[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.