this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2026
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Tim was great for the shareholders and not so much the customer.
I feel like most services got worse, hardware got worse before the M series, but post M I haven’t seen much innovation — just a lot of recycled parts for peripherals like Studio Display, which is premium price but sub premium quality (camera, panel itself, and ports/support).
Phones have massively homogenized under Cook
And software has taken a massive nose dive. As much as I try to like swift, it sucks. And it was a mistake to lose Chris Lattner, because without him Swift has had basically no focus or direction other than boosting SwiftUI.
Nobody has ever managed building production software with Swift outside of app dev, which I think says it finds a poor compromise on real performance vs ergonomics vs safety. I do not think Rust is better, I think Swift makes it too hard to do the right low level things.
AI/Siri has been embarrassing. Shipping cadence is worst in the business, there’s no reason so many updates are tied to OS updates, it’s simultaneously too rapid for trans to build robust software, and too slow to fix bugs and make QOL adjustments.
So when I look back on the last several years of Apple I kinda just see a bunch of departments duct taped together and drifting away from each other, and then the finance team driving all the decisions.
Multiple assumptions here.
That is a typo
I think you underestimate the power of the socks.
Having tried both Swift and Rust - you can hardly compare them. For me Rust is in a different league. Swift is a modernization and a step forward compared to ObjC, but Rust is a different paradigm altogether. Swift has IMO done a great job for Apple as a platform, but has not achieved universality and had not transcended the platform. Rust has achieved universality, but has not captured any platform in particular yet. Both have not and may never replace C/C++, though my biased opinion is rust may have a chance (at least with C++)
I pick on Rust because of the “write everything in Rust” crowd and just personally I don’t like how the language feels.
I don’t think rust has found fit in the GUI sphere, though it’s getting some adoption from tools like zed, and hopefully some native gui tools get better with it. Swift has some fit there, but it’s not a fair comparison because it’s forced. Swift has nice ergonomics though with callbacks and lib dispatch plus combine that work well for GUIs.
Swift also suffered from poor versioning tools, and platform code differences which have hurt it even if they’ve been patched over.
I agree on everything you've said. Rust hype is a bit annoying and can be off putting. AI bros seem to have amplified the effect and I strongly dislike it. GUI is probably the worst area of Rust, but given the universality of Rust, I think it's expected. I found egui easy to use, though, but far from swift ui, still.
Honest question: how can you make your mark on a product that is already perfect? At some point, software goes from meeting the needs of its customers to meeting the needs of the egos in charge.
You have low standards if you think Apple products are perfect.
I'm speaking theoretically about the software cycle. At some point, the product does what it's supposed to do as best as it can. Then what happens? People in charge feel they need to make their mark, so things just kind of drift around for no solid design reason worth customers getting used to.
Thanks for explaining the downvotes, though.
There’s always a bundle of people in threads like this that are eager to downvote even vaguely pro-Apple sentiment
That's a different thing though. It is driven by marketing people, they want each iteration look different to give people impression that they aren't purchasing the same product every year.
Apple does that too for example each release of their phones has a bit different look.