Why Apple desperately needs a new Steve Jobs

The Mac Observer‘s Bryan Chaffin writes about “how important Steve Jobs was to making Apple products insanely great.”

“He focused on the little details most people simply don’t see, don’t care about, or don’t bother to do anything about even if we do see them,” Chaffin writes. “This was always a huge part of what set Apple products off from the competition. Even if we didn’t know why they seemed so much better, the fact that they were better was inescapable.”

“In recent months, I’ve been feeling what I fear is Steve Jobs’s absence,” Chaffin writes. “From the worst security disaster in modern computing to ever-more frequent UI glitches, Apple seems to need that person who can obsess over the things the rest of us miss.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: First of all, Steve Jobs is irreplaceable, but someone with vision, taste and focus is what’s required here.

The magic of Steve Jobs was vision, focus on the products from the user’s point of view, fastidious attention to detail, and next-level marketing acumen.

As we’ve been warning for many years now.

Apple is not firing on all cylinders.

The quality has been slipping for years and the mistakes, bad designs, stupid decisions, product delays and worse have been piling up. Exactly, how do you so thoroughly fsck up your top-of-the-line Macintosh by “designing yourself into a thermal corner” while trying to prove that you can “still innovate, your ass” (and failing abysmally) and not be able to deliver a replacement for going on FOUR YEARS?! Even HP and/or Dell could do it in 4 weeks. ASUS could do it on 4 days. If anyone needs a stronger indication of the existence of a problem at Apple that stems from the very top, they’re batshit delusional.

So, when you produce a $300 coffee table book with 450 painstakingly shot photographs on “specially milled German paper with gilded matte silver edges, using eight color separations and low-ghost inks” and even trumpet that it “took more than eight years to create,” but you can’t make or even bother to update the Mac Pro for over four years… Hey, you deserve every single bit of criticism and then some, if not for your horribly misplaced priorities and blatantly obvious mismanagement, then for your abject tone-deafness alone.

In other words, doing your real job first grants you the ability to screw around on some vanity projects without criticism. — MacDailyNews, May 18, 2017

This lack of focus, lack of attention to detail, lack of striving for perfection will catch up to Apple eventually if it is not arrested and corrected in time.

So – sigh – we once again present to Apple CEO Tim Cook, where the buck supposedly stops, the Trophy for Misplaced Priorities:

The Misplaced Priorities Trophy
The Misplaced Priorities Trophy
MacDailyNews, November 29, 2017
 

Luckily for Tim Cook, Steve Jobs left him a perpetual profit machine that can absorb pretty much any lackadaisical fsckatude that can be thrown into the spokes.MacDailyNews, November 17, 2017

Apple brass. Lost for years in the weeds of Apple Park, The Colossal Distraction. May you find your way out ASAP! — MacDailyNews, December 11, 2018

[Organizations like Apple] require a charismatic leader who will shoot people in the knees when needed.Alan Kay, April 2013

SEE ALSO:
The Washington Post: ‘Why doesn’t Apple make its devices as carefully as it’s making Apple Park?’ – December 11, 2017
Apple Park estimated to cost upwards of $5 billion to build – December 9, 2017
What to do about Apple’s shameful Mac security flaw in macOS High Sierra – November 29, 2017
Apple started working on HomePod in 2012, so why are they so late to the smart speaker market? – November 21, 2017
Why Apple’s HomePod is three years behind Amazon’s Echo – November 21, 2017
Under ‘operations genius’ Tim Cook, product delays and other problems are no longer unusual for Apple – November 20, 2017
Apple delays HomePod release to early 2018 – November 17, 2017
Apple CEO Tim Cook: The ‘operations genius’ who never has enough products to sell at launch – October 23, 2017
Apple’s Mac Pro debacle: Failure and future – May 8, 2017
Why is Apple’s next-gen Mac Pro taking so long? – April 18, 2017
Apple’s desperate Mac Pro damage control message hints at a confused, divided company – April 6, 2017
Who has taken over at Apple? – April 5, 2017
Apple’s embarrassing Mac Pro mea culpa – April 4, 2017
Who’s going to buy a Mac Pro now? – April 4, 2017
Mac Pro: Why did it take Apple so long to wake up? – April 4, 2017
Apple sorry for what happened with the Mac Pro over the last 3+ years – namely, nothing – April 4, 2017
AirPods: MIA for the holidays; delayed product damages Apple’s credibility, stokes customer frustration – December 9, 2016
Lazy Apple. It’s not hard to imagine Steve Jobs asking, ‘What have you been doing for the last four years?’ – December 9, 2016
Apple is misplaying the hand Steve Jobs left them – November 30, 2016
Apple delays AirPod rollout – October 26, 2016
Apple delays release of watchOS 2 due to bug – September 16, 2015
Apple delays HomeKit launch until autumn – May 14, 2015
Open letter to Tim Cook: Apple needs to do better – January 5, 2015
Apple delays production of 12.9-inch ‘iPad Pro’ in face of overwhelming iPhone 6/Plus demand – October 9, 2014
Tim Cook’s mea culpa: iMac launch should have been postponed – April 24, 2013

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