Apple is a company that is following the process they learned when Steve ran the show, without any clear understanding of why that process exists. As a result, they are unable to adapt to adapt that process to the external world while remaining true to the underlying principles.
What you see is the predictable result: ossified thinking couple with a rigid adherence to "what makes them great". all criticism falls on deaf ears and they'll just continue like this until Tim Cook is gone and they get a product guy back in the heal who can give Apple direction and heart.
Apple is a company that is following the process they learned when Steve ran the show, without any clear understanding of why that process exists
Apple created Apple University years before Steve died, to understand clearly why they became so successful. They even hired a top professor from an Ivy League university to run it.
Whatever ails Apple these days is not caused by them not understanding how they became great. It's caused by the lessons of the past not being applicable to the reality of today.
You cannot teach taste and vision. Apple giving up monitors is the clearest sign of that: it's the face of the computer, so much that novices confused it for the computer itself.
The Jobs-style answer was the all-in-one iMacs and the monitor-as-a-dock, a computer that wants to be seen. The Cook-style answer is to put somebody else's logo right on their product's display case. Madness.
For someone that was waiting for this hardware refresh to get a Macbook Pro and a new Cinema Display, I was surprised that the keyboard became less utilitarian and the display more-so.
Nope you don't get to pass the buck to "the world has changed". Nothing has changed. Power users are still there needing the best machines they can get. Apple is the one that has changed to cater to the lowest common denominator, this is a lack of understanding.
Please. Apple not catering to power users is not in any significant way what ails Apple today.
And Apple catering to what you describe as the lowest common denominator is what made them the largest company in the world. If that is a sickness, I wish I could be afflicted by it.
What changed was not so much the world (although it did), but Apple itself. Apple is now a huge company, but it still run as a small one, because that is what allowed them to different and let them to success. But there are reasons why no other large company is run like that, and the bigger Apple gets, the more those reasons begin to compound.
It's not about courage or innovation for innovation's sake, but about making the right decisions. Sometimes that means being boring.
The 2013 Mac Pro is a perfect example of Apple badly solving a problem that wasn't there to begin with. What did Apple smoke? Circular GPUs that can't be upgraded? No PCIe slots or storage space that forces you to use expensive TB noisy boxes with cable all over your desk?
Apple also fired the closest thing they had to a second Jobs, Scott Forstall — the man largely responsible for iOS — apparently for being difficult to work with (!).
What you see is the predictable result: ossified thinking couple with a rigid adherence to "what makes them great". all criticism falls on deaf ears and they'll just continue like this until Tim Cook is gone and they get a product guy back in the heal who can give Apple direction and heart.