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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

I suspect he had a hand in several recent Apple "successes" like extra thin keyboards that break easily, $999 monitor stands and not to forget, the cables that come apart easily.

While his work was definitely important at Apple, I think he might have lost the needed balance when SJ left

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I think this may well be true. I've argued for years that what Steve Jobs was exceptionally good at was acting as a kind of "product editor": he could look at a program or a device and very quickly pinpoint problems. He wasn't perfect at this -- it's easy to point out big flubs and minor misfeatures -- but he was clearly better at it than most people at most companies, and sure seems to be better at than anyone left at Apple.

(More than one long-time Apple employee has told me that they think Scott Forstall was nearly as good at this as Jobs was, and that it's quite possible some of Apple's more egregious form-over-function blunders in the last five or six years would have been avoided if Forstall was still on board. Forstall was admittedly the champion of skueomorphism, but I'd accept the silly linen backgrounds if it meant better keyswitches.)

I wouldn't put cables on him, but he did have a big hand in the 2013 Mac Pro, which was possibly the worst thought-out Apple product of the last decade.

He did push boundaries, but sometimes boundaries pushed back.

For a second I thought you meant the 2013 Macbook Pro and I was wondering what the hell you were talking about.

While I get the appeal of the Retina Macbook Pros and forward, my love affair with the Mac laptop ended with the discontinuation of the 15" unibody Macbook Pros.

Those unibody laptops represented just about everything I wanted in a laptop.

A powerful laptop with a quad i7 with a bunch of useful ports (including ethernet) and the ability swap out the RAM and storage easily.

Perhaps, or maybe this was because he had already clocked out, taking less active role.

He has probably been planning this for a long time.

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