Come on. Are you seriously suggesting that Apple is not a tech company? Have you seen their chip designs? Do you know of any company that ships in volume that has successfully migrated from two chip architectures which is still around today?

If Steve Jobs hadn't returned to Apple, we would be talking about the Macs the same way we talk about Amiga and Atari nowadays.

I clearly remember the not so good situation Apple was in around 1994, with Copland failing to impress.

When you've got the cash Apple has, you can make (and they have made) some really nice acquisitions, and undoubtedly there are some pockets of real geniuses (pun intended) working under the Apple banner. However, those very engineers are cultural misfits at Apple.

I do have to admit that Apple's complete lack of transparency makes it difficult to determine exactly how dire the technical skill shortage is at Apple. However, if you've ever tried to report a bug to Apple (a proper detailed bug report) the engineer who gets back to you will most likely be an arrogant latte loving hipster who is more interested in the latest trendy social sharing app than quality engineering. Don't expect an intelligent conversation!

> Can they develop complex software/systems? The evidence strongly suggests a resounding, no!

I love me a bit of schadenfreude about apple in my time, but come on - they took a unix base and turned it into a desktop that that naives can use pretty safely. No-one else has done that, not without dumbing it down into a simplified OS like a smartphone OS.

They certainly do seem to be sliding given that their users are grumbling more and more, but really, they've got a fair few notches in their belt (though they definitely do also have some turkeys)

> they took a unix base and turned it into a desktop that that naives can use pretty safely. No-one else has done that, not without dumbing it down into a simplified OS like a smartphone OS.

Ubuntu works fine, before that there was SGI Irix which worked ok.

> They struggle enormously at providing solid cloud services,

So does everyone else.

> their websites suck (particularly their developer portals),

I'm sure consumers care about developer portals.

> they can't write a functional USB stack,

Never had any problems with it.

> macOS has more bugs than ever,

How did you quantify this?

> even iOS' stability seems to be going downhill.

How did you quantify this?

... I'm not trying to discount your experience, but you really can't decide whether a company is good at tech based on n=1. I happen to think the design of everything since the iPhone 5 sucks, does that mean Apple is a tech company masquerading as a design company?

>> They struggle enormously at providing solid cloud services,

> So does everyone else.

That's fair, but given the size of Apple they're doing disproportionately poorly.

>> their websites suck (particularly their developer portals),

> I'm sure consumers care about developer portals.

I didn't say consumers care. Consumers care about design, which is what Apple focus on, that's my point!

>> they can't write a functional USB stack,

> Never had any problems with it.

Plug in a USB 3 hub. Any USB 3 hub... seriously.

>> macOS has more bugs than ever,

> How did you quantify this?

As mentioned, Apple have a complete lack of transparency that makes this difficult to quantify. However, articles like https://eclecticlight.co/2016/09/28/known-bugs-in-macos-sier... give some incite. I've been using OS X/macOS for years, and at least in my personal experience it's been mostly downhill since Snow Leopard. Finder is particularly buggy, although Apple Mail also crashes at least once a week. Waking from sleep seems to wreak havoc on all sorts of things, why does my mouse and keyboard start playing up?

>> even iOS' stability seems to be going downhill.

> How did you quantify this?

As above. Just personal experience. I genuinely do not use iOS much, I do admit that. I use it purely for development, a lot of which recently is just web development. However, Safari seems to have an uncanny ability to crash iOS entirely! Allocate a lot of large WebGL textures and watch the system burn.

EDIT: To clarify the "downhill" statement, large WebGL texture allocations on iOS 8 do not cause a system crash, just the expected Safari tab crash. On iOS 9+ you'll be sent to the white boot screen at least 50% of the time, and things will get hot (on the same iPhone hardware).

You can make that n=2.

Apple really pushed hard to get me to adopt their products, going so far as to give me free hardware to develop on, I never really saw the point. From an engineering point of view I'd rather develop on Linux, from a consumer point of view I like the hardware but the software just isn't there.

Are you seriously suggesting that their teams of cpu engineers, battery engineers, material engineers, wireless engineers and electric engineers, among many, many others, don't have the chops required to design, build and manage the complexity of maybe one of the most valuable products in the world right now? all because you think their software engineers are not as good as you?

How do you think they got to be one of the most valuable and profitable companies of all time? by luck?

The hyperbole is strong in your comment.