Apple is at the first major cross-roads since the passing of its late co-founder Steve Jobs 12
years ago. It finds itself still largely dependent on the product lines and businesses that Jobs left behind. Its Vision Pro has received mixed reviews on launch, while it is also facing several other headwinds including a major lawsuit against what the DOJ claims are its anticompetitive practices.
People need to stop holding Jobs up as some deity of tech. He was a marketing and hype man that was in the right place at the right time and knew how to take advantage of that luck. Nothing more, nothing less. It is equally possible his leadership style would have squandered the opportunities Apple has had since his death had it been him and not Cook in charge.
By any metric other than “line must always go up” Apple is doing just fine.
“Oh no, they haven’t found another multi hundred billion dollar product to release since the iPhone, even though there are no signs that the iPhone won’t continue to be a very profitable business for years and years to come…better go dig up Steve jobs, shove a stick up his back, magic his corpse back to life, and beg him to save the shareholders profit margins”, the horror.
He was very much the Elon Musk of his times, and it’s very possible he would have gone down the same route of extremist views and decisions that completely failed because of his egoism.
He died because he didn’t listen to his doctor’s advice. That is somewhat extreme.
He believed in the teachings of a 20th century cultist who said you excreted mucus based on dietary choices, and therefore didn’t have to worry about health or bathing unless you ate poorly. (Stinky dude who also made an 8 yr old cry for eating a cheeseburger).
Wish everyone health but guy was as extreme as it gets in regards to being an asshole. Denied his daughter, settled child support days before taking Apple into the public market, etc.
Had pancreatitis because of his diet. A diet in which he thought would magically avoid creating body odor.
It turned into cancer. He lucked out that it was a rare form of treatable pancreatic cancer with a 90% survival rate 5 years out. Which is abnormal as most forms of pancreatic are essentially a death sentence. Survival rate past 3 years is under 10% for the more common variants.
Stuck to his diet anyway. Ignored his doctors. Died to an illness he had a 90% chance of beating because he knew better.
And to top it all off, it didn’t help his body odour at all. He stank.
Kinda crazy, because we figured out deodorant a while ago.
To be fair, we saw formerly what Apple without jobs did, it was a failure. So one might wonder when the new Apple might run out. The catch being that the iPhone, app store, and iTunes are all indefinite money machines, except maybe iPhone one day. So they had a steak of ever increasingly wildly successful products that culminated in the iPhone and then no mind blowing follow-up, but they don’t need one. Folks may like the narrative that Jobs death coincided with their last big product category though
We also saw Jobs without Apple, also pretty much a failure.
NeXT was successful at being an application for the position of CEO at apple.
NeXT was a mediocre BSD front end and a few interesting Objective-C libraries. Apple’s board of directors pretty much crawled back to Jobs hat in hand after the disasters of Sculley and Spindler.