<story><title>Apple Reports Second Quarter Results</title><url>https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-reports-second-quarter-results/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>smiley1437</author><text>How much is due to Covid, and how much is due to Jony Ive&amp;#x27;s departure?&lt;p&gt;The designs seem to make a bit more sense now, I was always perplexed at Ive&amp;#x27;s &amp;#x27;thinness at the expense of everything else&amp;#x27; mindset (butterfly switch keyboard, ugh)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>robenkleene</author><text>Here&amp;#x27;s my speculation: After the stellar early growth years for the iPad (here are some graphs from 2015 &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;qz.com&amp;#x2F;376041&amp;#x2F;the-ipads-first-five-years-in-five-charts&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;qz.com&amp;#x2F;376041&amp;#x2F;the-ipads-first-five-years-in-five-cha...&lt;/a&gt;), there was an impression at the Apple that the future of the Mac is iOS. Then that growth leveled off, and now iPad looks more like a comparable category to Macs (see the more recent Six Colors graphs &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sixcolors.com&amp;#x2F;post&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;apples-record-second-quarter-in-charts&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;sixcolors.com&amp;#x2F;post&amp;#x2F;2021&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;apples-record-second-quar...&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;p&gt;So Apple appears to have been asleep at the wheel with the Mac (which is perhaps why Ive&amp;#x27;s had so much leeway with clearly unpopular decisions like the keyboard, missing escape key, etc...) resulting in its worst years ever. The laptop keyboard is one example, but the iOS-ification of the Mac is another (i.e., moving towards the iOS security model), as is the stagnate Mac Pro.&lt;p&gt;Now things are back to normal, see the M1, the new Mac Pro, the new iMac, etc...&lt;p&gt;The M1 transition going so smoothly, and with such an emphasis on backwards compatibility (they ported OpenCL! they helped with Blender!) is my favorite example of this, contrasted with the complete &amp;amp;$@^*% you! treatment that developers got with things like notarization, new security features, and pretty much everything recent going all the way back to Mac App Store Sandboxing, which I&amp;#x27;d personally consider the start of the dark years (and I&amp;#x27;d also consider that the single worst decision in all of this, worse than the keyboard, that&amp;#x27;s the one that fundamentally broke the Mac ecosystem, maybe forever).</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple Reports Second Quarter Results</title><url>https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/04/apple-reports-second-quarter-results/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>smiley1437</author><text>How much is due to Covid, and how much is due to Jony Ive&amp;#x27;s departure?&lt;p&gt;The designs seem to make a bit more sense now, I was always perplexed at Ive&amp;#x27;s &amp;#x27;thinness at the expense of everything else&amp;#x27; mindset (butterfly switch keyboard, ugh)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vulcan01</author><text>Speculation on why Jony Ive pursued &amp;quot;thinness above everything&amp;quot;:&lt;p&gt;- for the first x years of apple, everything was legitimately thick&lt;p&gt;- so each generation Ive wanted to make things thinner&lt;p&gt;- it entered the culture (of the design division perhaps) that you had to make each generation thinner than the last to please Ive&lt;p&gt;- Then when things got to a comfortable thickness for users, people kept making each generation thinner to please Ive&lt;p&gt;- Ive never told them to stop making things thinner so they didn&amp;#x27;t stop.&lt;p&gt;- snowball effect and we got those horrible products&lt;p&gt;- he had to leave to stop the cycle</text></comment>