Simply Speaking: When buybacks beat breakthroughs

For most of its glorious life history, Apple lived by a simple creed - build great products and the numbers will follow.

Steve Jobs - a difficult genius- personified that belief, shunning dividends and buybacks, insisting that innovation and not financial engineering was Apple’s true currency.

Under Tim Cook, the formula flipped.

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Cook turned Apple into the most sophisticated capital allocator in technology. Since 2012, the company has returned more than $650 billion to shareholders in dividends and buybacks. Warren Buffett, who never invested a penny in Apple during the Jobs era , suddenly saw in Cook’s Apple a finance company he could bet on.

The results were indeed spectacular. Apple became the world’s first $3 trillion company, a colossus whose supply-chain discipline and operational excellence were unmatched.

Yet somewhere in this pivot, the brand story shifted. Apple’s aura was built on game changing invention. Over the last decade, the company’s launches became more iterative, more expensive, less magical. The iPhone’s design plateaued even as its price soared past $1,000. Finance was clearly in the driver’s seat.

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Nowhere is that tension clearer than in artificial intelligence. Apple was first with a mainstream voice assistant when it launched Siri in 2011. But Siri stagnated, accuracy lagged, and rivals raced ahead. By the time ChatGPT ignited the AI frenzy in 2022, Apple looked years behind.

The company’s answer, branded “Apple Intelligence,” is deliberately cautious. Essentially geared to on-device processing for privacy, a proprietary “private cloud compute,” and an opt-in partnership with OpenAI this is frugal fare. On the face of it, this is Apple at its most Apple being privacy-obsessed, design-driven, refusing to chase flashy demos.

But perception is a ruthless judge. The contextual, screen-aware Siri demoed last year has been delayed to 2026. Reports suggest Apple may need Google’s Gemini to plug obvious gaps. The richest company in the world suddenly looks like it is renting AI magic from others.

Apple’s defense is pragmatic. Its own researchers recently published ‘The Illusion of Thinking’, a study showing that so-called reasoning AIs collapse when faced with modestly complex tasks. The industry may talk of digital superintelligence, but Apple insists the tech isn’t yet reliable enough to entrust with everyday life.

From Cupertino’s vantage point, caution looks like wisdom even though the context was its evident inability.

More importantly , brands are not judged on wisdom. They are judged on wonder. Apple’s competitive edge has always been the sense that the future lived inside its devices. That mythology carried the iPhone to cultural dominance.

If consumers begin to feel that the future of AI lives elsewhere whether on Android, or in rival ecosystems, then loyalty can erode quickly. Motorola learned this lesson at Nokia’s hands. Nokia learned it at Apple’s.

Could an AI-native device do to Apple what the iPhone once did to Nokia? Not yet. Humane’s Ai Pin has collapsed, Rabbit’s R1 is a curiosity, and the only AI hardware with traction is Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses. This plays in Apple’s natural domain of design and ecosystem integration. If only it may deliver the goods.

The bigger risk for Apple is not a sudden collapse but a slow bleed of relevance, as daily AI experiences feel fresher outside its walled garden.

Coming back to the brand. Apple under Jobs was a product company whose brand created value. Apple under Cook is a financial machine whose brand now risks coasting on past glory.

The balance sheet is impregnable; the ecosystem still unmatched. But in AI, Apple must prove it is more than a vessel for other companies’ intelligence.

The brand test is stark. Can Apple marry its financial discipline with the daring needed to lead in the next wave?

Or will it be remembered as the company that perfected shareholder returns just as the future slipped from its hands?

The epitaph may read “A Buyback a Day Took Apple Away”

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Shubhranshu Singh is a business leader , cultural strategist and columnist. He was named as one of the 50 most influential global CMOs for 2025 by Forbes. He serves as the APAC representative on the EffieLIONS foundation board.