I have a different view regarding the John Sculley era. It was under Sculley where the Mac transformed from a sealed box to an expandable machine when the Mac

I have a different view regarding the John Sculley era. It was under Sculley where the Mac transformed from a sealed box to an expandable machine when the Mac II was released in 1987. Under the Sculley era there were many impressive Macs, such as the Macintosh SE/30, the Mac Color Classic, the Mac IIfx, the Macintosh Portable, the Macintosh Quadra, and the original PowerBook. In my opinion, the hardware was wonderful during the Sculley era. What dogged Apple from the latter half of the Sculley era until the purchase of NeXT during the Gil Amelio era was the inability of Apple to buckle down and ship a successor to the classic Mac OS (look up the history of Pink/Taligent and Copland). Apple's hardware didn't start suffering until 1995 when Apple had a disastrous year (the infamous PowerBook 5300 exploding battery scandal, the much maligned Performa 5200/6200 series, Apple's inability to release an OS that successfully competed against Windows 95, and the rise of Mac clones that ended up hurting Apple's marketshare). The John Sculley era was largely one of investment in the Mac, although the unfortunate thing was the failure of the Pink/Taligent project, which could have given Apple an advanced operating system as early as, say, 1993 or 1994 had development gone better. Unfortunately I can't say the same about the Tim Cook era, where the Mac has transformed from a platform dedicated to creative professionals, power users and developers to a platform that caters solely to casual users and doesn't provide the performance, upgradeability, and expandability that long-time Mac users need. Also, under Tim Cook the Mac has increasingly deviated from the longstanding Apple Human Interface Guidelines that made the Mac such a pleasure to use all these years. While the Mac experience is still miles ahead of Windows and many Linux desktops, it's increasingly not the same as it used to be.