Why Silicon Valley Will Never Build Another Apple
In a rare public appearance on May 6th, 2025, Sir Jony Ive sat across from Stripe founder Patrick Collison at the company's Stripe Sessions event. The legendary designer, whose aesthetic sensibility defined Apple's most transformative era, and with it, our lives, spoke in measured tones about creation, responsibility, and meaning. I found myself less focused on his words—wise as always—than wondering how the audience was receiving them. Could they still recognize the philosophy that once animated Silicon Valley's most consequential company? Or had that particular frequency become inaudible amid the cacophony of today's tech industry?
Yes, Silicon Valley may build companies as financially valuable as Apple. But value is not the same as meaning. And it’s meaning—not just money—that made Apple matter.
The Valley has changed, said Ive. Its defining characteristics now include velocity, scale, optimization, and disruption. The language of quarterly results has displaced the language of cultural impact. What Ive represents for me is a vision of business as cultural contribution—not just financial output. It feels, in many ways, like something from another time.
The Mirror of Creation
"What we make stands testament to who we are.
It describes our values. It describes our preoccupations."
- Jony Ive
There is a disarming simplicity to this statement, yet it carries profound implications. Every product we create contains within it a reflection of our priorities, our compromises, our attention. When we interact with truly great objects, we sense a convergence of intention and execution—a through-line of care that extends from conception to completion.
The original Macintosh wasn't just a technological breakthrough; it was a manifesto. It embodied a particular worldview: that computing should be accessible, humane, even joyful. Its creators weren't merely shipping a product - a computer - they were attempting to shift humanity's relationship with technology. The device itself was inseparable from this ambition.
Today's products rarely carry such weight. They optimize for engagement rather than enhancement. They collect data rather than create possibilities. They reflect a different set of values—values that prioritize extraction over expression.
The Invisible Thread
Ive reflected on what inspired him as a professional: the early Macintosh team, who, as he put it, were “original thinkers with clear values” and “obsessed with people and culture.” What moved him wasn’t just their talent—it was the integrity of their approach. Their shared values quietly shaped everything they made. And that way of working deeply influenced Ive himself.
As a young company, Jobs and his team could have focused on what was possible or profitable. But he pushed for ideas others saw as too ambitious—because he wasn’t optimizing for efficiency; he was aiming for impact. Their technical decisions were guided by a vision of how technology could amplify human capability.
This expansive vision has largely disappeared from Silicon Valley's operational framework. Today's tech companies still deploy the language of purpose, but it often feels retrofitted to business models that prioritize growth metrics above all else. The result is a kind of conceptual thinness—products that function but don't resonate, that solve problems without addressing deeper needs.
The Feeling of Care
“You can design to meet a price point and hit a schedule—or you can try to design something that moves the species forward. I always had a very clear sense of the latter.”
—Jony Ive
You can feel the difference, Ive insisted, between products built with genuine care for the human experience and those built primarily to satisfy business imperatives. This distinction cannot be faked. It lives in the grain of the object itself—in the thoughtfulness of its interactions, the coherence of its design language, the integrity of its materials.
At their best, great products don’t dominate your attention—they support your life. The original Macintosh had this quality. So did the early iPhone. These weren’t designed to trap you—they were built to empower you (Unfortunately, that balance didn’t last. The iPhone stopped being just a tool and became a tether. It began shaping us more than we shaped it).
Most digital products today were born in that second wave. They announce themselves constantly. They interrupt. They extract. They are optimized for engagement, not enhancement—for capturing attention, not earning it.
The Slow Drift
A poignant part of Ive's reflection came when he described Silicon Valley's cultural shift. The erosion wasn't sudden or dramatic. It happened incrementally, through a thousand small compromises that, in aggregate, transformed the industry's relationship with its own work.
It’s in the design of infinite scroll. The prioritization of engagement metrics over user well-being. The quiet shift from users to data points. Each change felt small—until the industry’s compass had shifted entirely.
The early tech pioneers operated with a sense of principled service. They believed they were advancing human capability, not just capturing market share. This wasn't naive idealism; it was the foundation of their business philosophy. They competed fiercely, but underneath that competition was a shared conviction that technology should enhance human potential.
Today's tech industry maintains the superficial language of this tradition while often abandoning its substance. "Changing the world" has become a marketing slogan rather than a governing principle. The result is a strange disconnect—companies that talk about impact while measuring only reach, that promise transformation while delivering transaction.
The Path Forward
If we want another Apple—another company capable of creating products that transform how we live and work—we will not find it by optimizing growth metrics or fine-tuning engagement algorithms. We will find it only by recovering what Ive and his colleagues understood: that business itself can be an act of cultural contribution, not just economic extraction.
This isn't about nostalgia. It's about recognizing that the greatest companies have always been founded on something more substantive than financial engineering. They have been expressions of particular values, particular visions of what technology can and should be.
The gap between this understanding and today's prevailing business culture helps explain why, despite all our technical advancement, we see fewer and fewer products that genuinely move us—that feel like they were created by people who cared deeply about both their craft and its human consequences.
Silicon Valley doesn't need another Apple. It needs to rediscover the principles that made Apple possible: a commitment to cultural contribution over mere extraction, to meaningful creation over mere optimization. Until it does, the industry will continue to produce companies that scale without resonating, that capture attention without enhancing capability, that generate profits without creating lasting value.
The question isn't whether we can build the next Apple. The question is whether we remember why we should want to.
If helping your teams create with meaning, this is what I talk about. In my keynotes, I help leaders and organizations reframe mistakes—not as setbacks, but as catalysts for innovation. Curious to explore how this could help your team? Let’s talk: info [at] theartian.com
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Nir
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