I don't get why people keep making this argument; they never strayed outside of their core computer business, they just committed genocide against buttons and added a big battery. They made a massive design innovation, not a huge technological shift.

You can say the same about automotive driving, it's still "computer business"

I dunno; Google's foray into self-driving cars made sense in part because they already had so much experience with 360-degree cameras and spatial mapping and managing international fleets of vehicles, not because they "do computers."

Apple's claim to automotive relevance seems to be the idea that they could somehow worm their way into the supply chain of ordinary car manufacturers. As in, Ford, Toyota, Tata, etc. would all have the same iDrive system. To me, this is not only hopelessly naive, but utterly contrary to Apple's consistent insistence on controlling every aspect of their ecosystem.

This pivot does not seem like a savvy business move to me. It seems like they see a big market and want to be part of it regardless of their actual...ugh...synergies.

Exactly. As an Apple user and fan since the late 80s, 2007 was when it all went to hell.

You mean when Apple stopped being a hardware company and started being a media / services company?

Nobody knows what Apple is anymore, least of all Tim Cook.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or if you are being genuine here. I'm taking it as sarcasm. If so well done.

Apple has hundreds of billions of dollars. They can focus on more than a few products. It's natural that they look into AI.

It's 100% genuine. Obviously Apple has been very successful following this path, but I'm much less happy with Apple 2017 than I was with Apple 2007, and it all stems from the iPhone.

In an alternate universe where Apple doesn't launch the iPhone, do you think the company would still be nearly as relevant in 2017? Getting annoyed at Apple for embracing mobile in 2007 is a fools game - if they hadn't made the iPhone, one of their competitors would have gotten close enough eventually and drastically reduced Apple's stature in the industry. Complaints like these remind of the Mac OS 9 holdouts when OS X was so obviously the future.

The comparison to Mac OS 9 makes no sense. Apple was dying in the late 90s. The OS was extremely obsolete and the whole company was on the verge of falling over. They needed a big change to survive, and that was OS X, which suddenly gave them a modern OS and made their computers popular in many segments which had previously completely ignored them.

Apple was doing just fine in 2007. OS X was in great shape. They had recently transitioned from the faltering PowerPC CPUs to x86, which revitalized their hardware offerings and opened up a world of new possibilities for users to dual-boot or virtualize other OSes. Their market share was pretty solid, and their share of PC profits was quite high.

You say "stature in the industry" as if there's a single "the industry" that encompasses both PCs and phones. If Apple hadn't done the iPhone then maybe Microsoft or Nokia would have done better, but so what? That wouldn't affect Apple in the PC market. Wikipedia says the top five PC makers are Lenovo, HP, Dell, Asus, and Apple, and as far as I know Apple is the only one with a substantial smartphone business.

Of course Apple wouldn't be nearly as relevant overall in a world where they never produced the iPhone. I don't care about that. I see no reason why the Mac wouldn't be about as relevant in the personal computing space, which is what I care about.

In any case, I'm not just annoyed at the existence of the iPhone, but the nature of it. If the iPhone had been a Mac-like open platform instead of this walled garden bullshit, all of my complaints would go away. I have no problem with mobile per se, I have a problem with pervasive vendor-controlled code signing, not getting root on my own devices, etc.

> Of course Apple wouldn't be nearly as relevant overall in a world where they never produced the iPhone. I don't care about that. I see no reason why the Mac wouldn't be about as relevant in the personal computing space, which is what I care about.

Most of Apple's APIs and tools run on and build for both Mac and iPhone. Without the iPhone, Apple would have to pay for that from just what they made from the Mac, so improvements to macOS would come slower than they do now.

The pace of Apple's API improvements don't seem to be particularly related to their cash flow, and the pace of improvement on the Mac has not noticeably increased since 2007 (I'd argue it has actually decreased) so I don't buy this.

    > improvements to macOS would come slower than they do now.

I'm starting to wonder how many people here even remember what Apple was like 10 years ago. The way macOS has "improved" under Tim I think "the slower, the better". One of the best WWDC moments this year was when Tim announced a maintenance release.