[sneak]

At the risk of going off topic: it feels like modern day Apple's priorities have shifted a lot from the Apple I grew up with, and many things they used to put front-and-center are falling by the wayside, out of neglect.

This isn't some generic "they don't care about the mac anymore" refrain, but I think there is a major sea change underway at the company. I think I will write soon about all of the hints, as I see them.

[nmstoker]

It seems like a company that has had many eras, so it's more subtle than the "good old days vs bad new focus" outlook. They're not afraid to reinvent themselves and sometimes that brings benefits and sometimes it ditches things people value. The sense of always moving towards a more and more "walled garden" view never fills me with delight and their UI ideals are nowhere near the 90s peak but they do get a heck of a lot of other things right.

[pyinstallwoes]

Oh for sure, I used to still think they had the design DNA but nope... it's definitely gone.

[r00fus]

It's almost as if, top-notch attention-to-detail doesn't scale automatically. Your company going from $4B->$40B->$400B->$2T is going to evolve culturally speaking, and it seems the effort to instill quality over the bottom $line is simply not possibly unless you choose to "leave money on the table".

I've noticed Apple does best PR wise when they do the latter, but it's hard for me to find examples of them doing that recently.

[sneak]

I have heard reports from current and former Apple staff of a brain drain in progress there.

It's not really a great place to work.

[undefined1]

what are they changing to?

[sneak]

It takes a huge amount of time and money to go to the insane lengths of Apple-ism that the company is known for.

I would venture to say that 80% of that doesn't translate to an increase in revenue. How many people bought a 2019 Mac Pro because of the speaker inside of it?

They're slowly but steadily trimming this "waste". The products are becoming merely "great", but no longer insanely so. The age of Sane Apple, perhaps.

Apple seems to be significantly more focused on building revenue (especially from services) than on building the most insanely great things that can possibly exist (with revenue as a side effect).

Another example is the fact that they introduced an end-to-end encrypted messaging system that rapidly became a widespread standard... then backdoored it for the FBI (via the non-end-to-end-encrypted iCloud Backup). That isn't so much an indicator of Apple's new values... except that the KB article about what is and isn't e2e encrypted in iCloud is designed to deliberately confuse and mislead people into thinking the situation is better than it is. That's very un-Apple, if you ask me.

Apple used to be "the computer for the rest of us", the pirate-flag-flyers. Now they primarily make Facebook/Candy Crush client hardware.

This comment is obviously a massive oversimplification, and I want to write properly on it in detail and at length soon.