Any job candidate who claims to be an expert in more than one or two things throws up red flags for me immediately. (And I’d still challenge their knowledge of those one or two things.)
No kidding. I was working on a game for the Atari 800 in 1980 and got a floppy disk with a bunch of pirated games from a friend of mine that included a copy of my incomplete game! To this day I have no idea how that happened.
Sorry, but who cares? A guy makes a bad financial call VERY early on in a company’s lifetime because he has different priorities. Does anyone reading this not have their own story to tell about bad decisions that only hindsight could have prevented? Sure, in this case there’s a lot more money at stake, but who’s to say that if he had stayed, the company’s history wouldn’t have been written differently? Apple is where it is today because of Woz and Jobs initially, and then Jobs in the later years.
I would pay good money for a phone for my 84-year-old mother-in-law that has photo-based dialing and easy access to a ride service such as Uber or Lyft. That’s all she needs. As you point out, a smart phone is too small and too confusing with too many options.
It might be too much to ask as an interviewer, but it wouldn’t be too much to offer as a candidate. Sit there submissively and only give me what I ask and you might impress me with you skills. Be proactive and get me engaged over something I haven’t seen before or that I wouldn’t expect you to know and you have a shot at wowing me with your potential.
People don’t throw out technology until it’s obsolete for THEM. There are tiers of consumers across the world for whom obsolete is defined at different stages of functionality/performance/affordability/etc.
I did the same thing on whatever Mac I had at the time. (It was the pre-Jobs-comeback era when Apple was slowly running the Mac into the ground...kind of like now.) It really opened my eyes as to how fast the Mac hardware could be and how slow the Mac OS was.
I have a 2014 MBP and love it as much as you seem to love your 2012! When it comes time to replace it, I’ll probably look for a new or refurbished 2015 (the last model before the touch bar design) unless Apple does something significant to the current design to make it more appealing to power users.