I have a different experience.<p>I first saw the Apple 2 in 1978 and thought it neat. The early Mac was a revelation. The iPod was a revelation. The iPhone was a revelation. The iPad was a revelation. But they started fiddling with the designs. The iPad had wide margins so you could hold it while lying down without accidentally touching the screen. Then they reduced the margins. Sure, it looks cooler, but it's less functional, with constant unwanted screen touches <i>doing</i> something that you have to undo.<p>I had an iPhone 6 which I liked. But the new models are either too big or too expensive, usually both. Apparently nobody at Apple uses pockets anymore.<p>I had a MacBook Pro for many years. Very solid hardware. But the OS annoyed me. It's Unix-based which I prefer, but hardly "just works", with Apple's fear of the GPL meaning some tools are decades old because they can't/won't run a recent version, so I have to manage that myself. I eventually switched to Linux on the Mac, and I thought about doing that with new Mac hardware, but with the new CPUs running Linux is doubtful again. So no new Mac.<p>At the time I was running Windows, Linux and MacOS on different machines. I wanted to share many terabytes of data between those machines, so I settled on ExFat formatted drives because they could all handle that format, right? The Mac had constant complaints of errors on the disks which it couldn't fix. Yet if I plugged the drive in error into a Windows machine it either fixed it in a trice or, on a couple of occasions, could find no error at all.<p>Apple's aftermarket service is usually first rate. But my second iPad was obviously faulty when new, detiorating to useless over a period of a couple of days after a full boot. Yet putting it in for service, twice, got me a response of "no problem found". I told them to throw it away and I decided I would no longer have anything to do with Apple.<p>But your title is fine because in another sense they <i>have</i> come full circle. Under Jobs (the second time) Apple had greatness due to his, sometimes flawed, view of HOW THINGS SHOULD BE. Now Apple has an air of past glory, humming along, trying to remember the words, trying to remember how to be great.