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A month before leaving, Chaudhri wrote a farewell email to colleagues announcing his planned exit. He was fond of quoting a line from the 11th-century Persian poet Rumi: “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” Playing off that line, Imran wrote, “Sadly, rivers dry out, and when they do, you look for a new one.”
The email alarmed the bosses. In his 2022 book 'After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul', NYT tech reporter Tripp Mickle wrote that they feared the message the email had sent. "They feared that the message Chaudhri sent could be interpreted to mean that Apple’s best days had passed," Mickel wrote. "Its river had run dry. It was one thing for outsiders to say that the company was no longer innovative, but another thing altogether for that critique to come from someone who had helped birth multitouch technology for the iPhone. They worried it would poison morale and moved to contain the damage. Shortly after the email, Dye fired Chaudhri." Firing meant Chaudhri won't receive his shares. He later explained to friends that the email was a personal reflection on his own lack of joy, not a comment on Apple.
Mickel's book, which narrates the creative brain drain at Apple after Jobs' death, rings true when the recent launch of iPhone15 has left many Apple fans a bit disappointed.
"Apple’s Wonderlust event may go down in history, but not for good reasons," wrote Lewis Painter on Trusted Reviews. "That’s because, despite the fact we saw four new iPhones and two new Apple Watches, it’s probably the most underwhelming Apple launch in recent memory. Could the behemoth that is Apple actually be struggling to innovate? While I’d have baulked at the idea a few years ago, today, I’m not so sure."
Though Apple has described the launch as "a huge leap forward for iPhone with a gorgeous new design featuring a durable, colour-infused back glass and new contoured edge; the Dynamic Island; a 48MP Main camera with 2x Telephoto; and USB‑C", many Apple fans think iPhone 15 lacks innovation that would make it stand apart from previous iPhones. "Meet the new Apple iPhone 13, I mean 14, no sorry 15!" a user wrote on X. Another went so far as to say that innovation died with Steve Jobs, roughly the point Mickle makes in his book though it sounds too exaggerated.
Did poetry die at Apple after Steve Jobs?
It is a widespread belief that Apple under Steve Jobs did not just sell products to people to make money but was an inspired venture that prioritised innovation, art and aesthetics over profits. Unconvincing though it may seem to many, the belief is powered by the personal mythology of Jobs who grew to become a god of innovation as well as an inspiring icon for the masses.
When a dying Jobs chose Tim Cook as his successor, he had told Cook to chart his own path for Apple. And Cook did, turning Apple into a $3 trillion company by market cap, the most valued in the world.
But many think the creative soul of Apple had been eclipsed by the machine, as Mickle puts it in his book. The argument goes that as Apple focused on services, notably music streaming, production and supply chains, innovation attenuated and several members of Jobs' team of inspired designers, Imran Chaudhri being one of them, left the company and also took away with them the culture of innovation.
It's argued that the decade from 2001 to 2010 was the decade of innovation at Apple when the company launched several products that became iconic such as the iPod, the Macbook Air, the iPad and the iPhone. However, in the next decade, after Jobs' death, the company went low on innovation, not launching any breakthrough product, but grew tremendously under Cook's able business leadership.
Danny Coster's was the first high-profile exit of a designer from Jobs' times. Coster, who led the redesign of the iPad and was instrumental in the design of the translucent iMac, left Apple in 2016, frustrated with the increasing cost-consciousness at the company, a sharp break from Jobs' times when money would flow freely for the design team. With Apple's most famous designer and a trusted aide of Steve Jobs, Jony Ive, leaving in 2019, many saw it as the end of the Steve Jobs era at Apple.
Cook versus Ive
The argument about the loss of inspired creativity and the rise of a nifty business growth culture at Apple hinges on the uneasy polarity of two contrasting figures — Apple's design leader and Jobs' close confidant Jonathan Paul Ive or Jony Ive, and Jobs' chosen successor CEO Tim Cook. For two decades before he left in 2019, Ive had created the sleek and elegant Apple products that set the company apart from all others. As Apple grew under Tim Cook with its focus shifting to business from innovation, as many including Mickle argue, Ive no longer remained the presiding deity at Apple.
Mickle tells the story of how Apple made money but lost its creative soul through Ive's decline and Cook's rise at the company after Jobs' death.
"It was no exaggeration to say that his way of seeing, his love of pure, simple lines, had already redrawn the world," Mickle writes about Ive in his book. "Yet he was never satisfied with his own creations, noticing imperfections invisible to others such as a watch he considered a millimeter too thick or the infinitesimal gap where iPhone parts intersected. He saw poetry inside the machine. He found inspiration in the curve of flowers and the color of tropical waters. He considered imitation to be lazy theft, not flattery. When he stood among the members of his team, they felt as though any problem were solvable, any breakthrough possible."
Cook was Ive's polar opposite, not an inspired artist but a savvy business leader. "He had risen through the ranks from the supply side of the company," Mickle describes Cook in his book. "His gift was not the creation of new products. Instead, he had invented countless ways to maximize margins, squeezing some suppliers and persuading others to build factories the size of cities to churn out more units. He considered inventory evil. He knew how to make subordinates sweat with withering questions. Though he had started as a wizard of spreadsheets, he was rapidly distinguishing himself as a master politician who had forged global alliances with the presidents of both the United States and the People’s Republic of China. A single sentence from his mouth could send the world’s stock markets into free fall."
And this is how Mickle describes the passage of the Jobs' era at Apple by narrating Ive's increasing irrelevance. "The truth was, Ive had been slipping out of focus for years. Apple was no longer his beautiful creation. He was no longer the star of the show. The cameras no longer clicked for him, and news anchors no longer invited him to wax poetically about design. The outside world wanted to know what the company was going to do about tariffs, immigration, and privacy. They wanted Cook. The creative soul of Apple had been eclipsed by the machine."
Those who think iPhone15 sorely lacks innovation would be convinced with Mickle's thesis, that its soul has been sucked out of Apple. But many would find it too simplistic to believe that any business organisation with the stated aim of making profits and growing its market should have a soul to begin with.
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