, but with a shrug. We’re at the tipping point now, where Apple would traditionally ship late, but quickly dominate an entire sector, or ship too late, and act as a successful entrant but not market dominator.

Epilogue: The Plateau Principle - “Real Artists Ship” (Without Plateaus)

So where does that leave us?

The Times asks,

“How has a company that was once the quintessence of innovation drifted so far?”

The answer is not a single failing, but a slow-motion surrender to comfort. The plateau is not a flaw. It’s a choice. Apple isn’t doomed but it is in stasis. And as every engineer knows, stasis is a temporary condition. Eventually, you move or you’re moved-on. The only thing left to do is #FreeSiri, the original agentic assistant embodying Steve Job‘a dreams of Apple’s future functionality - what we call agentic AI now - 15 years in the languishing, out of the privacy prison, and remember what “Real Artists Ship” actually meant before the plateau became the product.

Perplexity: The OS 9-to-OS X Moment for Apple AI, Why “Real Artists Ship” Still Matters, How Apple Could Own AI by this Christmas—and Hit $400 by 2027

Buying Perplexity gives Apple an instant AI OS, a live interface, and reclaims its instinct. It bridges FMF, replaces Google’s crutch, turning Siri from joke to conductor. Skip 18 months of build, own the narrative—and make $400 AAPL feel underpriced by 2027. The shortcut—shipping—is the product.

tommo.fyiTommo_UK

Until then, as I wrote months ago, the next great leap is waiting, over the horizon, and possibly in someone else’s lab. Getting there in the end is not a strategy. It’s an excuse for being latex and being late is not a tactic, it’s a failure to ship.

Real artists ship. Plateaus are for tourists to take in the view. And they don’t hang around, they move on. That is, unless Apple finally decides to ditch the plateau talk, and start an exciting and risky and exhilarating, risky climb again, carving out new heights, not fiddling with the edges of making it’s new plateau strategy look sculpted by design rather than ugly bumps now renamed as beauty marks, and sold as a feature.

Coming Up Soon 0n .fyi in a planned trilogy:

Ten Ways Apple Could Break the Plateau (and Actually Surprise Us)

• 1. MacBook “Air Connect”
  A sub-$700 MacBook with a C1X modem and A19 Pro chip. Ditch the status pricing, go “affordable luxury” again. Put “Mac for Everyone” back on the map and outsell Chromebooks.
• 2. Agentic OS - For Real
  Ship an actual, persistent, context-aware agent baked into iOS/macOS. Not just “Apple Intelligence” or “Apple Answer Questions” (as rumoured) as a widget, but an orchestration layer that makes your phone, Mac, and iPad think together, not just sync. Like my SenseOS concept.

SenseOS: The AI Interface Apple Already Built (But Never Launched)

You didn’t ask. It just knew. Because it’s been learning — not just from your words, but from you. Not Apple. Not Siri, but SenseOS - the AI Apple could and should have launched a year ago at WWDC2024, but didn’t. How about ’25?

tommo.fyiTommo_UK

• 3. #FreeSiri
  Uncage Siri at last: make it the open, app-accessible, developer-extendable assistant it was meant to be in 2011. Let it see, act, and learn across apps. Don’t just rebrand the corpse.

Apple’s 15-Year AI Odyssey: From Siri’s Promise to “Apple Intelligence.” Featuring Siri, the world’s first backwards-evolving assistant now aged -15.

Apple’s AI journey reads less like a roadmap and more like a séance. For 15 years, the faithful have insisted a grand plan exists—somewhere, someday—while Siri stumbles on, lobotomised. The real mystery? Why Apple, once the master of interface revolutions, keeps mistaking silence for strategy.

tommo.fyiTommo_UK

• 4. “Apple Health+” Goes Hardware
  A Watch (or even iPhone) with real, non-invasive glucose monitoring. Not “coming soon” shipping this year. Make Apple Watch the only medical device you want or need to wear.
• 5. “Bring Your Own AI” App Store
  Let third parties ship real agent apps and LLM plug-ins—not just widgets—into the App Store. Create an agent marketplace. What Steam did for games, do for AI.
• 6. Full “Comet” Browser Integration
  Acquire Perplexity (as I outlined) and ship a Chromium-based, agentic browser as default on every device. Turn the Apple’s browser from a cul-de-sac into the new home screen.

The Rise of AI-Native Browsers: Perplexity’s Comet, OpenAI’s GPT Browser (and no Safari).

10th July 2025–Browsers: Judgement Day. Perplexity and OpenAI launch AI-native, agentic browsers. Old paradigms—Safari, Chrome, iOS—start to look obsolete. This isn’t about faster search. It’s about the interface becoming the intelligence. Apple? Stuck in the mud, yelling “WebKit only!” Bozo yeah?

tommo.fyiTommo_UK

• 7. Apple Pay: Beyond the Walled Garden
  Make Apple Pay universal (Android, web, Chrome, everything). Use the regulatory opening to become the “default” payment rail for the internet, not just for iPhone users. As discussed in my article about Apple’s failure to dominate with ApplePay.

Apple Pay: The Wallet That Never Opened. How Apple Fumbled the Future of Finance

Apple had the rails, the trust, and the devices. It could have built the most powerful financial platform on Earth. But instead of revolutionising money, it sent us a credit card—via Goldman Sachs.

tommo.fyiTommo_UK

• 8. A Real AR/VR Reset
  Relaunch Vision Pro as a sub-$1500 “Vision Go” product - no ski goggles, no developer beta, just mainstream AR sunglasses/prescription lensesfor everyone. If not now, license the tech and move on.

• 9. “Zero Friction” Cloud Migration
  Seamless, one-click migration from Windows, Android, or ChromeOS to Mac/iOS. All your history, settings, and apps—just sign in. Make switching a feature, not a pain point. I know it’s meant to just work, now, but it doesn’t.
• 10. “Apple One-Lite”
  Reinvent the Apple Services bundle: a low-cost package that brings in students, Gen Z, and emerging markets. Stop treating services as a tax on loyalists, start treating them as an on-ramp.

… Bonus #11 Tommo-Tip-to-Tim:

“Actually ship something bold, ahead of time, prior to a rumour (box Mark Gurman for ruining consumers’ excitement every week, for at least 12 months perhaps, to assist this?), at scale, without a “beta” badge or a 9-month delay. In other words: Real Artists Ship, Tim, and not with a ”plateau” or iPhone Air battery carbuncle.

— Tommo_UK, London, 14th September 2025 |

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