GoKawiilYour AirPods just connected to the wrong device. Again.
iMessage is taking twenty minutes to sync a message between your laptop and your phone sitting six inches apart. HomeKit forgot the kitchen lightbulb exists, and will remember it again in three hours like nothing happened. System Settings, which used to be one of the cleanest preferences UIs ever shipped, now feels like a bad Electron app pretending to be macOS.
These aren’t dramatic failures. They’re worse than dramatic failures. They’re daily proof that somewhere along the way, Apple stopped caring about the texture of using its own products.
This is Apple in 2026. And this is the Apple that Tim Cook built.
Cook announced his departure last week, and most of the coverage you’ll see is going to be a victory lap. A lot of it is earned. Apple is a three-trillion-dollar company. Services revenue is at record highs. Apple Silicon is one of the great hardware bets of the last decade. He took a company already at the top of its industry and made it bigger than the GDP of most countries.
So why am I glad he’s leaving? Because somewhere in all that growth, Apple stopped making products it was proud of.
What Steve Actually Said
There’s a passage in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs that gets quoted less than the famous ones. Jobs talked about how great companies die, and his theory was that the rot has nothing to do with competition or markets or innovation cycles. The rot starts when the salespeople end up running the company.
He named names. He pointed at IBM under John Akers. He pointed at Microsoft under Ballmer. He even pointed at the Sculley era of his own Apple as the cautionary tale. The phrase Jobs kept circling back to was that the people running these companies eventually “have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.” They can’t tell the difference. They can run a supply chain better than anyone alive, but they couldn’t tell you whether the radius on a button looks right.
That’s not a small criticism. That’s the founder of Apple, on the record, naming the disease and warning the company against catching it.
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