Apple is struggling to innovate like it once did. There was a time when Apple keynotes felt like a concert 1000s tuned in. Steve Jobs would stroll onto the stage. He would unveil something we did not even know that we were missing, and suddenly the world couldn't live without it. The iPod, the iPhone, the iPad. Whole industry shifted overnight, and Apple stocks would soar.

But fast forward to 2025 and the vibe couldn't have been more different. Yesterday was Apple's annual WWDC, the Worldwide Developers Conference. So Apple unveiled the liquid glass, its biggest redesign since 2013. 

"We began by rethinking the fundamental elements that make up our software, and it starts with an entirely new expressive material we call Liquid Glass, with the optical qualities of glass and fluidity that only Apple can achieve, it transforms depending on your content or even your context, and brings more clarity to navigation and controls." cook said

The new user interface looks like the future. The software is sleek. It dynamically reacts to motion and light. It lets users see through everything. Basically, it's transparent, and in the age of generative intelligence, it feels like a cheap party trick, and not just to us, reported by firstpost, the consumers, even the investors were disappointed. Just six minutes into the show, Apple stocks dropped by two and a half percent.

So what happened here? Has Apple lost the plot? One year ago, they announced a grand AI vision. They called it Apple intelligence, and Wall Street was excited and hopeful.

There was a $200 billion spike in Apple's value. Headlines declared the iPhone was finally about to become smart. Siri was about to get a brain. 12 months later, series of upgrade is MIA - missing in action, a long awaited upgrade has been postponed once again. Apple says it needs more time.

Meanwhile, its competitors are sprinting ahead. Google's Geminis writing essays and planning mails. Meta AI is all over WhatsApp. Microsoft is stuffing AI into your Word docs, open AI is hoping to build devices and Apple is showing us buttons that fade in sunlight.

Now, to be fair, Apple has always been cautious. They don't like to ship half baked ideas. They do not chase every shiny object, and in many ways, that has worked for them.

It's why people trust their products. But this is not about trust anymore. This is about pace, and Apple is way behind right now. What's worse, they seem to have accepted it. They're not even pretending to lead, and you could feel it during this WWDC event

critics say a lot of this has to do with a man leading the company right now, and that is Tim Cook, in 2011 he took over apple from Steve Jobs, and since then, he has turned apple into the world's first $3 trillion company by every capitalist metric, he is a success, and yet Tim Cook's Apple feels different. 

The radical reinvention is gone. In its place, there's an obsession with refinement. Apple's most recent innovations have been safe, a slightly thinner MacBook, a slightly brighter screen, a slightly less annoying Siri.

Even Apple's own boardroom seems to know it. Reports suggest executives have internally acknowledged this. They say AI could make the iPhone irrelevant within a decade.

So Apple is now in a race not to leave but to survive, and the threats are not limited to technology. Legally, Apple is being boxed in, the company could lose a $20 billion annual deal with Google.

Its App Store revenue faces anti trust heat, both in the US and the EU. And then there's China. Most of Apple's manufacturing happens in China, but Donald Trump's trade war has exposed this vulnerability. Apple will now have to move or face tariffs.

So is this the beginning of the end for Apple?

We say Not. The company still sells millions of iPhones. It still has time, but the threats to its dominance are multiplying. Apple will have to do what it hasn't done in years. It will have to take risks, tear down its walled garden, rethink the privacy pitch, embrace third party AI models, license Gemini or partner with OpenAI. Let Siri talk to other brains and allow customers to leave the Apple ecosystem without wanting to. The other alternative is to slowly fade into irrelevance, because here's the truth, Apple did not win by being polished. It won by being bold.

The original iPod was clunky. The first iPhone lacked apps. The Mac was overpriced, but Steve Jobs bet on the future, and he was right. Today, Apple is betting on refinements, but the age of refinement is over. We are in the age of reinvention. If Apple cannot reinvent itself, someone else will do it for them.