[WildUtah]

There has been amazing news from Apple since Steve died. There was the introduction two years before everyone else of the new blazing fast ARM AARCH 64. There was retina notebooks. There was the design and thumbprint reader tech on iPhone5.

But all of those were built and designed while Steve was leading Apple. They're like little amazing tech gifts from beyond the grave. It just takes a while to get to mass market.

There has been nothing amazing that started while Tim Cook has been running the place except raising margins by making base products less useful. Keeping the crippling 16GB limit on base iPhones for three extra years while camera images grew and grew was a bold move to drive up average selling price at the expense of customer happiness.

[TheOtherHobbes]

That's the fundamental Cook flaw. He prioritises short-term margins over long-term product farming and ecosystem management.

And he's very good at it. But it's a strategy that literally has a limited shelf life. First you get an exodus of early adopters and creative users, and eventually you get a catastrophic product failure that does a lot of damage to the brand.

Apple isn't there yet, but I'll be surprised if that failure hasn't happened by 2020.

Of course there may be One More Thing in the R&D labs to save the day. But Cook has a poor record with original R&D, so it's optimistic to assume that's going to be happen.

I'd love to be wrong about that, but the smoke signals suggest otherwise.

WWDC this year will be a turning point. The theme is the liberal arts and we'll see whether that means a return to pro hardware, or just some hand-wavey presentation rhetoric.