In 2005 I heartily agreed with John Siracusa. From early 2006 to late 2010 I worked for Apple. Now, I'd have to say that I disagree. True, technology is a tre

In 2005 I heartily agreed with John Siracusa. From early 2006 to late 2010 I worked for Apple. Now, I'd have to say that I disagree. True, technology is a treadmill. What Apple has gotten really good at, though, is moving the treadmill forward instead of running just to stay in the same place. Everyone knows that computers get cheaper, right? See a model you like; wait 6 months; and buy it for 20-50% less. Not with Apple, though. Instead Apple just keeps the price the same and moves the specs up. Same, too, with the technology. While everyone else is out there writing hyper-super-parallel-concurrent-evented-message-passing-functional-object-oriented-metapseudotemplate code, Apple is writing code the same way today that they did in 2000...except this time it's running on the computer in your pocket instead of the tower on your desk. I get it, though. We're engineers. We love design. So we buy Apple kit and we would love to believe that our preferred brand has the same values we do. It certainly did. This is, after all, the company that Woz founded, that employed Raskin and Kay, that still employes Bud Tribble...but I, personally, think that the "glory days" of Apple/NeXT's preeminence in core software are behind them. Of course, UI? UX? Hardware? That's where Apple's engineering focus lies now. Copland 2010 was avoided not because Apple did something about it, but because they changed the rules completely.