How today’s Apple has thrown out the classic Apple rulebook

“When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, he didn’t like what he saw, so he set about changing the corporate culture,” Jason Snell writes for Macworld. ” A decade later, one proof of his success was the fact that the company seemed to follow a rulebook, largely behaving with a consistency that allowed those of us who covered the company to react to wild rumors with phrases like ‘Apple wouldn’t do that’ or ‘that’s not how Apple does things.'”

“But in the years following Jobs’s death (and the departure of some other Jobs-era executives), Apple has continued to evolve — and in many cases, it’s torn up the old rulebook. A lot of the changes strike me as being for the better,” Snell writes. “I feel like after Steve laid down the law in the late 1990s, some policies and decisions were never really reconsidered until the Tim Cook era got into full swing.”

Snell writes, “Here are just a few ways that today’s Apple has tossed out, or at least amended, the classic Apple rulebook.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: The changes Snell describes are, thankfully, relatively minor in the grand scheme of things.

14 Comments

  1. It was better when Steve was at the helm. All they care about now is MONEY and the F%#$*@$ iPhone. They need to play more attention to the Mac and making a more stable operating system, meaning the Mac OS. Its not as stable as it use to be.

    1. Pipeline has done nothing but neglect the Mac since he took power. All of Pipeline’s attention is toward the iPhone. If it doesnt generate billions of dollars in cash, Pipeline is not interested.

      Steve Jobs wanted to change the world. Pipeline wants to stockpile cash.

    2. You could have stopped at, “All they care about now is MONEY.”

      Cook really is Sculley 2.0. You know, the guy who 3.5 decades ago argued for gross margins on the original Mac of 53%. (There were even rumors back then that Sculley pushed for gross margins on the original Mac of 60% or more, but I’ve never seen anything to substantiate that.)

    1. No, Jobs would have released the cube #CubeGate and the perfectly round mouse #MouseGate. And, actually, Jobs WOULD have released it, then told you you’re using it wrong. LOL

    2. No point speculating. If history is any guide, however, Jobs would have been first in line for the newest chipset. He would have had a properly designed all-new 17” MBP chassis ready to go a year ago. With Magsafe, optical audio, etc. because that’s exactly what Jobs did and he made millions of users happy with well designed hardware.

      Now Cook is all about fashion and emojis. Hardware is comprised a dozen different ways, so nobody is totally satisfied. Why can’t Apple get the basics right anymore??????

  2. Yes, Apple has thrown out most everything that once made it unique and special.

    “It just works” is no longer a mantra.
    Superior value, or performance, or user friendliness, are no longer mantras.
    Consistent design guides and constant improvement — no more.

    Apple is all about overpriced fashion and subscriptions. Greed over goodness. Image over substance. Fat and out of touch. There is literally no Mac hardware, and no software that Apple currently offers that can be considered tops in performance or efficiency in the industry, and that’s before you consider the Apple Tax. Apple is a thin client iOS gadget company now. It shows in everything they do, and everything they refuse to fix.

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