Seems like a good a place as any to chuck in my 2p on this topic.
I was a convertee, like Feek I needed to know everything about my PC and looked upon OSX and Macs with disdain. They weren't "proper" computers. Until I started to use Solaris and the command line at work more and more, then I started using Linux at home and found the experience fell short. So I found myself looking at Macs thinking "that has a decent shell, they look nice and hey you can get Steam on this too!" and for a time it was good.
In fact for about 10 years it was good. I've owned 3 Macbooks, an Air, an iMac, a Mini, a Mac Pro, original iPhone, 3, 3G, 4, 5S, 6S, Apple TV, and a Series 2 watch.
However throughout this period of ownership I found myself getting increasingly irked by how Apple operate, putting aside the obvious "cult of Mac happy clappers" at every keynote and the "one more thingisms" of the brand I couldn't help but notice that beneath the showmanship veneer Apple are unscrupulous operators.
My most notable bug bear is Apple's reliance upon planned obsolesce to drive their sales, the gimping of features on models that can support them including:
- Handoff not working on <2012 Macs, even though the bluetooth cards support the low power features needed to run it.
- BootCamp not updated for Macs <2011 so no chance of running Windows 10. Even though the machines are more than capable of running it.
- Countless iOS features that required the latest model, even though the phones were proven to support it when jailbroken.
Then there's the declining quality of software updates, the never ending saga of declining battery life with each initial iOS update. Most recently I gave in to the incessant nagging to update to iOS 11 took my iPhone 6S that ran for 2 days between charges to just about making through the day. Then removing my ability to revert the phone back to 10.3 which was rock solid stable, which admittedly has always been a policy of theirs but still no less annoying to know that my device is forever less than it once was.
The recent performance throttling for devices that have "declining battery quality" was pretty crass, considering I never saw any throttling when my device was on 10.3 and lasting for 2 days.
My view is that Apple are fine so long as you keep buying their latest and greatest products, anything over 2 years and they actively reduce the functionality and lifespan of your device. Which given their apparently green position of technology production is kind of ironic to say the least.
Not to mention the fact that you've already paid a premium for the device in the first place, I expect more when paying that sort of money. It adds to the growing bad taste in my mouth the the individual items above fostered, in fact any one of the items above in isolation I can handle but over a long period of ownership they start to add up and become too hard to ignore. Don't even get me started about being "brave enough" to lose a headphone jack.
So I sold my Macbook. Bought an HP Elitebook. Windows 10 is pretty good, and VMWare Workstation allows me to scratch my command line itch with Debian etc. Battery life is decent too, and it cost a quarter of what my Macbook cost. Watch is going to the Mrs, and the last piece of the puzzle will be the phone replacement. It'll do for now, but I'm getting more tempted with an Android device each time I'm reminded I need to charge my phone daily again. This is the device I'll be saddest to lose as the iOS interface is the embodiment of "it just works".
The above context in mind and back to the OP, do I think that Apple are losing their touch? Yes, I think they've gone as far as they can under their current leadership and the product development isn't what it used to be. Instead there's the spin of "bravery" removing features and replacing them with dongles, there's the forced upgrade paths to drive repeat purchases, and the slew of quality errors in their software. How many OSX vulnerabilities have been discovered in OSX High Sierra since it's release for crying out loud? Not small ones, big blank password to elevate privileges type ones! Hardware design decisions will always spurn a debate but there's no escaping when the software is full of vulnerabilities.