Apple’s Diet of Worms

On a crisp April morning in 1521, the twenty-one-year-old Emperor Charles V entered the Bishop’s Palace in Worms. The weight of a continent rested on his adolescent shoulders, and he carried it with the stiff dignity of someone raised to believe history itself had chosen him. He wore black velvet trimmed in gold. Across from him stood Martin Luther, a monk with a monk’s haircut and a peasant’s accent, in simple robes. He had written things—dangerous things—and was now being asked to recant.

He didn’t.

That was the moment. The moment when conscience collided with empire. When rhetoric outran control. When a single friar split a thousand-year institution down its spine with the sharpened edge of conviction. Charles couldn’t believe it. He didn’t need to. Belief wasn’t the currency of emperors. Stability was. Obedience. Continuity. The structure held, until it didn’t. And when it broke, it didn’t matter how regal the embroidery. What mattered was that the monk had a printing press, and the Emperor had a bureaucracy.

Fast-forward five centuries and you’ll find another empire, dressed in brushed aluminum and spinning out keynote sermons with evangelical precision. Apple in 2025 wears its regalia well: it dominates the high-end smartphone market, commands one of the most powerful chip teams in history, and sits atop a cash mountain taller than most national economies. Its leadership speaks in calm, slow vowels about privacy, design, and services revenue. Its court is filled with loyal vassals—analysts, journalists, developers—who until recently would defend the crown even as it taxed them into submission.

But something’s changed. The cracks are visible now, to those who know where to look. The grand promises of Apple Intelligence have not materialized. Siri remains less a personal assistant than a confused concierge. Judges are calling out the company for contempt. Executives are contradicting each other under oath. The aura is thinning.

It’s not the mistakes that matter. Apple has made them before. The Newton, MobileMe, the butterfly keyboard. What matters is the posture. A company once defined by joyful provocation—by thinking different—is now defined by its defensiveness. Its leadership acts not like inventors but like stewards of a status quo. They protect margins like relics. They fear dilution. They optimize at the expense of surprise.

Charles V believed the Church could not err. Apple believes its operating procedures cannot be wrong. Both relied on closed systems enforced by powerful institutions—canon law or App Store guidelines, pick your poison. Both found themselves increasingly out of step with the forces swirling around them.

Apple’s fate isn’t sealed. It has the resources to adapt, the talent to reinvent, the reach to still shape the culture. But none of that matters if it won’t change its mind. Empires don’t fall because they run out of gold. They fall because they mistake orthodoxy for durability. Because they think the pageantry of power is the same as the legitimacy of it.

Luther stood before power and said no. Apple’s users are starting to do the same. The only question now is whether anyone in Cupertino is listening.