I can't imagine someone presenting this "touchbar" bullspit to Jobs and not getting fired right away for such a dumb idea.
However, I think its becoming increasingly clear that Tim is "not a product development CEO". He is clearly, by far, probably one of the best COO's of the last 100 years (yes, I'm totally serious).
Apple would've never had its rebirth if not for the duo of Jobs as product visionary and Cook as executor. Sadly with Jobs passing, Apple is slowly sliding back to the confused, overlapping, inconsistent product catalog circa 1998.
[0] https://steveblank.com/2016/10/24/why-tim-cook-is-steve-ball...
But this is an example of the opposite. It'd be MORE confusing to have the only difference between the Air and the Pro be the Touch Bar, as the author suggests. How does the a touch bar make it "air?"
Tim Cook seems very competent business person, but has little vision on his own. He'll not risk the bottom line out of conviction like Jobs did.
Say what you want about Jobs but it seemed he was driven by a true sense of what users "should" want... the current leadership seems more to be about stock prices and retaining market share.
That's the conventional wisdom, but I dispute it. Ive and his team seem to have lost sight of some of the most basic principles that made the Mac great in the first place, like: it should be easy to tell what parts of the screen contain things that you can click on.
I'm still running Mavericks because I want buttons to look like buttons. Is that really too much to ask?
There may be some widgets that still look like buttons, but that's not what I'm talking about.
A lot of that drive was motivated by unpleasant personal narcissism - he seems to have had a strong need to feel cool, fun, empowered, and elegantly engineered himself.
But still - it pushed computing in directions that were really positive.
I have no idea what Cook is motivated by. I suspect not even Cook knows what Cook is motivated by.
He knows what Jobs looked like from the outside, and he has some ability to follow some of the moves. But it feels as if there's an aloof and maybe even slightly hostile detachment that Jobs never showed much evidence of.
Unless he has an epiphany and understands that user benefits matter more than manufacturing margins, Apple's future is going to look increasingly unexciting.
Big companies are so difficult to steer and be allowed to do so, and in an increasingly complex world it's only getting worse. I'm not sure it's feasible for much longer for a person to have the amount of power and charisma needed to steer a company off the beaten path. The ever increasing entropy of modern time complexity is not all encouraging.
a) Leadership is smart and actively dismissing portion of the market that's vocal but the largest one
b) Leadership is dumb and misjudged what their users want
c) Jonathan Ive has a lot of internal power and is dictating industrial design changes being disconnected to what their users want
d) They see PC sales slumping anyways and is targeting their efforts where they can earn the most money
e) Internal strife and confusion leading to a muddled product
f) Following an internal strategy road map and being so focused on it that they're discarding any signs that they're wrong
g) They're right and this will be a commercoal successful product... but they might lose their professional segment
h) We're all wrong, it will be a commercial and overall success. We're a loud minority
Jobs was good at what he focused on and other things tended to languish. For the last half decade, everyone has been focused on iOS. Cook seems to be getting the blame for basically doing roughly the same thing while not being Steve Jobs.