I supported the Macs in offices and graphics departments for about 15 years and was a big advocate. Apple used to have a commercial where they compared the stacks of manuals you needed to run a PC, with the small booklet that came with the Mac.

Now every update to iTunes makes me cringe, the GUI is like a cockpit and I feel like I need a stack of manuals to do what used to be simple.

I totally agree.

I don't agree that this statement is relevant to Apple.

Jobs is arguing that when you have a monopoly, your product people take a back seat to your sales/marketing guys. Fair enough, but that assumes Apple have a monopoly.
Far from it, they have:
- 13% of the smartphone market
- 24% of the tablet market (and that market is in decline)
- and a whopping 4% of the desktop market

How on any planet is that even close to a monopoly?

Don't get me wrong, I think Apple are in a bit of a creative slump at the moment. They desperately need new design blood.

Apple still makes some good products, but their competition has had plenty of time to catch up. I mean look at the Microsoft Surface commercial that came out the day before last year's Macworld. It's everything that a modern iMac should be, but the basic design of the iMac hasn't changed in 5+ years.

Oh, and about Apple still having some decent products, iTunes isn't one of them.

Yes, I agree my iPhone 7 is a good product. I never saw a cellphone as a necessity but I have to say I wouldn't be able to do my current job without it. My company sent me to a remote site to replace the network router and switch and my iPhone served as the hotspot to connect to VPN so the network engineers could remote in to my laptop and run Putty to configure the new equipment. At the same time I'm talking to them on that phone, emailing them pictures of the equipment with it, checking my personal email, etc without a performance hit on the phone. I would have been listening to Pandora too if I didn't have to talk to them. So I was impressed that this device not much bigger than a playing card could do all that.

I don't like the newer MacBook Pros.

As a former employee under both Jobs and Cook, I can tell you exactly what is wrong with Apple.

When I started with Apple, every thing we were concerned with was innovating. What could we come up with next? Sure, there were plenty of misses, but when we hit, we hit big. It was ingrained in the culture of the company. Managers wanted creative people, people who might not have been the best worker bee, but that could come up with new concepts easily. Sometimes corporate rules were broken, but if you could show that you were actively working towards something new, then you were OK.

Fast forward to when Cook started running the show, Steve was still alive, but had taken a backseat really. Metrics became a thing. Performance became a watchword. Managers didn't want creative thought, they wanted people who would put their nose to the grindstone and only work on things that headquarters suggested. Apple was no longer worried about innovating, they were concerned with 'maintaining'.

Two examples which might help illustrate further:

1. One of the guys I was working with was constantly screwing around in any free moment with iMovie. He was annoyed at how slow it was in rendering, which at the time was done on the CPU power. Did some of his regular work suffer, yeah. But he was praised because his concepts helped to shift some of the processing to the GPU and allow real time effects. This functionality made iMovie HD 6 amazing to work with.

2. In a different section of the company, the support side, a new manager improved call times, customer service stats, customer satisfaction, and drastically cut down on escalations. However, his team was considered to be:

a. making the other teams look bad

and

b. abusing the use of customer satisfaction tools, like giving a free iPod shuffle (which literally costs a few dollars to make) to extremely upset customers.

Now they were allowed to do all of these things, no rules were being broken. But Cook was mostly in charge by that point and he was more concerned with every damn penny. So, soon after this team blew all the other teams away for the 3rd month in a row, the new manager was demoted and the team was broken up, to be integrated into other teams willy-nilly.

Doing smart things was no longer the 'thing'. Toeing the line was. Until that changes, nothing is going to get better for Apple. I know I personally left due to stress and health issues from the extreme pressure that Cook kept sending downstream on us worker bees. My job, which I had loved, literally destroyed my health over a year.

That's awful. So, you can't work?

I could probably work in a different field if the employer was willing to make certain exemptions for my issues. Realistically, I would have a very hard time dealing with stress and some of my meds would make working difficult (or even getting to work in some cases). Working in a high stress field like I was would be nigh impossible.

Thankfully, I have been in the right place at the right time (for the most part, in my career. I've worked for quite a few big-name tech companies at their height and I was always one of those people who took judicious advantage of employee stock options, so while not rich in any way, I am comfortably well off enough to basically 'retire' early. My wife works a job she loves, we own our home, and we decided against having kids a long time ago, so we are doing fine.