From 2012: Dan Crow: We've Passed Peak Apple: It's All Downhill From Here

Before we get into the quotes, you know from this headline alone that this is going to be a banger.

I think in hindsight, we will see that Apple's peak of creativity, innovation and leadership was early 2012.

Look, releasing the iPhone and iPad in a 3 year stretch is unsustainable for anyone, so complaining that Apple hasn’t released a third product of that caliber another 2 years later is funny. With the benefit of hindsight, we can of course see things like the Apple Watch, AirPods, and Vision Pro as products that were all big swings and certainly don’t feel like products from a company who is coasting ever downwards.

This paragraph on the introduction of Apple Maps is more interesting:

Apple's success had been all about offering users the best possible experience; suddenly it is willing to give users a clearly worse experience to further its corporate interests - in this case its long-running dispute with Google. We might expect this sort of behaviour from Microsoft, but we don't expect it from Apple.

On the one hand, Apple Maps is a great example of Apple taking a core part of their product in house so that they control their own destiny. This has been a major theme of the Tim Cook era, and I think it’s proven to be a winning strategy for them so far.

On the other hand, this does touch on the biggest area of complaint people seem to have with Apple in 2023, which is that Apple puts their interests ahead of customer needs. Not in every case, of course, but things like prioritizing “Messi Lives Here!” over my actual watchlist on the Apple TV, are annoying and clearly decisions made to benefit Apple’s revenue, not to enrich my experience.

I may be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. But something tells me I'm not.

Sadly, it doesn’t seem like Dan Crow did much tech commentary after this, but I would love to see how his opinions changed (or didn’t!) over time. As I wrote recently, people get to be wrong and being wrong about stuff like this doesn’t make you an idiot.