With the VisionPro hype already dead (maybe forever?), bad or tasteless iPad ads, purposeless updates to iPad, Apple dropping their car project, and reaching out to OpenAI or Google for AI services … it certainly feels like it to me. They’ve at least run into their limitations recently however much they want to find the “next iPhone”.
With the VisionPro, I always thought it’d flop and so predicted that it’d be the end for Cook. I’m still holding onto that prediction.
Apple has been like this for ages now though. They succeeded despite of it, not because of it. What OP is suggesting (I think) is that there’s less positives and those historically outweighed Apple’s anti-consumer practices.
They weren’t like this under Jobs.
They were, they just weren’t massive enough for it to be as obvious or egregious as it is now.
I mean, I remember buying my first Macbook in 2007 and only speccing it with 1gb of RAM because what they were charging to double it to 2gb was eye-watering compared to what I paid online. Same with storage. They only get away with it now because they solder everything on.
But while I never like to be all “Steve would never…” I do wonder whether they’d have walked a more fine line if he was still around. Some of the shit they’re pulling now feels downright hostile, where his approach was to make Apple the more friendly of the computer companies.
Well yeah it was a moot point when they were upgradeable.
And you could argue that they were only upgradeable because they hadn’t at that point, figured out how to make it not.
Certainly soldering chips to the motherboard wasn’t an unknown technology to apple in 2007?
I’m not sure. IIRC pricing structure that pushes you to upgrade to high tier hardware was there under Jobs as well. And they’d solder RAM if it was a thing back then too - they always purposefully gimped base models.