One thing I remember under Jobs, was the "Just works" mantra. Going 1mm thinner but making a device that had serious flaws to achieve it? I guarantee that more often than not, Steve told Ive to go back and try again. Where Tim Cook probably says "it'll be cheaper with less material lets do it!"
With the butterfly keyboard switch, cost probably was not a driver since it required R&D to develop and then a new production chain to make it.
I think testing is the Achilles Heel of these issues - a lab environment is not representative of "real world". They likely tested them mechanically with robots in a semi-clean room where foreign debris was not an issue (see also the Samsung Galaxy Fold). So the idea that a small piece of hard debris could physically damage the switches just never came up until the model was in the field and Apple has been trying to fix that since.
I think this is the overall major failing of Apple under Tim Cook. A failure to recognize changing reality of a company that is now one of the largest in the world, making dozens of products over numerous product lines.
I feel the exact opposite. He realizes that Apple cannot coast on iPhone sales forever because the market is saturated where Apple plays in. The only real option to expand iPhone sales is to make a cheaper product out of cheaper materials with a cheaper overall experience and the iPhone 5C showed that Apple's clientele will not accept that.
So just as Steve saw the iPod plateau and moved on to iPhone and iPad, so has Tim seen iPhone start to plateau and is (finally) paying attention to the Mac as well as entering other markets: wearables (Apple Watch), home assistants (Homepod), and services (Apple TV+, Apple Music, etc) that can tie into their hardware (Apple TV, Homepod, Mac, iPhone/iPad).
The old way of Steve Jobs and his executive having direct hands on attention for all products is not something I feel like Tim Cook has been able to reproduce. But at the same time, refuses to re-organize and restructure in a way to provide more autonomy over product cycles.
There were a lot less product lines, much less products, for Steve and his team to manage back then. And Apple was very successful because they followed an Organizational model versus a Functional one under Steve.
In a company of the size, with this many products, each product category should be it's own division run by it's own "visionary". Each of those should also have their own teams of semi-autonomous engineers experimenting and showcasing what they can do. With the divisions visionary keeping forward momentum at all times.
I would not at all be surprised that Apple under the 'Three Stooges' between Steve's tenures went with a Functional model where each product category had it's own executive team focus and there was little to no collaboration.
The Mac Pro should never have languished for so many years. Laptops should never go more than 1 full year without a spec bump (you don't need executives control to manage that!). Heck even 6 months is probably reasonable. The product list goes on where you can see focus on one or two products while everything else "sits".
I fully agree that Apple has been too focused on a leadership level with iOS (and the iPhone particularly), but that was because it generated the vast majority of the company's revenues so it was a case of "the most important child gets the attention". However, that looks to be changing. The MacBook Pro is being updated on a sub-annual schedule with even newer models rumored to be coming within months of the last round of updates.
That being said, Apple does not ship the volumes the major PC OEMs do nor do they do so at their (average) low prices. The PC OEMs update annually because the bulk of their sales are to the enterprise which are on rolling upgrade schedules so they can (try) and tailor their inventory levels to those schedules (that they have so many closeouts implies they're not as good at it as they like).
Apple ships far less systems and the bulk of their sales are to consumers who do not follow a regular schedule for purchasing. So Apple would have to BTO everything to make sure they are not sitting on a large inventory of outdated models. And yes, Apple could just clearance sale them, but then there is the risk people just wait for the new model to be released and then buy the clearance model (since for the significant majority of purchasers, the technical updates mean nothing to them - unlike the folks like us who frequent this forum).
I think Cook is going to wind up the "ballmer" of Apple. The next guy in charge hopefully will either bring with him a bunch of design focused people, or restructure in a way to allow for the more autonomy. Something Cook should have been working towards instead of trying to continue doing it the Steve Jobs way without a Steve Jobs
To truly be the Steve Balmer of Apple, Tim would have to continue to focus on iPhone and try and force everything else to fit in the iPhone box (as Balmer did with his "Windows Everywhere" policy). Instead, it looks like Apple is willing to keep supporting different operating systems and their unique experiences they bring to their products (iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS) even as they try and cross-pollinate them where prudent to try and support older platforms (Catalyst on macOS, for example).
