Apple doesn’t backtrack the way Steve Jobs did. That’s a problem.

When Apple Senior VP and noted dad-joke-maker Craig Federighi announced Monday that iTunes would soon add access to Mail and Safari, a handful of “whoops” from the audience suggested some Apple fans were taking him seriously. 

That’s not surprising, given that these new moves came as part of a litany of features iTunes has added over the years. The whole point of the joke was that it sounds like something Apple would do.

“Nailed it!” Federighi told the crowd of developers at WWDC in San Jose before revealing that, in fact, the functionality of iTunes would now be split among three apps new to the Mac (Music, Podcasts, and TV). 

The thing is, this moment of supposed levity was more telling about the state of Apple today than Federighi may have realized. He was poking fun at iTunes bloat, marking the first time Apple has attacked one its own products on stage since Steve Jobs lambasted MobileMe in 2008. But Federighi was doing so in a trolling, mealy-mouthed way. We got none of the explanation for Apple’s direction-shifting that Jobs — for all his famous intransigence — was always keen to offer. 

Apple is skating dangerously close to self-parody

This speaks to a wider problem with the world’s largest tech company today. It almost never backtracks. There are no failed experiments, so there is no beneficial course correction. Apologies are occasionally made, but offstage, in statement form. CEO Tim Cook and his team cannot ever be seen to have been wrong. 

Jobs may have been inflexible at first on matters such as the iPhone 4 Antennagate and MobileMe. As someone who tangled with him in the Silicon Valley press corps in the 2000s and often had him call me at home, I remember well that phase common in any Jobs backtracking: a shouted “You’re an idiot!” But he cared about how Apple products were seen, withdrawing those that didn’t work (RIP Mac Cube), and he always wanted to update us on his evolving philosophy. Like any true entrepreneur, he treated failed experiments as a badge of honor. 

For years after it was junked, Jobs would use his first online subscription service as a punchline. “Now you might be saying, why should I believe [Apple]? They’re the ones who brought me MobileMe!” he said to laughter and cheers in 2011, introducing iCloud. “It wasn’t our finest hour, let me just say that. But we learned a lot.”

Apple under Cook, meanwhile, is skating dangerously close to self-parody. The funniest joke on stage yesterday wasn’t intentional like Federighi’s puns and japes. It was when Apple revealed that the monitor stand for the new Mac Pro would cost $999. 

A thousand bucks for a piece of metal! There weren’t whoops for that, but appalled gasps, even among this audience of Apple developers, the friendliest possible crowd in the world. The reaction has been described by some other attendees as “booing,” but I wouldn’t say it went quite that far — more like “a sh*t-ton of disgruntled murmuring.” (Judge for yourself here.) 

Good luck getting Apple to ever acknowledge that a thousand-dollar monitor stand is price-gouging. “Steve Jobs wouldn’t have done that” isn’t a game I like to play very often. Still, I believe the founder was well aware of how far was too far, and of what would get ridiculed in the media. He never would have launched a product like that at a price like that in the first place.

It doesn’t speak well to the question of whether Apple realizes why its iPhone sales have slowed in recent years. I doubt there’s even internal acknowledgement that users have balked at spending more than $1,000 on the too-confusing iPhone X series. Let alone: Is anyone addressing the question of whether the company will ever again offer at least one new phone with Touch ID rather than Face ID, or even — whisper it low — an iPhone with a headphone jack? Multiple articles that laud the iPhone 6S as Apple’s last great mobile device still continue to attract readers. Apple doesn’t get it, however, and the 6S is now one model away from not being supported in the latest iOS update. 

More troublingly, Apple doesn’t acknowledge when there are serious security problems in its midst. Just before Tim Cook took the stage Monday, Wired published a piece about a disturbing Mac OS bug that allows hackers to click through security prompts invisibly, giving them all kinds of access to your private stuff. As Apple confidently informed us how much it values our privacy, here was an exploit based on the fact that the Mac grants a surprising amount of access to apps like VLC and Steam. How long can this sort of behavior go on before disaster strikes?

Apple had no comment on the story, of course. Anyone working in tech journalism is depressingly used to writing those words: “Apple did not respond to a request for comment.” The company’s reps are uniformly nice, friendly, and helpful folks in general, but come to them with the slightest piece of bad news and they shut down like a bank teller’s window. At such moments, most will say that you can’t even mention the fact that you talked to them — even if they said nothing. It’s positively Orwellian.

As I read the Wired article, I happened to be watching (on my Apple TV 4K!) the hit HBO series Chernobyl, a show filled with Soviet stonewalling and denials of reality. Obviously, even the most egregious Mac bug is never going to have the impact of a nuclear meltdown. 

Still, I looked from Apple’s response to the screen, from the screen to Apple’s response, but already it was impossible to say which was which.