MacRumors used to have archives of its forum posts dating back to around 2001. There you could read about all the really stupid things that Apple was doing. Some are still relevant, most people still don’t like the actual Apple Mouse, and they didn’t like them then either. But it looks like MacRumors doesn’t have those forums available any more. Removing support for Adobe Flash animation, getting rid of built in CD drives, never actually providing BLURAY drives, memory limitations, gaming support (or lack of it) computer main hard drive Lack of options and keeping physical platter drives long after everyone else offered SSD are all things that people conveniently forget about when talking about Steve Jobs.
He was right about some of those choices, and by no means have I listed everything that caused a controversy. And some technology eventually made the issue superfluous, and I’m thinking about hard drives and CD/BluRay as standard equipment and not something that you needed to buy as an external and non-Apple component. And he did leave Apple in the 1990’s, some say that he left and some say that he was pushed. In the late 1990’s after Steve took over again, Apple became the powerful company that it is today because of decisions that Steve Job was behind. But he wasn’t perfect, not all of his choices were smart business moves, and everyone wasn’t constantly singing his praises.
Few companies have 2 farsighted CEO’s who follow one right after the other. Businesses are conservative and Steve Jobs was disruptive. He was right more than he was wrong but lots of egos where probably broken along the way.
Look at the major successions of computer related companies since the mid 80’s: Compaq and Digital are now just names and not a computer manufacturer, IBM is no longer synonymous with desktop computing, the Steve Ballmer era at Microsoft isn’t held up as an example of a good transition from founder to a new CEO…. But Apple has done very well under Tim Cook. Do I think Tim is the visionary that Jobs was? No. Do I think that Apple has managed this transition better than other companies have managed theirs? Yes.