Has Apple lost its mojo?

We've heard it before - Apple is not the same without Steve Jobs, it lacks a visionary, a revolutionary new product, and lada dada. Finally, someone will ask “Has Apple lost its mojo?” The question comes up almost every single time after Apple unveils its new products for the year.

This time, though, it’s clear that Apple is finally on its own. It will soon be two years since we lost Steve Jobs and whatever legacy of products he had left is now clearly released. Some speculated that the iPhone 5 was the last device to have his blessing, and now Tim Cook steers the Apple ship without guidance from the founder.

Let’s be clear - the market did not respond well to the new iPhones. Investors bemoaned with a collective ‘meh’ as Apple shares lost 2.3 points after the unveiling. A look at the rival camp shows a crazy variety of new ideas in all areas - 41-megapixel camera, snap-on camera lenses, large displays, 4K video capture, gigabytes of internal storage (expandable too!), and so on, and so on.

Moreover, Apple’s presentation was strange. Instead of the traditional focus on features, Apple started the iPhone 5S presentation with important, but geeky technical details - a new 64-bit chip, an additional M7 processor, and so on. The narrative that focused on functionality, apps and features suddenly changed to tech specs, an area where Apple will have a hard time running against Android. The narrative changed but its style did not - the whole presentation had a bitter after-taste of ‘been there, done that’ with the same pompous adjectives: “incredible”, “amazing” and “great”.

We still expect Apple to refresh its iPad lineup and introduce more new products next months, but with all this piling up we can’t help but once again ask this question: “Has Apple lost its mojo?” What do you think? And why?