[jaems33]

I hate to say it, but I agree.

The commercials aren't the only red flag for me.

The recent releases (MacBook Pro Retina, Mountain Lion, rumored iPhone 5, iOS6) haven't thrilled me at all and I have been looking forward to the MBPR and iPhone5 for a long time.

[achompas]

> The recent releases (MacBook Pro Retina, Mountain Lion, rumored iPhone 5, iOS6) haven't thrilled me at all and I have been looking forward to the MBPR and iPhone5 for a long time.

All of these have been released so recently (less than a year since Jobs passed away) that it's likely he played a large part in their design. Further, you're talking about (1) a 15" laptop that beats almost everything else on the market, (2) a minor version bump of OS X, and (3 & 4) two products that haven't been released yet.

I'm as interested in Apple, post-Jobs as everyone else, but the arguments I've seen so far look too forced. The true test will occur over the next 2-3 years--not just the last 9 months.

EDIT: I like snowwrestler's point: this is all "hindsight bias."

EDIT 2: I've fallen into this trap myself at some points, especially with some of these commercials. But these are just single data points. We shouldn't fall into the trap of overemphasizing single data points.

[kokey]

I think the next big product or two (iPhone 5, or the 'other thing' that is possibly a TV) is what will prove whether Apple will stay strongly in the running or fade away as quickly as it did when Jobs was pushed out of the company. I personally think it'll be good for a while longer than that, but the company will need to find new leadership focus after that.

[taligent]

Exactly. This is what makes this all so hilarious.

Steve Jobs said himself that he was directly involved in the next 2-3 years worth of upcoming products. So "this would never have happened under Steve Jobs" can partly be blamed on him.

[masklinn]

That sounds like a decision looking for a justification. You weren't supposed to be thrilled by ML just as you weren't supposed to be thrilled by SL. Were you thrilled by Lion? I was not, I still consider it a huge pile of shit. Hell, I'm way more thrilled about ML because SceneKit, that may make me put my trusty SL to rest, it's got way more potential than fucking skeumorphic iCal or "linen all the things" (which I see in the line of the old stripes, that's going to age just as nicely and in 5 years everybody will agree it was a moronic idea).

MBPR, if you were looking forward to it I fail to see why you wouldn't be thrilled by it, it's the biggest (positive) change in Apple's laptops since the 2nd gen Air.

As for iOS 6, how is it any more underwhelming than iOS 5? Remember when you were thrilled about the "deep twitter integration"? Or that Apple had finally added a notification system which didn't blow goats? Yeah me neither.

As to the ads... all the Siri ads I've seen so far make me facepalm.

[wonderyak]

Just because I think it needs to be said - I, for one, was thrilled with Snow Leopard. I think it is the best OSX version by far and away.

[Caballera]

I just watched the new Apple ads and think they are fun. I don't feel they were directed at me. But I do feel for non-Apple and non-tech people they could raise the question, who are these Geniuses and perhaps they'll look deeper into it and visit a Apple Store.

[grecy]

> The MacBook Pro Retina haven't thrilled me at all and I have been looking forward to the MBPR for a long time.

Wow, you have some high expectations.

What exactly were you looking for?

[radley]

The RMBP is fine as long as your focus is text, so it's great for programmers & business people.

But Mac has been the mainstay of graphic designers who predominantly use Creative Suite, and the RMBP is quite useless without a 2nd, non-retina monitor.

[huhtenberg]

It's not even that.

Now that Jobs's gone turning iPad sideways with the taskbar open causes app icons to overlap. Sometimes, not always, but that's just the kind of "sloppy" that just didn't exist in Apple products a year ago. They are slipping. I will give them a couple of years tops before they are back at the average product polish levels.

[kalleboo]

iOS has been super buggy ever since iOS 5. Has nothing to do with Jobs' death.

[taligent]

Always fascinating watching this kind of delusion in action.

This complete rewriting of history so that every Apple product before Jobs death had some extraordinary level of perfection that somehow doesn't exist anymore. When in actual fact the quicker release cycles for Apple software is resulting in less bugs.

[jonursenbach]

Keep in mind that the products you mentioned have been in development long before Jobs passed away, so his passing shouldn't have had any effect on them.

Wait a few years when Jobs' product roadmap runs out and we'll see what they're doing and if it's still up to snuff.

[aggie]

Jobs was visionary, not clairvoyant. I'm sure he did everything he could to keep Apple on his track as long as possible, but there's only so much that can be planned years in advance.

I imagine Tim Cook was groomed as a Jobs zombie of sorts. He's an manufacturing/operations guy, not a creative product manager. Eventually Jobs' roadmap will run its course and Tim Cook will be replaced or exposed as an automaton. It seems to be showing already.

[Macha]

The rMBP was the first Mac that I would seriously consider buying for myself. I haven't, because I can't afford to buy a new laptop just because a shiny new one came out, but if I had been looking for a laptop at that time, I would have bought it. A couple of my non-Apple using tech friends had the same opinion.

Then again, I'm not exactly Apple's core customer base, as I have no love for OS X and would probably have just installed Windows (for gaming) and Linux on it, but it's the first time in years where their computer hardware has distinguished itself, rather than selling on the basis of the OS.

[ruswick]

I agree that there isn't much that Apple has done lately that has been truly groundbreaking. The last time that I was really surprised by Apple was the iPhone 4. That said, it's totally unreasonable to assert that Apple is declining because Steve is gone simply because their products haven't "thrilled" you or because they ran a bad line of ads.

The Retina MBP is an excellent machine with one of the best screens to ever be put on a consumer-grade device. It might not blow everyone's mind, but it is at least as interesting of a product as the scores of laptops that were put out under Steve.

Mountain Lion isn't groundbreaking by design. It's an iteration on Lion, and so it's unreasonable to expect a massive amount of new features. The iPhone 5 and iOS6 haven't been released yet and in the case of the former the rumors are so vague and unsubstantiated that it's categorically ludicrous for you to pass judgement yet.

Lastly, I have to ask why the amount of "thrill" that a product brings matters anyway. Most consumers don't want to be thrilled. They want to buy a computer, and that's it. Apple is successful not because they thrill people, but because they make good products. The Retina MBP and Mountain Lion are still good products.

I think the biggest annoyance in the post-Jobs era is that every imperfect action that Apple does is automatically passed off as a result of Steve being gone. Steve wasn't perfect, either. We need only look to the iTunes phone, Ping or the button-less iPod Shuffle. Apple has never been perfect, and the post-Jobs era is no different.

[slovette]

"I have to ask why the amount of "thrill" that a product brings matters anyway."

Marketing. Hype and thrill, I would argue, is a direct result of Apple's financial position today. The everyday consumer doesn't understand the technical qualifications nor do they care. They want nice, shiny and new. Start with that and build a stable high-quality product to match and it could be candy canes you're selling, you're gonna be successful. Packaging is probably the most important part of a product. It entices thrill and envy, the very primitive emotion that makes you click the usually brightest button on the page: "Buy".

[rdl]

While this may be against NDA, iOS 6 Beta is actually quite nice. If they can get real buy in from non-Apple iOS developers for iCloud, it will be a big win, but IMO it all comes down to iCloud (and probably the long term premium for the Apple ecosystem depends primarily on iCloud).

The security features in ML were critically necessary to keep OSX viable for business and professional use. 10.7 is vastly less secure than a well managed corporate Win 7 machine, and maybe even worse out of the box. (Linux probably covers the whole range of less or more secure based on exact distribution and features, but isn't terribly relevant for desktops). Which made the Google no-windows policy from a few years ago pretty funny. ML is now at parity with Win 7 out of the box, but still probably weaker in an enterprise setting due to lack of management tools.

[brown9-2]

Seems unfair to judge Apple based on rumored specs for the "iPhone 5".

[FreshCode]

It feels like someone inside Cupertino has been saying, "OK, it looks good!" more than they have been saying "No."

[rimantas]

If I ask you what would they need to have to thrill you, would you be able to answer? Built in toaster? Cure for cancer? We don't expect luxury cars to thrill us, why do we need that from electronics? It's a sign of maturity and I will take solid no-thrills product over gimmicky one any day.

[pizza]

The trend could just be a fluke. Only time will tell...

[aprendo]

The rMBP, widely hailed as the best Mac since forever? You seem to be the only person on the planet disappointed by it (besides people disappointed in the glued-in battery – but that’s nothing new).

Besides, there are a few years to go until we run out of Steve Jobs products.

(I think this whole discussion is utterly pointless at this point. Look at Apple’s stock in ten years and you will know the impact of Jobs. I have my doubts that it will be possible to say much meaningful now.)

[Retric]

I hate the rMBP. Apple calls it an 'PRO' laptop but it's basically just an 'AIR' with a higher resolution display. It's got no optical drive so you can't swap in an extra HDD while keeping the SSD for the OS / programs. It's limited to 8 or 16GB of ram and you can't upgrade it after the fact. It's also got way to few connectors no HDMI/DVI or even VGA. At the same time they also killed of the old MB line entirely.

[Gigablah]

I cancelled my rMBP order when I tried it out in the store and saw the screen lag in Safari for myself.