[joe_inferno]

"…this is going to be seen as where Apple's golden age began to wane."

I heard that kind of talk when Steve died.

[baddox]

I think a lot of people would still argue that. I've seen a lot of talk in the press about how Cook is still under pressure for not releasing any revolutionary new products after Jobs' immediate pipeline.

[gareim]

Yes, it's definitely easy to cry doom, haha. But what have we seen since Jobs? Iterations of successful product lines. Faster, thinner, better battery life in general. But where's THE AppleTV that the media has been rumoring about for years? Or the wearables that grab headlines every day?

I'm sure there were plenty of products (AppleTV, smartwatch) in the pipeline before Jobs passed away. The question is, outside of those long-rumored about products, what next? This purchase of Beats just seems like a bad omen of acquisition rather than invention.

Maybe I'm wrong and the Apple-Beats combination will create a new product that changes how we look at headphones. Maybe I'm right and Apple is losing their vision. Only time tells and either way, it'll be interesting to look back on these crazy decades.

[gnaffle]

Then again, what did we see before the iPhone launch? Not much more than incremental improvements to Macs and iPods.

We'll see next week what they'll have to announce.