I really wished Apple would focus $$ on their own products. Look at their recent products. Argh.

I really wish companies in the Bay Area would focus their $$ on more responsibility in the face of immediate, local issues.

But hey... space ship, or whatever.

They're still working on the laser power supply problems in the shark tank.

Shouldn't the building be called Steve O instead of spaceship?

Well, Steve was an odd duck. He was a huge asshole, but when it came to people coming up with new and innovative ideas, he would support you into either success or failure (god help you if it was failure though). Once he died, there was a noticeable shift in direction towards conformity and the bottom line.

As an example, one of the managers I worked with had a team that was breaking customer satisfaction records because he had them actually caring about the customer. Unfortunately, it also meant they weren't pulling in the same amount of profit because they weren't trying to ram Applecare contracts down customer's throats, they were also supporting some customers that were just outside their free support, and finally they were using the internal program put in place under Steve that allowed escalation reps to go beyond the norm. Like helping a smaller school set up a mac mini server network without forcing them to go to server support and paying 300 bucks for a one time call. Yeah, bottom line wise, Apple lost a 300 dollar support call fee. But they later sold quite a few macbooks to the students who were used to hearing how good Apple was.

Anyway, after some of the other groups started complaining, that manager was quietly removed and put over a non support team. This pattern continued to grow worse right up until the time I left, whatever brought in the most money was king and thinking outside the box was verboten. It certainly influenced my decision to retire early, as it did others who went on to other jobs.

Wow, retire early already? You should had taken over his role! I would had if I could since I am a stubborn/picky arsehole too. I'm almost your age and trying to find a new job since 12/16/2016 after my 1.5 years contract ended

Nah, I got out when things were good. I have friends who still work there that complain every time we talk about how the entire culture internally is toxic and backstabby now. Besides, I had the good fortune to work at Dell in the 90's and Apple in the 2000's, when both were at the top of their game. Working for another company would be anti-climatic and probably require me to move to California. Between my partial disability and my stock investments, I have enough money to live comfortably with my wife. She will probably retire early as well, since her UT pension will be fully vested in around 7 years.

Lucky you. I stayed employee fulltime with my previous jobs to their ends.

Moving this video to ant's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.