couple of things:
1) Boards are overrated these days. Most of the time, these Boards only serve to set pay, do auditing tasks, etc. Pretty tame and boring stuff. Boards do not set company agendas or tell CEOs where the business should go. Not these days.
chuckle .... you are confusing having a bad team (e.g, The Saints back when they had bad players , coaches , etc. ) and having a good team (e.g, The Saints that just recently won the super bowl). The crappy Saints teams didn't mean that football sucked. Just that team.
Second, many board sucked because they are packed with insiders ( friends and cross populated. " If you'll rubber stamp me on my board, I'll put you on mine and I'll rubber stamp your stuff. " ) and flunkies ( bodycount stuffers who fake like doing something and cash the check. ). If employees down the food chain from the CEO acted that way ( propped up each other pet, empire building projects and just "mailed in" doing analysis ) most rational folks would say that was not evidence of a good, well run company.
The blow off of you don't really need good, compentent board members is exactly akin to saying don't really need good, compentent employees. They both serve a function.
2) 6 board members is pretty remarkable and very low and seems to be very Steve-like. Why have 9-10 members that could suffer groupthink?
What??? Larger groups of diverse people are typically
less susceptible to group think than smaller homogeneous ones. There is a point when grow too large and it is difficult to get large consensus ( cough U. S. Congress .... hopeless pile of ding dongs ).
It is hard to pick the right group with a good balance. Many corps just punt and round up a bunch of "buddies" ( "I like him/her, he/she thinks like me. ). That's what leads to group think.
It appears that the board picking committee is Steve. That is a bad thing. One, he probably doesn't like doing it ( "Oh well we kicked Schmidt off ... we don't need a spare and I'd rather spend all doing tweaking iPad minutiae " ) and put off doing it. Ooops really did need a "spare" member. ( stuff happens. Sometimes folks have to quit, get better offers, come into conflict, or just straight up die on you. ) Two, a good small working group can split up the work.
3) Al Gore is on the board and I would argue that is pretty different than just any other "outsider".
Even if he isn't in over his head when it comes to really grokking what is going on and being able to ask good questions, he is just one person. Typically a board has multiple committees.
P.S. The board doesn't have to set vision but they should be a sounding board for it. Since Apple is so secret there is no one else who doesn't report to Jobs (directly or indirectly) who can challenge an assertion he makes and not be under threat of being fired ( or sent packing with a golden parachute if have special contract). Sure next, shareholder meeting could get board member not reelected if have the votes, but would take a while.
