> It wasn't obvious at the time, but I think in retrospect the case can be made that Apple's ability to innovate effectively (both in terms of time and quality) died with Jobs.
Oh stop. Apple's effectiveness was entirely a product of its time. You had designers building the Zune and calling it competitive but really there was no competition for the products Apple was building for a market that was screaming for a better balance of form vs function.
This picture of Apple's innovation includes no part of OSX, which was always an OS that was technically capable but superbly messy and extremely behind on the times.
Innovate effectively? For a long time of Jobs' tenure, Cocoa was being supported on BOTH Objective-C and Java, and when they ripped it out, they actually chose Objective-C, not Java, as their platform of choice (in retrospect: wow), only to have to build yet another platform (Swift) just a few years later (Swift of course, based off of MacRuby, which they initially tried to build Cocoa on top of internally, so I hear).
Innovate maybe, but effectively no. There is a whole host of broken, abandoned, and outright bad decisionmaking in the OS layer at Apple. Apple's success has everything to do with their success with industrial design, UX design & marketing, and just a bit of being at the right place at the right time.
IMO this interpretation fits the timeline much more cleanly: Apple was churning out the same iPhones and Macbooks long before Jobs left, just as they had been before with the iPod. The butterfly switches, the thin above all else, that's all part of Apple's MO dating back years. Lack of FM radio on the iPods, lack of IR sensors on their early phones, removal of removable batteries, headphone jacks, USB-A, etc, is all part of the DNA. A $5000 screen is not surprising to anyone who saw the Powermacs of the last generation. Butterfly switches look an awful lot like bendy iPhones, which look an awful lot like DOA Powerbooks.
I'm really not sure what part of this is new post-Jobs, but I have a good feeling this is a great case study of confirmation bias. If you believe Jobs was a one-of-a-kind irreplaceable visionary who was single handedly responsible for Apple's success, then you have no choice but to interpret any action Apple makes post-visionary as a failure, otherwise you were wrong about the one-of-a-kind irreplaceable visionary.
And it would be a pretty big blow to most to be wrong about Steve Jobs.
The other interpretation, of course, is that Jobs was not a magical visionary, just a smart guy who made a couple of right decisions, got lucky on lots of others, while still getting it wrong on plenty of occasionss (Macintosh TV cough Apple TV cough Apple TV2), just like most fallible humans.
Apple only kept Java around because coming from Pascal and C++ background they were unsure how the Apple developer community would welcome Objective-C.
When they saw the community had no issue embracing Objective-C that is when they dropped the Java bridge, QT for Java and eventually their own JVM.
Chris Lattner never speaks about MacRuby on his interviews, rather how, like clang before it, Swift started as a side project before being shown to upper management.
According to his interviews, many of the Objective-C 2.0 and later improvements were already a kind of slow roadmap into Swift.
Yeah, but Objective-C 3.0 would have been a much better path than Swift. It would have allowed easier upgrading to existing code instead of mass rewrites, which always bring their own bugs (and that's ignoring the bugs in Swift itself).
Oh stop. Apple's effectiveness was entirely a product of its time. You had designers building the Zune and calling it competitive but really there was no competition for the products Apple was building for a market that was screaming for a better balance of form vs function.
This picture of Apple's innovation includes no part of OSX, which was always an OS that was technically capable but superbly messy and extremely behind on the times.
Innovate effectively? For a long time of Jobs' tenure, Cocoa was being supported on BOTH Objective-C and Java, and when they ripped it out, they actually chose Objective-C, not Java, as their platform of choice (in retrospect: wow), only to have to build yet another platform (Swift) just a few years later (Swift of course, based off of MacRuby, which they initially tried to build Cocoa on top of internally, so I hear).
Innovate maybe, but effectively no. There is a whole host of broken, abandoned, and outright bad decisionmaking in the OS layer at Apple. Apple's success has everything to do with their success with industrial design, UX design & marketing, and just a bit of being at the right place at the right time.
IMO this interpretation fits the timeline much more cleanly: Apple was churning out the same iPhones and Macbooks long before Jobs left, just as they had been before with the iPod. The butterfly switches, the thin above all else, that's all part of Apple's MO dating back years. Lack of FM radio on the iPods, lack of IR sensors on their early phones, removal of removable batteries, headphone jacks, USB-A, etc, is all part of the DNA. A $5000 screen is not surprising to anyone who saw the Powermacs of the last generation. Butterfly switches look an awful lot like bendy iPhones, which look an awful lot like DOA Powerbooks.
I'm really not sure what part of this is new post-Jobs, but I have a good feeling this is a great case study of confirmation bias. If you believe Jobs was a one-of-a-kind irreplaceable visionary who was single handedly responsible for Apple's success, then you have no choice but to interpret any action Apple makes post-visionary as a failure, otherwise you were wrong about the one-of-a-kind irreplaceable visionary.
And it would be a pretty big blow to most to be wrong about Steve Jobs.
The other interpretation, of course, is that Jobs was not a magical visionary, just a smart guy who made a couple of right decisions, got lucky on lots of others, while still getting it wrong on plenty of occasionss (Macintosh TV cough Apple TV cough Apple TV2), just like most fallible humans.