For years now, I’ve been saying the same thing when it comes to the world’s biggest, most famous, hippest, and yes, probably most overhyped tech brand.

You see, I was old enough back in the early ’90s — the dark ages for the darling of Cupertino, California — to remember how its products went from new and exciting to bland, repetitive, and downright boring.

Boring isn’t something Apple can afford to be ever. It’s not what it was built on. It’s not the spiritual essence instilled in the company’s DNA and left behind as a legacy by its creator and god, Steve Jobs.

And yet boring was exactly what it became when it turned one great idea, the Macintosh, into a product line numbering in the dozens but varying only in size and shape… with astronomical pricing being another constant.

Of course, Steve was gone by the time ads like this were appearing in magazines…

Fired by a board that knew better… a board that eventually ran the company to within three months of bankruptcy.

It took the return of the creator and god to bring the company back — a feat Steve accomplished by giving us iTunes, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.

Everything New is Old Again

History, however, does tend to repeat when we repeat the same mistakes. 

Unfortunately, the only mistake Apple made this time was letting Steve leave for a second time. It wasn’t a mistake they made intentionally.

Even Apple, with its 12-figure bank account, wasn’t powerful enough to halt the forces of nature that took Steve away permanently.

With its creative inspiration gone, Apple went back to its old tricks. The iPhone and the iPad, its two flagship products, were both great when they were first introduced.

Today, they’re still great but largely unchanged… except, of course, in size, shape, and computing power.

The same pattern that brought this once-great company to its knees a quarter-century ago is now starting to play out once more.

Go into an Apple store, and you’ll find dozens of products. All bright and shiny and pretty as could be, they all share the same design DNA, just as their ancestors, the early ’90s line of Macs, did.

For a while, this worked just fine. However, as Apple grew from the floundering tech disaster of the mid-’90s towards the half-a-trillion-dollar giant it is today, another problem started to surface.

There just weren’t enough people left to buy enough Apple stuff to keep the momentum going.

It was a theoretical idea — sort of like peak oil was before people realized that yes, oil actually was a finite resource — but an unavoidable one nonetheless.

A Chink in the Armor… Or the First Sign of Systemic Collapse?

This week, it appears as if the theoretical has now finally stepped into the physical.

Apple missed its iPhone sales projections, causing shares of the stock to slide faster and harder than at any point in the last two years.

Why the shortfall? Well, some industry analysts think that the iPhone 6s just wasn’t a major enough improvement over the 6 to justify an upgrade for existing users.

Sadly for Apple, capturing new users isn’t as easy as it once was. They simply don’t make people fast enough… not those who can afford iPhones, anyway.

So if this were 1997 and a seasoned, experienced, and tempered but no less brilliant Steve Jobs was on the way back, what would be in store for Apple?

Well, new products, for one. And I don’t just mean a watch that, while cool and neat as a wearable, isn’t a standalone device (it requires an iPhone) and doesn’t really do anything that new.

I mean something substantively different… Just as different as the first iPod was from the desktop PCs Apple was cranking out in the 1990s.

Not Half Measures, But a Whole New Direction

For a company that’s as massive as Apple, however, another trinket or even series of trinkets won’t fit the bill.

Which is part of the reason a major product line expansion, with something on the order of an electric car, is now all the talk in the world of consumer tech.

Is that the case, though? Is an iCar in our future? And if so, will it be enough to let this giant keep growing?

It may be too early to tell, but things don’t look particularly great.

The last news from Cupertino regarding “Project Titan,” which is rumored to be the code-name for the company’s electric car development program, was that a hiring freeze had been imposed after chief designer Jony Ive expressed displeasure with the team’s progress.

If you think this sounds like a good moment for Steve Jobs to step in, kick some ass, and get thing back on track, trust me, you’re not alone.

But reality being what it is, this giant may have just found its clay feet. And when the rest of the carcass comes crashing down, it will not be a pretty sight — for Apple shareholders or for the market as a whole.

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