Yesterday, a short Twitter thread by the excellent Jeff Johnson caught my eye. Since he often deletes past tweets, I’ll quote the relevant ones here (emphasis mine):
The selling point of the Macintosh was never the hardware, it was the user interface. So if the selling point now is the hardware, that’s a damning indictment of the current user interface.
I cannot emphasize enough how everyone seems to have lowered their standards with regard to the user interface. The “Overton window” has moved. The Overton window now has rounded rects.
We’ve gone from “insanely great” and “It just works” to “Catalyst is good enough for most people.”
That’s fucking BS, and I won’t tolerate it.
Windows is “good enough for most people”. That’s why Windows has a 90% market share. Why should we aspire to that level, shouldn’t we have much higher aspirations? Mac is a niche. “Most people” are not even using Macs, so the majority is not even relevant. Mac is a premium brand.
The way I see it, the Mac now is merely milking the brand reputation and loyalty it previously built. That Jobs previously built. But neither Cook nor the current Mac deserves that reputation or loyalty.
Steve Jobs wasn’t an engineer. Not a hardware engineer, not a software engineer. At Apple, his role was as “proxy” for the users.
Apple no longer has a proxy for the users. Tim Cook is a proxy for the shareholders, nothing more.
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