I say this as someone who hasn't worked there, but has a large number of friends and peers who currently do or have in recent years.
We’re talking about the company that shipped the storage bug?
I vehemently disagree with this. I think Cook's logistics and business-focused goals are, if not diametrically opposed to Job's product obsession, at the very least orthogonal to it. Almost everything about Apple the product, over the past 15 years, has either coasted (e.g. stayed at par with the rest of the industry) or gotten worse. The one exception is arguably Apple Silicon (and I'm sure their board is acutely aware of it).
I started writing out a list of Apple's products and it was simply [x device] in [y category] is either the best or consistently rated in the top of that category.
Safari, a web browser, randomly stops being able to connect to the Internet (other apps can).
I also think most products apple makes are in the top tier of their respective category, if not the best.
Every time I see someone here dismiss this success as status symbol-oriented marketing, I just shake my head at how much that signals a deep misunderstanding of how the world works or what most of the human race wants in a product. Nobody wants the Sony WF-1000XM5 earbuds because Sony doesn't even give a shit enough to give them a name people can remember. Nobody wants Bose earbuds because nobody wants to open a buggy spyware-laden app to turn on/off noise cancelling. These products are destined to fail because they make simple things complicated, untrustworthy, bothersome.
People are whole-experience buyers, not single-feature buyers, and the experience nearly every person on earth wants is the magical 'I put it in and it works' experience. What people want is all the upside of the magic of technology and none of the cognitive overhead associated with it. The specific choices that make up a product offering - aka the product marketing - reflect the inherent desire of the customer. Any luxury / status symbol aspects come AFTER that.
Like what? In the true wireless camp, the Sony's are much less comfortable (and more expensive), the Bose are not as good (and more expensive)...
There's cheaper options, sure, but you're sacrificing build, ANC, battery life, etc.
I'm not just being snarky — I don't think it's reasonable to say the profit-maximizing service-oriented Apple is the best possible version of itself without losing its values of personal computing and individual empowerment.
Besides some changes to macOS and removing the ability to upgrade I've been pretty happy with Apple.
The Steamdeck was a breath of fresh air, the whole Steam frames and cube could have been a big deal.
I would disagree here. Apple actually did lose their values, or they are in the process of doing so.
Ads in App Store results, Ads in Maps (coming soon!), constant upsells and pushes of subscriptions and services, forced upgrade of Numbers/Pages/Keynote with annoying nags that can't be turned off, things are getting worse.
Also, when the word "values" is mentioned, one cannot forget about Tim Cook's donations to Trump and his overall support of Trump and cozying up to him.
But no matter what definition you take Siri was not the first AI. It's a classical cases of Apple fans thinking Apple invented everything because they saw it first in an Apple product...
If you think about AI in broad terms, it goes back to the 1970's where any skill computers gained originally thought as only human was called AI. Like playing chess.
If you think about the recent use of AI = LLM chatbots/gen AI, Siri wasn't an LLM.
This is a classic case of thinking that inventing something before others is all that matters, while ignoring that finding a mass market use-case for an existing technology is also important.
Such as Think Different, where you don't need to comply with the standard ways of doing things?
From a Steve Jobs interview in relation to this statement:
> When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your job is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.
> That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is - everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
(Via Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different)
I couldn't think of a company to whose hardware "your job is just to live your life inside [someone else's] world" applies more, though maybe that's because Oracle doesn't make consumer hardware products
Edit: I should probably add that this isn't meant as a purely negative statement: many people want to hand over digital control and have someone else be bothered with keeping the hardware running and curating what software they're allowed to run. It's not me, and it's not what Steve Jobs said Apple was about, but it's not that I don't understand why someone's grandma would choose it
I could not disagree more. Apple has become increasingly just another tech company shipping products that are great but not insanely so.
The level of insanely great coming out of Apple has been in steady and constant decline since Jobs’ death.
The “I wish Steve were still around so he could have vetoed this” that I get have been steadily increasing on a y/y basis for the last 5-10 years.
I’m not talking about big obvious macro stuff like the Airpods Max being super mid or how much my face hurts after wearing the ridiculously heavy Vision Pro for a while, but the constant subscription nags for $5 after buying a $1500 phone and a million other little paper cuts, culminating lately in the polished turd of an OS that is 26.x. Apple is the most un-Apple it has ever been in its history. Their contempt for their users is now palpable.