I was thinking some of those things but have learned not to say them so explicitly in this forum. I've worked for Apple, been a consumer with them over 2 decades, been at MR officially since 2003, but I still am labeled anti-Apple from time to time.
"Viel Feind, viel Ehr'."
- Georg von Frundsberg
There's no shame in being called Anti-Apple on Macrumors. Many members of this site have been in the reality distortion field too long and mistake buying and using Apple products for a major world religion.
About some of the other stuff that's been said in this thread:
Tim Cook is good curator. Since we like to compare Apple with a religion, it's fair to compare him with Pope Peter the First: The rock to build a church on, but certainly NOT the person you would expect ANY new visions or directions from. A rock solid curator and accountant, but nobody who would even dream about
thinking something risky - and definitely NEVER do it.
"Steady as she goes" is all we will be seeing from Apple until the "product pipeline for four years" that supposedly was Steve's legacy will have run dry. After that, Apple will fall back into insignificance - where they already were in the years without Jobs at the helm.
From all that we've learned so far, Jobs ran the company like a French king would have run his court: One man at the top, dominating over his underlings that spend their days cutting each others throats over a second of the king's attention, trying to appease him wherever possible. And no worthy heir who could walk in his steps and the lead the realm to a blooming future.
Cook will only institutionalize as much of Steve's legacy as he can. But he has no vision of his own, and neither has any of executive staff. They only added flesh to Steve's abstract ideas. At least that's what their marketing always tried to make us believe. Imagine the horror of all those Apple fans out there when it turns out to be true.
This is a fast moving industry and world. Unless Steve left them with a clear concept for the next big thing in the pipeline, by 2015 nobody will be talking much about Apple anymore. Without a visionary in a leading position, the rest of the industry will soon leapfrog them. Android already is technologically more advanced than iOS and has a much higher adoption rate. OS X has been living the life of an unloved stepchild for several years now; Leopard was the last significant release of that system, Snow Leopard and Lion were not more than second rate service packs for Leopard.
And the competition is not sleeping and rapidly cranking out more affordable and in many cases even superior products. I would not even trade in my Samsung Galaxy S2 for two iPhone 4S, and I certainly will never buy a crippled iOS-product again in my life -- I gave Apple three chances here and they disappointed me each time. But iOS clearly is their cash cow now, and I doubt that OS X will have much of a life left. That means that Apple and I will part ways in the foreseeable future, and there is not much sense in buying an over-priced, but nice-to-look-at Apple PC just to put Linux on it. So the day they officially EOL OS X - or announce that it will be merged with iOS - somebody else will get my business. And I doubt that I will be the only one who will decide to move on when that day comes.
