His later involvement in the Apple lineup really didn’t paint him in a positive light, if we remember the atrocities with the “trashcan” Mac Pro, the notorious butterfly keyboard, the questionable Touch Bar, etc. They were all highly unpopular changes that were all rolled back once he left the company.
It’s worth remembering that the trash can Mac Pro was an engineering bet on a new ecosystem, specifically external GPUs, which were made possible by the incredibly high speed of the Lightning port/cable.
That ecosystem of accessories did not develop as Apple hoped it would, which essentially stranded the Mac Pro design and made it look (in retrospect) like a stupid design. And Apple kept hoping the ecosystem would develop, so they waited too long to replace it.
Apple has done great with many similar bets (USB, FireWire, removing optical disk drives). This one just didn’t work out.
Wasn’t just external. Remember it shipped with two internal AMD GPUs. The real issue was AND GPUs were close to useless for any GP-GPU work at the time because of CUDAs dominance and Apples lack of commitment to OpenCL at the time.
Apple gets a lot right and a lot of small things horribly wrong. Apple’s mice are a good example but nothing is as bad as the all black Apple TV remote. I’ve never hated a small device with such a passion. One wrong touch and you’re in remote hell.
I don't mind the form factor of the newest remote; however, it is slim and small enough that it regularly gets lost in odd places. An audible FindMy integration would be very welcome.
On the other hand they have the best trackpads, period. I don't even use a mouse when working with an external monitor anymore, I use the external trackpad from Apple instead, and so does most of my coworkers.
I think this is very much a matter of personal preference. To me, the "Magic Mouse" is the best pointing device I have ever used on a computer, and was actually my original reason for switching to Macs. I do understand that many people see it different, of course.
I worked with an engineer who didn't like Macs. I don't prefer the "Magic Mouse" however I bought it when it first came out and showed it to him. Not long after that I saw him using the mouse and he used it for years. He absolutely loved it.
The Mighty Mouse is, imho, one of the best mice made. It feels great in the hand, supports three button operation, has vertical and horizontal scrolling, and side buttons. The wireless version has a nice weight and uses AA batteries (no charger needed).
Unfortunately, the scroll ball eventually gets gummed up and the housing is glued together making regular maintenance impossible.
> Apple hasn’t made a decent mouse for more than twenty years starting with the hockey puck.
I think that's largely fair (although I do think the magic mouse is pretty nice). But in their defense, they make such great trackpads that many people prefer to use those over a mouse.
Even though I don't use a Mac, the touch bar is extremely useful, you can click buttons through it, scroll videos, have per-app shortcuts, text suggestions and much more, it really felt like a magical experience.
I was disappointed when Apple removed the touch bar, they could've just added the function row without removing it.
You accidentally touched it ALL the time leading to random functions being called. I had to turn it off. A capacitive bar right on top of the physical buttons you use all the time was not a fantastic implementation. Apple reverting it is testament to that.
I found it the exact opposite - I very nearly never touched it. My problem with it was you need to look at it to interact with it, which meant you weren’t looking at the screen.
It felt like someone designed it and said “but that won’t be a problem, because you can have the bar show you what you need” without considering it’s impossible to see what’s under your finger.
If they’d somehow put it at the same angle as the screen, so you could interact with it and while focusing on the screen, it could’ve been amazing - for me at least.
I do not recall ever accidentally touching it in the two years I had one. However I did not like it replacing the Fn and Escape keys. Having a section of contextual keys and controls was nice but not to replace the top row.
Happy Touch Bar enjoyer here, however it did not receive much love from 3rd party software developers and only single hardware iteration by Apple. MacBook Pro 13" 2022 still has Touch Bar, so it is still living, but more like a zombie.
Iirc it bumped up the price of the MBP and was something I would definitely decline if it were an option. But it wasn't. So for me it was a ham handed excuse to get a few hundred more out of me.
Didn't hate it, but didn't care for it either. Happy it's gone.
I used a trashcan Mac Pro up until this year when I replaced it with an M1 Pro Macbook. It was a great machine. Fast, silent, just did it's job and looked cool while doing it. It was like I was living my childhood dream of having a Silicon Graphics workstation.
Lol, that’s a weird childhood dream, which I also had. Ever since I saw a flight simulator running on an SGI Indigo, and I started speccing out an “affordable” O2. That was some good 90s industrial design.
I just replaced my 2009 cheese grater Mac Pro with a new machine. That was a timeless design, both inside and out, which I can’t blame Ive alone for abandoning. Apple has long internalized that expandable-monolithic tension between the two Steves.
