Apple in 2005 under Steve Jobs watch was sued, and lost, for the iPod nano being too easily scratchable.
And over the years he made plenty of design compromises for a product that he thought would be “cool”.
I mean, you can literally make a long list of the Steve Jobs products that had major flaws due to aesthetics or to have something that was cool or improved the products experience.
The biggest and easiest example being the iPhone 4, Steve even admitted on stage about the lines that they “don’t look like Apple” and ended up causing a lot of problems.
I have never understood the argument that Steve would have said no to foldables simply based off of nothing but the crease. it has always felt like a way for people to parasocially attach the things that annoy them to a man who can never speak for himself.
It’s been 15 years, the tech landscape is a completely different world from what it was even in 2011. It shouldn’t even be a question of what Steve jobs would have allowed and what he wouldn’t have, it’s irrelevant. It leads nowhere.
If all Apple did was try to hypothesize what would Steve Jobs do in regards to their product roadmaps, they would be a completely paralyzed company. One could argue for a long time they were, at least until around the launch of the M1.
