Apple's not learning from repeated mistakes in deciding to enter the thin wars, and I agree that it's a sign of trouble. Maybe the tech equivalent of the canary in the coal mine.
Apple used to rise above the spec wars, a domain of the PC crowd. "But ours has more megahertz and more RPMs," they'd say, to which Apple would rightly respond, "Who cares? Ours feels more responsive and offers a better user experience because of our integrated software/hardware and the beautifully functional al ergonomics. Everyone from classroom kids to creative pros couldn't care less about geekbench and megahertz as they're having the best user experience there is."
Fast forward. "Magazine reviewers want thin? We'll give them thin!!" says Jony Ive, no longer with Job's insight into the user to rein him in. So we now have phones that are so thin (at the expense of milliwatt-hours) that the camera absurdly protrudes out the back. We have laptops so thin the battery life curve is actually decreasing as battery demands are rising. We also have new laptops that you can't plug into new iPhones, new Apple TVs you can't plus into laptops if a software update bricks it, and not-yet-legacy peripherals you can't plug into new laptops without an array of dongles (which you must now buy à-la-carte).
Everyone's got a theory about what's happened in Cupertino, but something certainly has. Who knows if it would've happened had Jobs not died, but my gut says it wouldn't have, at least not this way. I'll still stick with Apple because, frankly, MacOS is still better that the alternatives in my opinion, and everything flows from that. But I'm no longer as proud of my choice as I used to be.
