NYT| 外刊精读（1）

如今苹果为何让人失望？

The Steve Jobs Theater on Apple’s spendy new campus in Cupertino, Calif., is a majestic temple to pomp. An ethereal glass-and-marble cylinder set high on a serene hill, the venue feels like the architectural manifestation of the Apple co-founder’s famous “reality-distortion field.” It is an edifice meant to recall those moments when Mr. Jobs, smirking joyfully, would bound up to the stage, teasingly pull a black shroud off some new invention and instantly alter your picture of the future.

And so it was meant to go once more last week, when Apple invited journalists and celebrities to an event billed as “a Think Different production.”

Some different thinking did seem in order. Since becoming the first trillion-dollar corporation last summer, Apple has battled a souring assessment on Wall Street. The iPhone is the most profitable product in the history of business, but more than a decade after its debut, pretty much everyone on the planet who can afford one already has one, and many customers see little reason to upgrade.

So now, instead of selling better stuff to more people, Apple’s new plan is to sell more stuff to the same people. “Today is going to be a very different kind of event,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, taking the stage.

It was not. From start to finish, Apple’s affair was a brushed-aluminum homage to sameness — a parade of services that start-ups and big rivals had done earlier, polished with an Apple-y sheen of design and marketing. Among other offerings, Apple showed off a service for subscribing to news on your phone and a credit card, and it offered vague details about a still-in-development TV service involving Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey （who are not exactly edgy or up-and-coming）.

None of these efforts look terrible. Some, like the news service, might be handy. Yet they are all so trifling and derivative. As the analyst Ben Thompson noted, Apple’s crush of me-too announcements falls far short of Mr. Jobs’s goal of putting “a ding in the universe.” As I watched Apple’s event, I felt the future shrink a little. In its gilded middle age, Apple is turning into something like a digital athleisure brand, stamping out countless upscale accessories for customers who love its one big thing, a company that has lost sight of the universe and is content merely to put a ding in your pocketbook.

In an ordinary time, such an ordinary corporate vision might be fine. But these aren’t ordinary times, and Apple is no ordinary company. Here is a corporation with the resources of an empire, the mass devotion of a religion and the operational capacity of a war machine. Under Mr. Cook, Apple has cannily avoided every minefield in tech and politics over the past couple of years, winning a windfall from President Trump’s tax cut, avoiding getting burned in his trade war — all while enjoying the loyalty of every moneyed hipster and suburbanite on earth.