Father Drang:
After using Macs exclusively from 1985 on, I reckoned it was time to light out for Linux territory near the end of 1996, just before Apple bought NeXT. But I didn’t leave because I thought Apple was about to go under, I left because the platform had turned to shit. The purchase of NeXT, and the courting of Be that came before it, was Apple finally admitting that it didn’t have the chops to fix an operating system that was in dire straits.
Back then, Apple’s inability to produce reliable software preceded a rapid drop in revenue. Today, in a weird, upside-down reflection of that time, Apple’s great financial success has preceded a rapid drop in software quality, and it’s hard to avoid drawing conclusions about cause and effect. The easy explanation, right or wrong, is that Apple’s success has spread it too thin and that the attention to detail we saw up until a few years ago has been lost.