Apple built up a lot of positive brand credibility over the second Jobs era. That credibility is eroding now, but that kind of erosion takes time to show up in sales figures. All that banked-up credibility can drive sales for a long time until it's completely drawn down. But operating that way is like living off the money in your 401(k) -- it lets you pretend nothing's wrong until the moment the balance hits zero, at which point everything goes wrong all at once.

Techies are more exposed to the details of hardware than normal people are, so Apple should be looking at their complaints as the leading edge of tomorrow's problems rather than as an outlier. Back when Apple couldn't sell computers to save their lives, the techies were the first to notice their products had improved enough to be worth recommending. Now everyone wants to buy their products, but the techies are the first to notice that maybe they shouldn't.