Why Apple Fell Off: They Lost Taste!
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My iPhone does not work. I'm sorry. I'm just going to say it. Okay. I don't know what happened. You upgraded your software. What happened? You're on iOS 18. It doesn't work. The phone bricks constantly. My photos app doesn't work. It is just really bad. And I think for a company of this scale, I don't understand how it does not go through a more complicated test harness that catches all of this. There's no arbiter.

of taste anymore, who is the backstop. - So I think taste is great if you have it, but there's only so many people on the planet that are gonna have cutting edge taste and be right. If you don't have taste, what most tech companies do is they use data. Data is something that's approachable and leverageable. Because Apple has the antibodies to using data to measure success with the user experience, to measure whatever success. - Hmm.

If you subtract taste even by a bit, you don't have the scaffolding that every other company would use. And so you see the worst of both worlds. That's a great take.

You go off the rails. You think that what happened is like when Steve Jobs isn't there and Johnny Ive isn't there, there's still a bunch of folks that probably think they have taste, but the real taste folks left and there's really no scaffolding left. The scaffolding you had at Facebook Meta, obviously, or the Google uses would catch some of this stuff without a doubt, like no doubt about it. You know that users are less thrilled and they'd use things less and you'd fix it.

And maybe even you take that to a stream, you never develop taste. Like I could argue that about Google or Meta. They don't really have taste. If you don't have that backstop, if the taste attracts even 10%, not all the way down, you're just not going to catch this stuff. And I think there's only like how many people in the world really have cutting edge technology user experience taste? I don't know too many. I would fund them right away. Brian Chesky might have it.

If I'm being really insecure, I would want to say, oh, yeah, no, we had a lot of taste at Facebook back in the day. But actually, we had so much scaffolding around data, probably because intuitively, we knew that that was way more reliable for us.