Naval's death prophecy: Apple is dead, SaaS is next

Naval Ravikant discussed the judgment that "pure software is no longer worth investing in" on a podcast, exploring the repricing of tech companies in the AI era. This article is based on Mustufa Khan's X post "Naval Ravikant: Apple is dead, SaaS is next, you have 18 months," compiled and reorganized by BlockBeats. (Context: The "1995 moment" of the crypto world: History is repeating itself, but the script has changed.) (Background: When SaaS moats are filled by AI, the three remaining paths for software companies.) Market changes imply a revaluation for both large companies and startups. The risk for Apple is that if the interaction layer is taken over by AI agents, the premium on software experience it has long relied on may be eroded; the risk for SaaS companies is that functionality itself is becoming increasingly difficult to serve as a moat. At the same time, the democratization of software production capabilities may bring about a new wave of individual creators and small-team companies. For commoditized software, this is a dangerous era; for founders with distribution, taste, data, and industry depth, this may also be an unprecedented window of opportunity. Apple is dead; the market just hasn't finished the paperwork yet. This is not a sensationalist judgment, but a structural summary of industry changes over the past six months. Naval Ravikant's remarks on a podcast last week almost confirmed this. As one of the most patient investors in the tech circle and one of the sharpest capital allocators of the past two decades, he gave an extremely clear conclusion for the entire software industry: pure software is no longer worth investing in. For founders, the real question is not whether you agree with this judgment, but whether you still have 18 months to complete a transformation before the market fully realizes it. Background: Naval founded AngelList and is an early investor in Twitter, Uber, Notion, and about 200 other companies that have shaped the tech landscape over the past decade. He rarely makes judgments lightly, but once he speaks, it is often cited repeatedly for years. It is precisely for this reason that when he says "pure software is not worth investing in," it is not a casual comment, but a capital allocator's repricing of the industry cycle. The following is his judgment and what it means for all entrepreneurs. Apple will not go bankrupt, and it won't disappear from your pocket next year. The collapse Naval speaks of is not operational, but economic. The underlying fulcrum of Apple's $3 trillion market cap is essentially one thing: using superior software experience to support high-end hardware premiums. Once this experience advantage no longer holds, Apple will become a better-made Samsung. And this is already happening. The interaction layer is being commoditized. In the next 24 months, the way most people open apps will change: they will no longer actively enter individual Apps, but will talk directly to AI agents, which will generate the required interfaces in real-time. Apple's carefully constructed App Store, human-computer interaction norms, design aesthetics, and ecosystem moats will rapidly lose their original value once the interface itself can be generated in real-time by AI on any device. What is Apple's response to this change? Licensing from Google and introducing Gemini. This means that the company that has always regarded "controlling the experience layer" as its core identity is outsourcing the experience layer to its strongest competitor. After its bet on self-developed AI failed, Apple is using external models to patch internal strategic gaps. This is almost an accelerated replay of the "Microsoft in the post-mobile era" script. Microsoft missed the mobile era, not because it lacked resources, but because it was unwilling to build a touch-native operating system from scratch. Its dominance in the old era led it to mistakenly believe that the old paradigm would continue. By the time Microsoft truly accepted reality, Apple had already won the next decade. Today, Microsoft is still a $3 trillion company, but Windows has lost the consumer war it could have won. Apple is currently making the same mistake in the AI wave: it still believes that its hardware-first DNA can carry it through the agent era. But this path is destined to be difficult. Once the operating system and interaction interface are commoditized, Apple's profit margins will be compressed to the level of hardware commodities. And hardware premiums are precisely the core profit source supporting Apple's entire business empire. At that point, structural revenue and valuation revaluation will be hard to avoid. You can certainly continue to hold Apple stock, but don't treat it as a growth stock anymore. This most valuable hardware company in history is about to be forced to answer a brutal question: if there is no software moat, how much is its hardware actually worth? For founders, the harder part to accept is