I take issue with "It was the very reliability of it — in user-friendly design, as well as stability of functionality — that was the basis of my choice in the first place..." With some Apple products this was true, with others, not so much. iTunes is one example. To me, iTunes has always been a mess. In the old days it would reliably update my iPod with new songs purchased from iTunes, but that was about it and the usability was always terrible.
Trust, once lost, is hard to regain.<p>I agree that slowing down the upgrade cycle would be one way to regain the trust, as long as the extra time was spent on quality assurance (in all its forms) rather than new features.<p>Killing some product lines would be another (though be prepared for howls of rage from the 20% that found the product useful).<p>It's tough, though, for me to give any advice to the folks running a large company without their context.
I have a Surface Book and a 2013 MacBook Pro. Hardware wise, both are are what I would consider to be best in class. Software wise there is absolutely no comparison in terms of reliability. I generally like Windows 10, but I'd have a really hard time depending on my Surface Book as my only computer.
Yup.<p>My first macbook pro lasted ~4 years, then I sold it for ~50% retail. Second macbook pro died after 2.5 years with a screen hardware issue. Third, and probably last, macbook pro is dying after 1.5 years.<p>If I was a conspiracy nut, I would say they don't care about declining quality because otherwise people wouldn't buy the next release as replacement.<p>I'm getting off the Apple bandwagon for my next laptop.
I stopped buying Apple products when they stopped updating iOS on my iPad after just a couple years. It's now over six years old and is still perfect for many tasks but since it's stuck on iOS 5 and has bugs in its HTML rendering, there are an increasing number of web-sites that crash the browser. If I'm going to replace a tablet every year or two, I'm going to buy sub-$100 Android devices.
I've thought that Apple has been in a rut or declining for over a decade. Their hardware designs are trite & a little ugly; their UI just is neither attractive nor easy on the eyes; their cloud services don't really deliver privacy and security (iCloud isn't end-to-end encrypted, and iMessage allows Apple to MitM).<p>At a certain point, one has to ask: why pay the premium? Why not just use Linux?
Another day another "Apple isn't what it used to be and I hate their products now" diatribe.<p>If you don't like their products buy someone else's. If you don't like your Apple Watch stop using it.<p>I use an iMac and a MacBook Pro for work and they serve me fantastically. Sierra has a couple weird things (like it doesn't automatically load your SSH identities after reboot) but it seems fine. iOS 10 has been fine as well and my new iPhone 7 Plus is great.<p>If there's something actually wrong with your hardware, take it in for repairs instead of writing a blog post that will accomplish nothing.