Apple's corporate culture has a variety of things that I would find hard to imagine not suppressing their ability to hire and retain the best; I'm sure others have a better idea than I, but the #1 thing staring us in the face is that software is not respected.
It's not that black and white. No-one is suggesting or implying that Apple throws some money at HR and Monday morning comes around and they're sitting down a new multi-hundred person engineering team like magic.
But at this point, OS X/macOS improvement has been in obvious decline (since 10.6? 10.8?) for _several years_.
No, Apple can't just magic an engineering team out of thin air.
Apple can, however, create engineering teams given several years of it being a pressing priority. They were able to for iOS, for watchOS, etc.
But therein lies the rub - with every month that goes by, it's clear that to call it a "pressing priority" to Apple would be to give it an importance that they clearly don't feel it has.
The question is, what is Apple's priority right now? The latest iPhone and Apple Watch models are incremental upgrades, and in the case of the iPhone, everyone expected a redesign (and Apple had two years to make that happen, but they either chose not to, or failed). macOS or whatever they call it now hasn't changed much in several years, as you pointed out. The Mac Pro is stagnant. The Mac Mini is stagnant. The new Macbook Pro model has the touch bar, after several years of sameness.
The only recent Apple products that are a notable upgrade from their previous versions are the Apple TV with Siri, and potentially the touch bar Macbook Pro. That's all I can think of since the release of the iPhone 6 in 2014. I guess you could throw in the giant iPad Pro too, but I've never actually seen one outside of an Apple Store, so I don't know if they sell that well.
I hope Apple has some exciting products lined up for 2017, because the past few years have been incremental at best.
Pretty much the only thing that didn't change on the iPhone in the latest rev was the form factor. Apple is also very well known for continual incremental upgrades. Yes, I'm going to quote Gruber:
In every regard, from performance to battery life to camera image quality to haptic feedback to water resistance to wide color gamut displays to sound quality from the speakers, the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus are impressive year-over-year improvements over the 6S/6S Plus, and stunning improvements over the two- and three-year old iPhone 6 and 5S — which are the models most people considering the new iPhones will be upgrading from.
https://daringfireball.net/2016/09/the_iphones_7
Is the lack of a form factor change in the iPhone 7 make you think the iPhone is not (still) a priority for Apple?
Frankly, John Gruber is a poster boy for rationalization of Apple's mistakes. He's like a dog that gets kicked and keeps coming back to its owner. If the iPhones were exploding instead of Galaxy Notes, Gruber would have defended Apple. If Apple decides to release smallpox in 2017 instead of a new iPhone, Gruber will eventually come around to Apple's side, like he always does.
At what point do you approach a near-perfect design? Look at the other phones out there, pretty much mimicking Apple's lead (with some exceptions, granted. The Samsung wrap-around screen is pretty cool). The whole attitude of "Apple isn't innovating fast enough, but I don't have any ideas as to what they might come up with, but I want something new and shiny" gets old. For me, I'd like to see a return to something like the 4s (I have small hands), but I'm okay with the 6. I'd also like a more camera-like camera, as I have some difficulty lining up the lens with the subject as the lens isn't centered on the body. I'm used to a DLSR. I don't take a lot of pictures, so this isn't a big deal for me, and a lot of people seem perfectly happy with the current set up. A lot of other phones have similar lens positions.
What aspects of the iPhone form factor would you like changed?
That's not what I'm arguing. I don't care if the insides of the iPhone 7 are 100% different than the insides of the iPhone 6S.
The bottom line is that Apple created an expectation, and failed to meet it. The particular expectation in the case of the iPhone was for an external redesign, but that's not really what matters. What matters is that Apple created an expectation and failed to meet it. That's not what good businesses do. Either they don't care, which is bad, or they can't meet the expectation, which is worse.
Looking back at the history of iPhone releases:
Source: http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobil...
- iPhone 1 June 2007
- iPhone 3G July 2008 (13 months)
- iPhone 4 June 2010 (23 months)
- iPhone 5 Sept 2012 (27 months)
- iPhone 6 Sept 2014 (24 months)
There have been 3 cycles of the bienniel updates, the majority. Honest question, is that alone enough to set expectations?
Should they iterate even when they really don't have any idea how to improve it? Iterate for iteration's sake? Wouldn't that mean at least meaningless cost at best, and possibly decrease the value of the design?
Given that the iPhone is a major source of Apple revenue, this is an important question. How much can we read into Apple's prospects for the future based on the lack of a significant form factor update with the iPhone 7?
By the way, I agree with you on the Mac Pro and the Mac mini. I'd really like to see strong updates in these areas. However, I don't know what the market looks like for these form factors these days. Of the two, I'm only interested in a mini. I have been for quite a while (it would replace a PowerPC model, FFS) yet I haven't pulled the trigger, so am I really in the market? Same with pro-level software such as Final Cut and Aperture (pretty significant when it came out).