Hmm, you could be right. It could be I was fooled into believing that Apple was still the cool company that I originally knew, back in the 1980s. Then it really was cool.
So when did Apple actually cross over into badness? Or whatever-ness would make running ads about rebels a deliberate imposture? Before Steve came back? Between then and now?
They were always about the control, starting from the Mac. The Apple ][e was what I cut my teeth on, from a programming perspective. It was a marvelous machine! And you could do anything on it, because there was BASIC and an assembler (after all, what else could one possibly need?)
I saw my first Mac in the store in 1984, just before I graduated high school, and I loved it on sight. The cute little face! The crisp graphics! I had precisely zero dollars, but I looked into a developer's kit. There was exactly one. Apple sold it. It was $1200 or something - an incredibly high bar. Unattainable for me, of course, but even at the tender age of 17 I had the impression that couldn't bode well for the Mac.
The IBM PC wasn't nearly as attractive, but within a year of its release there was software to do anything you wanted, and the Mac still didn't have anything to speak of, except for what the big boys had written for it.
So my answer: Apple balances Jobs yang with Woz yin. And lately, there's been no Woz yin. It's all about controlling the experience - a media thing. They talk about being rebels, but it's the rebelliousness of, say, Twilight.
I'd say it happened at the point where the iPod gained mass-market dominance. It's hard to be cool when you're a market leader, and Apple first rose to market-leader-status with the iPod. Everything else - the iPhone, the iPad, the increased popularity of Mac and OSX - follows from that.
I'd peg it at 2004/2005 with the huge mass market success of the iPod and the Intel switch. That's the point where you couldn't feel sorry for Apple anymore or think of them as anything less than a major industry player. To me that's still pretty cool but I can see your point too. It's certainly less romantic. Apple pre-2001 was basically a good ole fashion tragedy story. Apple pre-2004 was still a feel good diversity trumps adversity -- return of the king type of story. Apple post-2004 is just a really successful but unique business story.
So when did Apple actually cross over into badness? Or whatever-ness would make running ads about rebels a deliberate imposture? Before Steve came back? Between then and now?