IMO there's a nasty undertone of money-grubbing accumulation for its own sake that wasn't there during the Jobs days.

The iMac Pros are nice-ish machines, but I can't see Jobs trying to sell a >$10k BTO Mac as anything other than a very special edition with a whole marketing circus supporting it - not as a ludicrously expensive mainstream SKU with a "This is the price, you're going to buy it because it's a Mac, take it or leave it" attitude underlying the sales pitch.

Apple seem to be becoming increasingly tone deaf. The money may keep rolling in, but sooner or later there's going to be an event - a competitor, a new technology, a software disaster - that makes the wheels fall off.

> I can't see Jobs trying to sell a >$10k BTO Mac as anything other than a very special edition with a whole marketing circus supporting it

Remember Next or the Lisa or the original Mac? Jobs was pretty good at trying to sell very expensive computers. The original Mac was priced equivalent to $5,877 in today's dollars. The Lisa was priced equivalent to $24,600 of today's dollars.. and we all know how expensive Next was.

That was a huge problem of his that he fixed the second go-around (mostly - the Cube was beautifully expensive and would fracture). But from like 2000 to 2013 or so Apple would put out stuff that was a little more expensive than the competition but usually had enough features and quality to make it easily worth it.

Now they're selling $1,000 phones, gold watches, and machines that are way overpriced for what they offer. It's a noticeable shift.

A thousand dollar phone is only a few hundred more than the old phones, and is incredibly affordable. I’m still struck dumb by people bent out of shape about its price, when they are paying far more for their phone service.

I’m going to sell mine for $400 in two years, having cost me $25 a month in total For something i use a hundred times a day and take all my family photos with. I could have saved $10 a month by getting an iphone 8, big deal.

> gold watches

This is no longer the case - the most expensive Apple Watch has a ceramic case.

You may disagree with the components they chose for the iMac Pro, but they certainly aren’t profiteering off it. You can’t build an ugly box with the same parts for more than 10% less.

I don't know about an event. I think people will just stop buying Apple because of all the frustration with their products. I think it'll be subtle and one day we'll just all realize that, "hey, Apple used to be worth $900 Billion, now it's worth half that."

When was Ballmer ever good for shareholders? Windows/Office was already a super profitable juggernaut, he misinvested every dime of their profits. Expedia/Zune/Windows Phone/Nokia/Original Surface, etc, etc, etc. Even the XBox was a money loser for its first decade.

Tim Cook hasn’t incinerated shareholder funds. Most of the profits have been returned to shareholders as dividends, or saved overseas for them. His bad acquisitions have been relatively tiny, like Beats.

And as far as competitiveness goes, the Mac market share is at all time highs, iphone sales are st all time highs, and iPad still dominates the tablet market. Plus their app store and apple music dominate as well. Oh and Apple watch is the biggest selling watch by revenues in history, both now and it’s launch year.

Apple hasnt been wildly creative under Cook, but is still designing innovative new devices, Apple Watch, Airpods, the 5K iMac, HomePods, iMac Pro. Let’s just agree to ignore the touchbar macbooks;)

He’s not Steve Jobs, but has done better than i ever thought possible.

>When was Ballmer ever good for shareholders?

For pretty much everything that wasn’t consumer facing. Office 365, Exchange, Azure, CRM and SQL Server all saw huge growth under Ballmer. He really killed it in Enterprise, but as you mentioned, consumer facing products had several missteps (and where a lot more public).

As an aside, are there many examples of major (say Fortune 500) companies where more than one CEO was famous / respected / acclaimed?

Maybe Sundar Pichhai but he is young in his CEO role so it's too early to decide.

If I had to point to anyone, I'd say that Satya Nadella is being giving a lot of credit for a major turn around at Microsoft.

I am deeply impressed by the tech that Google puts out but it seems that Pichai has not really improved Google's biggest issues : a complete lack of focus and over-reliance on ads.

In tech? How about Intel - Moore, Grove, Otellini. Nintendo - Yamauchi, Iwata. Microsoft, obviously.

Top of my head? Goldman Sachs, GE, Disney, Ford (maybe not as fair since the Ford last name gets you instant fame)

In tech: Google before Alphabet, the former Yahoo, the former Sun. Twitter did their musical chairs act, as well.

Google before Alphabet was only Eric Schmidt right?

Larry was the original CEO until 2001. He was then CEO after Eric Schmidt, starting in 2011, until the formation of Alphabet in 2015.