Trying to Identify the Next Apple

The search for the next Apple tends to begin with a man on a stage explaining why his product is unlike anything that has existed before. Behind him is a presentation that looks remarkably like an Apple presentation. Apparently, the first step towards defining a new era is borrowing the typography of the previous one.

We look for familiar signs: an uncompromising founder, an elegant object, customers whose enthusiasm makes their relatives uncomfortable. These may accompany a great company. They are also available separately, and assembling them does not guarantee the result.

The more useful question is where a change in what is technically possible might finally become a change in what ordinary people can expect.

The achievement was making it come together

When Apple introduced the iPhone in January 2007, it presented a combination of phone, music player and internet device. The following year, the App Store gave developers a way to distribute software through the same product. Apple reported ten million application downloads during its opening weekend.

Those are company announcements, not an independent explanation of everything that followed. But they capture something important about the sequence. The device became more useful because other people could build things for it. Hardware, software and distribution reinforced one another.

My reading of Apple’s achievement is less about inventing every component than taking responsibility for how the components worked together. The customer could buy the result without becoming the project manager.

That is a promising place to look for another great company: somewhere the ingredients have improved dramatically while the experience of obtaining a useful result remains unnecessarily difficult.

Electricity is having that kind of moment

Energy is an obvious candidate, although it suffers from the presentational disadvantage that a transformer rarely looks good on a coffee table.

The underlying economics have changed. In its 2024 battery report, the International Energy Agency reported that average battery costs had fallen by 90% since 2010. IRENA’s analysis of renewable generation commissioned in 2024 found that 91% of new utility-scale renewable capacity produced electricity at a lower levelised cost than the cheapest new fossil-fuel alternative.

Neither figure means every household can obtain cheap, reliable electricity simply by ordering the correct equipment. Generation cost is not the retail bill. Storage, networks, financing and the timing of supply still matter.

That distinction may be where an important company emerges. Cheap components create possibilities; somebody still has to make the whole arrangement dependable. A household wanting predictable energy costs does not necessarily want to develop an interest in electricity-market settlement.

The opportunity is to turn improving technology into an ordinary service people can understand, afford and trust. The company that succeeds may initially resemble a rather obsessive installer.

The bottleneck might be the business

A technological improvement often makes another limitation more important. Generating electricity cheaply is less useful if connecting it takes too long or the network cannot accommodate it.

The IEA’s 2023 assessment of electricity grids estimated that meeting national climate goals would require adding or replacing eighty million kilometres of grids by 2040. That is a scenario-dependent requirement, not eighty million kilometres of guaranteed orders.

It does suggest that some consequential opportunities will involve equipment, construction and coordination rather than another consumer interface. The company defining an era may remove a constraint that allows thousands of other companies to grow.

ASML provides an existing example of that less visible importance. Its lithography equipment helps semiconductor manufacturers produce advanced chips. Its 2025 annual report describes dependence on specialised suppliers, including critical optics from Carl Zeiss SMT.

This is not the story of a solitary genius who became impatient with everybody else. It is an achievement involving expertise distributed across organisations and sustained over time. The product is impressive partly because so many difficult things have been made to cooperate.

The laboratory is only the beginning

Biomanufacturing offers another place to look. Making something work in a laboratory and making it reliably, economically and repeatedly are different accomplishments.

NIST’s account of the manufacturing “valley of death” describes the gap between promising research and successful production. Pilot processes, scale-up costs and the practical requirements of commercialisation can determine whether an idea becomes a product.

The next important company might therefore make a new material or biological process usable by other industries. Its defining achievement could be consistency rather than spectacle: delivering the same specification, at the necessary volume, without requiring the customer to participate in an ongoing scientific adventure.

This is easy to underrate because a breakthrough makes a better story than dependable manufacturing. Yet the second is what allows the first to change everyday life. Nobody buying an essential product wants to hear that the latest batch was intellectually fascinating.

A large problem is not a business model

There is a trap here. Once we start looking at energy, housing, water or health, the needs become so substantial that commercial success can seem inevitable.

It is not. A problem can be enormous because solving it requires difficult political choices, because the people benefiting cannot pay, or because responsibility is divided among institutions with incompatible incentives. The addressable market may turn out to be several departments waiting for one another to reply.

Housing illustrates the difficulty. The OECD identifies land scarcity, regulatory constraints and construction costs among the barriers to affordability. A better way to manufacture buildings may help without resolving permission to build them, access to land or the financing of a project.

An ambitious company needs to understand which part of the difficulty it can actually change. Otherwise, it has discovered a social need and mistaken it for a purchase order.

Where the next company comes from

These businesses may emerge wherever specialised knowledge meets the ability to manufacture, finance and deliver. That could be an industrial region with experienced suppliers, a university cluster or a company already serving an unglamorous market.

The geography matters because competence accumulates in places and relationships. Not every advantage can be recruited after the funding announcement. Sometimes the valuable person is the engineer who has spent fifteen years discovering why a promising process fails on humid Thursdays.

Nor must the company be entirely new. An existing manufacturer or service business might combine emerging capabilities more effectively than a start-up that first has to learn what its customers already know.

The important distinction is between possessing a technology and building an organisation capable of making that technology matter. Both are difficult. They are difficult in different ways.

Look for a new expectation

The companies that define an era change what feels normal. Something previously expensive, awkward or restricted becomes dependable enough that people organise their lives around it. Eventually, the old arrangement begins to look unreasonable.

That is the test I would use. Does this company merely demonstrate something impressive, or is it making a previously difficult outcome ordinary? Can it deliver repeatedly? Does its success make other useful activity possible?

None of those questions identifies a winner in advance. They do offer a better search than looking for someone sufficiently confident to describe himself as a visionary.

The next Apple may be working on something people currently regard as a utility, a manufacturing nuisance or an administrative ordeal. It may have no intention of selling you a beautiful object.

Somewhere, a team is trying to make an awkward process work reliably for the hundredth time. Elsewhere, somebody is rehearsing a launch presentation about changing everything. I would be interested in what the first group has finally stopped having to explain.