All the evidence says Apple is the IBM of this era. The evidence testifies against itself: Apple sued the company founded by Jony Ive. What does that mean? If Jobs were alive, Apple would sue Jobs.
IBM played the same hand: its sharpest tools were lawyers and compatibility walls, and facing a new paradigm it substituted restriction for transformation. Lawsuits buy time; they don’t buy the right to define the next paradigm — a sentence IBM paid for with the entire PC era.
The ledger balances too. What Apple defends is a services business making 110 billion dollars a year at 75 percent gross margin, with App Store commissions at the core. What it might miss is a platform worth a trillion. Stock versus growth, rent-collecting versus platform-building. IBM ran this exact math once; after running it, it never got back to the table.
The product logic is worse. In an era where you speak a sentence and software comes out, a system where software must pass through the App Store means users cannot write software. On-device compute can’t match the data center; privacy compliance equals having no data — and with no data, where does your AI come from? In the AI era, the garden wall has become a ceiling.
Some say Ternus is true engineering excellence and Apple is in safe hands. The excellence is real. But put Ternus in charge in the Jobs era, and Apple ships an especially thin Nokia. What I want is a new iPhone, a new ChatGPT, a new CUDA — not a thinner phone.
Jobs’s DNA had two halves: defending yourself with lawsuits, and counterattacking with paradigm innovation. Apple inherited the first half and dropped the second. Cash cow, device base, legal department — which of those did IBM at its peak not have?
