At Tim Cook’s Apple, Steve Jobs is long gone, and so is the ‘it just works’ ethos
“‘It just works,'” Adrian Kingsley-Hughes writes for ZDNet. “This is the phrase that Steve Jobs trotted out year after year to describe products or services that he was unveiling. The phrase expressed what Apple was all about — selling technology that solved problems with a minimum of fuss and effort on the part of the owner. Well, Steve is now long gone, and so it the ethos of ‘it just works.'”
“2017 was a petty bad year for Apple software quality. Just over the past few weeks we seen both macOS and iOS hit by several high profile bugs. And what’s worse is that the fixes that Apple pushed out — in a rushed manner — themselves caused problems,” Kingsley-Hughes writes. “It’s not just been limited to the past few weeks. I’ve written at length about how it feels like the quality of software coming out of Apple has deteriorated significantly in recent years.”
“Apple isn’t some budget hardware maker pushing stuff out on a shoestring and scrabbling for a razor-thin profit margin. Apple’s gross profit margin is in the region of 38 percent, a figure [about which] other manufacturers can only dream,” Kingsley-Hughes writes. “Apple owes a lot of its current success to its dedicated fanbase, the people who would respond to Windows or Android issues with “you should buy Apple, because that stuff just works.” Shattering that illusion for those people won’t be good in the long term…”
Not only that, but it’s the 2016 winner of the highly coveted Misplaced Priorities Trophy, too!
The Misplaced Priorities Trophy
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
Nobody’s perfect, but Apple is lately a lot more imperfect than we expect them to be.
We pay for “it just works,” Apple. When you stop providing that, the gravy train will stop, too. Get your act together, Apple! — MacDailyNews, December 2, 2017
Exit question: Isn’t a caretaker CEO’s No.1 priority, you know, to take care?
