Instead, they should have stayed on the Straigth and Narrow of Quality - where they were for many years - where you move up to computing paradise by having fewer features but more time spent perfecting them.
I generally see complaints about advancement aimed at the hardware. Some are unreasonable standards, some are backlash to the idea of continuing to buy a new iphone every year or two as the differences shrink, but either way software feature spam is a bad response.
That's the bed they made themselves and lay in it willingly.
No one is forcing them to do huge yearly releases. No one is forcing them to do yearly releases. No one is forcing them to tie new features which are all software anyway to yearly releases (and in recent years actual features are shipping later and later after the announcement, so they are not really tied to releases either anymore).
The stock market can easily be taught anything. And Jobs didn't even care about stock market, or stock holders (Apple famously didn't even pay dividends for a very long time), or investors (regularly ignoring any and all calls and advice from the largest investors).
You need political will and taste to say a thousand nos to every yes. None of the senior citizens in charge of Apple have that.
Their software side however is riddled with issues, delayed or cancelled projects, meandering focus, unclear priorities. They are increasingly overpromising and underdelivering.
Their product side is neither here nor there. Vision Pro is a technically marvelous bust. iPhones rely on gimmicks because there's really nothing to differentiate them anymore. Peripherals (Homepod, AppleTV) are stagnant. iPad suddenly saw signs of life this year with good functionality updates after a decade of "we have no idea what to do with it, here are meaningless and confusing hardware updates". Macbooks have been completed as a product years ago (not that it's a bad thing), so, again, they are just randomly slapping non-sensical names on upgrades and chase thinness.
Oh. Thinness. That is literally the only feature that Apple is obsessed with. You can't build a product strategy on thinness alone.
They could easily wait longer between releasing devices. An M1 Macbook is still in 2025 a massive upgrade for anybody switching from PC - five years after release.
If Apple included fully fledged apps for photo editing and video editing, and maybe small business tools like invoicing, there would be no reason for any consumer in any segment to purchase anything other than a Mac.
They could, but then they wouldn't be a trillion dollar company. They'd be a mere $800bn company, at best. ;)
Not many consumers go out to buy an Apple device because the new one has been released. They go out to buy a new phone or new computer because their old one gave out and will just take the Apple device that is for sale.
That's also why Apple bothers to do the silent little spec-bump releases: it gives Business Leasing corporate buyers a new SKU to use to justify staying on the upgrade treadmill for their 10k devices for another cycle (rather than holding off for even a single cycle because "it's the same SKU.")
And then what? Mac users would buy some janky Acer with Windows 11 and bunch of preinstalled malware instead?
1. They've stopped starting small and instead started unrealistically large. Apple Intelligence is a great recent example.
2. They've stopped iterating with small improvements and features, and instead decided that "iterating" just means "pile on more features and change things".
And that's not excusable - every feature should have its maintainer who should know that a large framework update like Liquid Glass can break basically anything and should re-test the app under every scenario they could think of (and as "the maintainer" they should know all the scenarios) and push to fix any found bugs...
Also a company as big as Apple should eat its own dogfood and force their employees to use the beta versions to find as many bugs as they could... If every Apple employee used the beta version on their own personal computer before release I can't realistically imagine how the "Electron app slowing down Tahoe" issue wouldn't be discovered before global release...
Either everyone is worried about the consequences of failing to produce high quality work (including at the VP level, given they can allocate additional time/resources for feature baking) or optimizing whatever OKR/KPI the CEO is on about this quarter becomes a more reliable career move.
And once that happens (spiced with scale), the company is lost in the Forest of Trying to Design Effective OKRs.
yep. The attention to details is still there, it is just changed from polishing and curating details to creating a lot of small unpolished and uncalled for and thus very annoying details. From MBA POV there isn't much difference, and the latter even produces better KPIs.
Not entirely, though; there is joy and playfulness at the core of Liquid Glass. But delight is not that common, and refinement and focus are definitely lacking. They could have used more nos and fewer yeses.
We see what you did there!