[sugarpimpdorsey]

You forgot they broke iTunes Home Sharing on iOS some years ago and have refused to fix it.

Takes over a minute to connect now. (Allegedly the fault of a new, yet horribly inefficient, parser that chokes on large libraries which worked fine a decade ago on phones with half the CPU and RAM.)

Once connected, it won't play DRM-protected tracks I PAID FOR, says I'm not authorized.

I ended up having to break the DRM because Apple can't be bothered to include a functioning music player anymore.

An "iPod with touch controls" is no longer part of iPhone.

An ad-filled music subscription consumption software is.

[seec]

Apple has stopped caring and producing local/personal software for a while now. Which is absolutely brain dead because that was the primary reason to buy their hardware in the first place. Why spend the premium for a Mac if you are going to run some shitty cloud software anyway.

For now the illusion is maintained because they are dominating with their chips, but that won't last forever and the competition is almost caught up (it's not that relevant for non mobile computers anyway).

iTunes had it's flaw but at least it was a very useful software and it worked quite well (at some point I had a library of over 100k tracks); the replacement while trying to keep some of the fundamentals is a joke in comparison.

[pjmlp]

In general their products weren't that great, hence why they almost went bankrupt.

They only played nice during the time they were getting back into the game

[seec]

I think you are at least partly right. The period after Jobs left was pretty bad. The Mac was too expensive and not providing enough advantages to be worthwhile. But the work that happened at NeXT basically enabled the Mac to make a comeback (macOS is basically a variant of the NeXT OS).

And indeed this is the period when they did play quite nice but I don't think it was only to get back in the game. I think Steve Jobs really had a goal, a "higher-purpose" towards offering elegant, powerful and easy to use computing devices. If that wasn't true, he would never had started NeXT in the first place, this endeavor nearly bankrupted him, so it wasn't just about greed.

But nowadays the hardware products are quite good (often best in class) but they are way too greedy and very negligent towards what actually matters, the software (having good hardware that cannot run any good software is rather useless).

[pjmlp]

To see the mindset of Steve at NeXT there are a few biographies on that subject, e.g. "Steve Jobs & the Next Big Thing".

Also to note there was the other alternative reality where Apple acquired Be instead.

[pwg]

It sounds like they are well on their way down the "Enshittification" [1] path. Eventually they will enshittify sufficiently that the illusion will shatter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

[seec]

It looks like it but it's quite sad.

We need another commercial desktop OS to compete with Microsoft. The problem is Apple is shooting itself in the foot with their greed on hardware pricing.

This is the reasons many heavy/high-duty software never makes it to the Mac, it's just too expensive to outfit everyone with performant enough Mac computers. It's pretty sad because they don't even need the money, and clearly they have shown in the past 10 years that they are completely unable to do anything better with the surplus money. It's just self-defeating greed, they could eat a lot of Microsoft market share where it matters but instead they try to push an even more locked-down approach with the iPadOS.