Steve is rolling over in his grave on this.
There's also a strange contradiction in these millions of people always complaining how Jobs would hate this or that, while essentially relying on the implied authority of the name!
If you all are capable of accurately predicting Steve Job's hypothetical opinions on all matters of design I wanna see some products you designed.
Apple[Jobs] produced a steady stream of industry game changers - original iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, even the MacBook Air. Plus supporting ecosystems and software, including Siri and iCloud. And business relationships - with music companies, movie companies, phone carriers, podcast creators, and app devs.
Apple[Cook] has acquired a mountain of cash, but product development has followed a consistent and predictable faster+thinner+more_expensive path.
No game changers. Not one. Watch is the closest thing to a new class of products, but it seems to be an Ive vanity project rather than something that really scratches a user itch that users didn't even know they had - which was the classic Jobs USP. (And - ironically - Watch isn't obviously a design classic.)
No big new ecosystems. No big new business relationships - unless you count far-from-leading options like ApplePay. No game changer products. Just endless glacial refinement.
Which is fine for generating mountains of cash, especially when you're selling into new markets like China.
But you can only keep producing reruns for so long before you lose momentum. And buyer good will isn't infinite.
Luckily for Apple, Windows is still an incredibly terrible POS as an OS, so the motivation to switch isn't there. Nor is MS ever likely to do better for cultural reasons.
And Linux is - Linux.
So Apple can continue on this path for five more years. Maybe ten. But when the next new thing appears - quantum, bio, plain old distributed, whatever the hell it is - Apple will be buried by it.
In other words, apple became boring, or at least has been boring for a while now.
I mean, the whole computer market is boring (tablets, phones, laptops, etc; all the same shit YoY), but its kind of hard to think that current-apple is going to break that trend, in the same way you wouldn't expect IBM or Xerox to. Don't know of any startups doing anything terribly interesting in the space, with any real chance of success.
Hell, at this point Microsoft might be the likeliest candidate: at least they're doing something with stuff like stupidly big conference room screens and maybe Hololens will do something cool.
Just because a conversation starts with a topic doesn’t mean it stays there.
And I probably wouldn't argue.
After all, when viewing the page on an iPad, I can't double-tap the top of the screen to make it go back to the beginning. Irony at its best.
Seriously - that's a great feature that I use multiple times per day, and Apple broke their own rule!
crosses self, prays for forgiveness
/lifestyle brand/
...that it's going to take a massive misstep of some kind to shake people off the platform. A handful of UI misfeatures won't do it, even if it would do it to users of other software and platforms.
At least - Apple will try it. But I don't think it's going to fly.
Part of the Apple Magic[tm] is conspicuous display of ownership. Rent-to-wear won't have the same cachet.