I never understood the appeal of Steve Jobs to other people, and had never bought an Apple product until about six years ago.

However, after buying a couple of Macbooks - including ones, circa 2012/2013, on eBay - it's very obvious that the quality has shrivelled into oblivion after his passing.

If I was to credit him with one thing, Jobs was the ultimate QA guru with long lasting products as his top priority.

Now, Apple sells glue machines and Steve Jobs would be clean slating the entire list of employees - from the top, down - if he was alive to notice how little the company seemed to care about what he had planted as the seed, many years ago.

2015 mid macbook pro is perfection

Totally agree, notice how in his time iphones were really different. Now they sell u the same crap with a better camera

OMG. Apple fanboys.

Apple has never invented anything. They just glued a repair unfriendly product of existing pieces.

Steve Jobs never was a QA or inventing person. He was just a brilliant sales guy.

While quality wasn't perfect under Jobs (overheating cube, discoloring iBook, "you're holding it wrong" iPhone, etc) I agree it was generally better.
Nowadays we get MacBook Pro keyboards breaking from dust... And in the next generation, keyboards breaking from dust *and* monitor cables with early material fatigue.

@Floydian easy, we didn't. Apple just had better marketing than the others.

Hey look, THIS thread again! :D

I had never used a Mac until I was issued one for my current job when I started three years ago. I was 37. It was a 2015 MacBook pro. As with most new Mac users, I hated it at first, but then I fell hard for it. Late last year it finally gave out, unable to be charged anymore, and I was issued a 2017 model to replace it. The quality difference between the two is like night and day. The newer laptop is TRASH. It seems like whatever quality the company's products once had was buried with Jobs.

The blind hatred towards Apple products, especially from novice Linux fanboys is somehow laughable.

Obviously the price tag is very high given the specs and there have been issues over the years, however there is a reason they sold well and remain very constant in value over the years.

Personally never was an Apple fan, never owned an iPhone or iPad and always worked on projects with Linux based OS or Windows. Still pretty much guarantee that my next laptop is going to be a MacBook Pro.

What is it with this ridiculous Linux+Thinkpad evangelism, where people don't even know how to use Linux to its full potential or why they praise Thinkpads to high heavens - it's just this obnoxious IT culture, where "y0u'Re N0T a ReAl DeV iF yOu DoN't UsE tHiNkPaD, aNd G0D f0rBiD yOu HaVe A mAc".

Learn to use Linux, Windows and MacOS, if you want to be a good developer, ffs.

My first and only MacBook required three motherboard replacements in two years. If their quality has gone down since Steve's death then I'm definitely not buying one now.

@Maer said:

> The blind hatred towards Apple products,

> especially from novice Linux fanboys is somehow

> laughable.

Look, I'm all for calling out hypocrisy and intolerance where I see it, but where in the world are you seeing this, in this thread? Are you just looking to send a wall-message to piss off any linux users out there, just for the sake of doing so?

@bahua The calling out of Apple fanboys is in this thread, which is what caused my comment in the first place. Linux particularly is not, I am mentioning it, because there is a certain IT culture, throwing around thinkpad and linux as battle terms of sorts.

This is not anti-Linux bashing, this annoyance with the culture of IT novices to condemn apple and praise Linux whereever they can.

All of the most capable developers I ever worked with all had experience with and no predicament towards various OS. They see them as tools each with a specific niche and purpose, while bashing whatever-OS usually results from pointless IT culture.

They did invest much? Check your sources.

The iPhone/iPod is based on multiple patents hold by public universities. Paid for by tax payers money. As I said: Apple just glued them together.

@zemaitis I have one, can confirm. The capacitive touchpad is what gets me.

I don't understand what makes that better than a 2014 Macbook Pro. They all became glue-machines past 2013.

As soon as the front power light disappeared, Apple glued and soldered everything to a fragile motherboard, making sure that the wiring could snap when opening it.

Also, to make things abundantly clear...

- I fucking hated Steve Jobs.

- I fucking hated Apple.

I still hate Apple, but Steve Jobs was a smart motherfucker that I've grown to understand and respect a bit more; who knew that the user needed a quality physical product, in-hand, immediately after purchase.

So, if you read my "QA" comments as Steve Jobs being a software analyst... no. That's why he hired people to do just that. However, if you consider the proper design and "forced" approach of a new device, "the art of quality assurance before it's even put into production". Hell, yeah.

And this is where he and Bill Gates were different. One believed in the physical engineering being the most important, and the other believes that the software engineering is.

@Hypergeek

Seems to me that Jobs was more an adherent of PT Barnum, and left the engineering of any kind to the eggheads, while Gates worshiped at the altar of Alan Turing.

@bahua - Agreed. Even though Jobs had hands-on experience in the early days, he didn't do that anymore. However, that's where his nit picking worked.

Shit needed to get done and get done to the point where he felt it was done correctly - in terms of speed and quality.

This is also what seems to have set the high pricing of Apple devices - which should no longer be relevant considering the horrendous quality of their products and total lack of true support for them - these days.

"Faster production", "Higher quality", "Cheaper Cost"; you can only choose two out of the three.

Right now, Apple creates their devices quickly and of a lower quality than they used to... so they need to be cheap, or their main rival (who is now Samsung) will beat them to a bloody pulp as soon as their cult status fades away to oblivion - which is already happening, since many folks have been jilted on the unsupported software library they've purchased as well, based on Apple products.

@Hypergeek

It will take a long time before my friends and relatives lose the idea that Apple's products are the top of the range, at the same time as being the lowest quality acceptable-- meaning that no other company's products are acceptable to them. In the minds of many users, the belief is that android is for poor people or tech geniuses, but not reasonable, normal, attractive people. I have encountered many who view android as beneath consideration.

Apple's desktop and laptop computers are, like those of all other manufacturers, holding on to a dying market: general purpose computing. Whatever discussion we might have about them is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Laptops and desktops are important. That's where the real power is. However, most people don't go further than Facebook and Candy Crush - so there's no decline in the need for actual computers compared to tablets and other mobile devices.

The "decline" is cause by a shift of devices now available for those who have no fucking clue what they can be used for. It's really more of an "incline", if you think of it as "taking out the trash" - where software and applications will cater to those who need them more, as opposed to becoming popular because some fuckwit tapped buttons for a free promo can of shitspray.

There's a true decline in our industry, and I'm not for segregation, but I do feel that users need to be categorized and served accordingly by people with the appropriate skill sets. This will take top designers and developers and give them vehicles for their craft, as opposed to everyone expecting a buffet of random tech that's used for creating similar rips of other products.

This is the course all companies follow though:

1. enter a market as a small corp that can't compete on size or quantity.

2. Focus on quality and capturing market from companies that have become tone deaf

3. Founder dies or things change. Grow big.

4. Shift to quantity as you scale up, in order to appease the need to grow rapidly and feed investors

5. Get bought, merge, or bankruptcy. Rinse and repeat.

It's the course that every company you are a fan of will eventually follow. Quality, then quantity, then bought, merge, or bankruptcy.