I think it got stale when Ive didn't have Jobs as a counterpart. Or vice versa. Once Cook & Ive didn't seem to have the same relationship, things stopped working. But I agree that Apple is doing quite well again with the M1-era Macs.
The software was significantly more polished in the Jobs era. I don't know why, because it's not like it's something Jobs obsessed over more than Cook. Apple just doesn't seem to have "good software" in their DNA.
Except the Mac would have died if it wasn't for Jobs return.
I remember those failed attempts to rejuvenate the Mac OS and not having any significant Macs sales on my country besides a single importer company on the capital.
Software issues among all of Apple's products have become much more numerous in recent years. I don't want to get down voted for putting the blame on Tim Cook, but I do not believe he has been a positive influence on the quality of their software.
It's sad, really. My first Mac was a late 2009 MacBook Pro. I remember craving the machine before I finally splurged. After I bought it, I used nothing but a Mac for the next 6 years of my life. Those 6 years were some of the happiest times I've ever had using a computer. Everything worked flawlessly. The build quality of the machines I bought was pristine.
At the end of those 6 years my MacBook was getting buggier with each update, as was my iPhone. I ended up buying a Surface Book. I'm back on Windows for the first time since XP, and while I'm sure I made the right decision, I can't help look back 5 years ago and think that maybe the golden age is over.
Jobs famously pared the Macs down to laptop/desktop and pro/consumer to create a grid of four platforms (of course this predates phones, watches, ipads...).
I suspect Jobs was over-correcting because he had to, because Apple was floundering. But the model matrix for the Macs are not a lot bigger than Job's 2 x 2 minimalist stable.
It went really well for clone manufacturers and Apple with quick infusion of cash they needed. It didn't end well because Jobs came in and put an end to it, fearing cannibalisation - at a point in time when their product was Mac, more or less. Now it's different. A lot different.
I agree with that. (I'm a long time Mac user all the way back to the 68k era.) It's just that ever since Steve's return, there seems to be a subtle disregard for the history of the platform and a willing forgetfulness of the R&D effort expended by the company over the last few decades...
IIRC the whole relationship got off to a bad start when Intel failed to deliver 64 bit (x86-64) in time for the first MacBook Pros. Apple had to ship OSX on 32 bit only to replace it a year later when Core 2 Duo came out.
Given Tim Cook's known zeal for delivery I hesitate to think how bad things must have become later on.
I have a different view regarding the John Sculley era. It was under Sculley where the Mac transformed from a sealed box to an expandable machine when the Mac II was released in 1987. Under the Sculley era there were many impressive Macs, such as the Macintosh SE/30, the Mac Color Classic, the Mac IIfx, the Macintosh Portable, the Macintosh Quadra, and the original PowerBook. In my opinion, the hardware was wonderful during the Sculley era. What dogged Apple from the latter half of the Sculley era until the purchase of NeXT during the Gil Amelio era was the inability of Apple to buckle down and ship a successor to the classic Mac OS (look up the history of Pink/Taligent and Copland). Apple's hardware didn't start suffering until 1995 when Apple had a disastrous year (the infamous PowerBook 5300 exploding battery scandal, the much maligned Performa 5200/6200 series, Apple's inability to release an OS that successfully competed against Windows 95, and the rise of Mac clones that ended up hurting Apple's marketshare).
The John Sculley era was largely one of investment in the Mac, although the unfortunate thing was the failure of the Pink/Taligent project, which could have given Apple an advanced operating system as early as, say, 1993 or 1994 had development gone better. Unfortunately I can't say the same about the Tim Cook era, where the Mac has transformed from a platform dedicated to creative professionals, power users and developers to a platform that caters solely to casual users and doesn't provide the performance, upgradeability, and expandability that long-time Mac users need. Also, under Tim Cook the Mac has increasingly deviated from the longstanding Apple Human Interface Guidelines that made the Mac such a pleasure to use all these years. While the Mac experience is still miles ahead of Windows and many Linux desktops, it's increasingly not the same as it used to be.
They had sustained them for close to 20 years before that point of "edge of bankruptcy", and they soon grew into a great business post the colored Ive's iMac. It's only the iPod's phenomenal success that obscured their Mac unit, but the iMac and Powerbooks were already a big success when Jobs returned.
As for the "edge of bankruptcy" was due to a series of bad business decisions, not the Mac line itself. If anything, the Mac line and Mac customers was the only thing they still had going for them. It was the OS that was old and tired in an era of good enough Windows, Apple wasting resources in Copland, Newton and other endeavors without results, the blunder of allowing clones that ate into their Mac lunch, and so on.
I've always attributed that user-tradition as a Jobs byproduct; he was a unifying force for the user experience and that role hasn't been filled since his passing. There are lots of hands involved with many projects, but it feels there's no point-person or champion on this for many years.
From going back to dongle hell of the 90's via USB-C, to the conflicting marketization of the macOS products, the connectors proliferating on the iOS standards(now lightning and USB C!), the conflating of iOS apps into macOS space, dropping magsafe; it doesn't feel very user friendly when you start getting into the details.
For OS X, the decline began under Jobs with 10.7. I'd always assumed it was simply that Apple no longer cared about computers; in Jobs' own words, “milk the Macintosh for all it's worth and get busy on the next great thing.”
As I recall, they were doing pretty well, aside from the court case. There seems to be a demand for a generic machine running OSX even if it doesn't "deliver an experience like Apple".
Apple probably felt that they got burned by the last time they allowed Mac clones and ended up losing a lot of money. (I don't think that was the cloners' fault, but I wouldn't bother trying to explain that to Jobs.)
The context I was thinking of was the iPad. At the time it was really thought it was completely going to kneecap the portable Mac line (even Apple believed it and invested more in iPad development than Mac development). It was only after Jobs left our mortal coil that the iPad really stagnated in comparison to what the hardware itself was capable of.
Apple struggles with executing many things in parallel and doing them all well. That’s why we tend to see the most prioritized products getting all the love and the others languishing. I’m talking from the software perspective, where the changes in recent years and stability issues are way too painful and disruptive. Catalyst apps are third class citizens on the Mac. They cannot even be classified as Mac apps. Catalina is still plagued with different kinds of data loss issues (mail, iDevice integration, etc.).
Of course, Mac OS X/OS X/macOS has had glaring issues in almost every release, but the lack of design chops and inadequate testing across the software arena (like it was shown in one of the security issues exposed by Google Project Zero) are telling examples of Tim Cook being fine as a breadth guy but not a details guy or a focused guy who can drive his teams to double down on all the software quality issues.
Apple's problems stem from Jobs not Cook. Apple's downfall was set in motion when they decided to turn their back on the technical community and the entrepreneurial community and made products that were more and more mere consumer appliances instead of computers.
Although in numbers, techies and entrepreneurs are a minor customer of Apple, they have disproportionate influence and are trend setters.
I remember back in 2001, there was a lot of chatter among techies about OSX. It was all about how it came with a BSD licensed core, good terminal, a standard Unix environment, Perl out of the box, etc.
It was a fresh alternative to Windows which was a lot more open than iOS of today but still pushed software development in non standard and monopolistic directions compared to the Unix based OSX.
Thus began the rise of OSX. It was a credible technical platform and at the same time it would spawn some killer consumer features, a nice and fast simplified desktop environment and well integrated innovative consumer accessories such as the iPod. Sure Apple pretty much always limited their OS to their own hardware, but it didn't matter to techies as long as they played well with others by staying mostly compatible with Unix standards. Entrepreneurs were also free to sell software for it directly to their customers. You could buy a subscription on the devices without giving 30% of the revenues to Apple.
I tried to run a Perl script on my mac the other day and a perl module wouldn't compile because of some error with PowerPC compiler flags. PowerPC! Clearly Perl on OSX has not been maintained for a while.
I'm currently writing a subscription web service along with apps and the 30% cut to Apple is a dilemma for management.
Amazon doesn't let just anyone run apps on their Kindle devices either. However Amazon devices are meant to be pure consumption devices mostly for Amazon products whereas Apple wants iOS to be the main computing platform of the 'post PC era'. Pure consumption devices have a much more limited market than computing platforms. When Apple locks up their platform they are limiting themselves to this much smaller market.
No developer wants their computing platform to be locked down, non standard and encumbered by huge revenue levies.
The software development and entrepreneurial world needed a credible alternative thus came Android. None of them wanted another closed, non standard, fee encumbered platform thus failed, Palm, BB and Windows Phone and eventually Apple.
It's pretty ironic to review Jobs' goals to "Make the next great personal computer operating system", since they precisely highlight some of the biggest issues with MacOS today. Apple is no longer shipping a "single OS", they're maintaining a series of progressive LTS releases that seems to be a middle-ground nobody can appreciate. MacOS's metaphorical "plumbing" is far from state-of-the-art, too: the networking APIs are continuing to be gimped, while the userspace continues to be overhauled in confusing, highly abstracted ways. Oh, and killer graphics? MacOS has the least-supported, most esoteric graphics interface available today. I've heard people say that it's easier to write graphics code for the Nintendo Switch, because at least that doesn't force you to use Metal.
All for all, I wholeheartedly agree with what's being said here. After Mojave was released, I get the feeling that Apple started to panic, and began some unnecessary design regressions that really drove people like me away. They started gutting 32-bit apps and libraries, bloating one of the most space-efficient UIs on the market, and undoing a lot of the personalization options that I loved MacOS for. One day, I hope that Apple can put this all aside and make a genuinely great computer. They're holding a lot of the cards, but I still can't recommend the M1 to others yet, much less integrate it into my own professional workflow.
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