In the same fashion that microsoft and ibm thrives: its lost its dominance in the consumer market “headspace”, printing money but no longer being a company worth knowing. Its just another BigCo at this point, with all the benefits and dullness associated with it. (Eg it’s difficult to be excited for apple product announcements; they have a money-printing operation and their only intent is to maintain it as-is; naturally any updates will be rather mundane, safe iterations on the running system)

In other words, apple became boring, or at least has been boring for a while now.

I mean, the whole computer market is boring (tablets, phones, laptops, etc; all the same shit YoY), but its kind of hard to think that current-apple is going to break that trend, in the same way you wouldn't expect IBM or Xerox to. Don't know of any startups doing anything terribly interesting in the space, with any real chance of success.

Hell, at this point Microsoft might be the likeliest candidate: at least they're doing something with stuff like stupidly big conference room screens and maybe Hololens will do something cool.

You concluded all this from horizontal scrolling?

The person I was replying to was not referring to horizontal scaling, and neither was I.

Just because a conversation starts with a topic doesn’t mean it stays there.

Is it your conclusion that they concluded all that from horizontal scrolling ... ?

I'm not saying that apple won't thrive - nor anything like it.I'm merely saying the interface design would probably have made Steve fire the person who did it.

And I probably wouldn't argue.

After all, when viewing the page on an iPad, I can't double-tap the top of the screen to make it go back to the beginning. Irony at its best.

Seriously - that's a great feature that I use multiple times per day, and Apple broke their own rule!

I think Apple has become enough of a

crosses self, prays for forgiveness

/lifestyle brand/

...that it's going to take a massive misstep of some kind to shake people off the platform. A handful of UI misfeatures won't do it, even if it would do it to users of other software and platforms.

Wouldn't it funny if sometime in a few years you'll need to take out a loan or lease the apple products instead of being able to buy them outright.

Cook is motivated by making his hill of beans as big as possible, rather than by being a super-cool dude who is the envy of other super-cool dudes. So I fully expect lease-with-no-chance-to-own to become the business model for some of the Apple range.

At least - Apple will try it. But I don't think it's going to fly.

Part of the Apple Magic[tm] is conspicuous display of ownership. Rent-to-wear won't have the same cachet.

It’s been a long time and he would have been angry about something by now. The question is, what?