Apple is at the first major cross-roads since the passing of its late co-founder Steve Jobs 12
years ago. It finds itself still largely dependent on the product lines and businesses that Jobs left behind. Its Vision Pro has received mixed reviews on launch, while it is also facing several other headwinds including a major lawsuit against what the DOJ claims are its anticompetitive practices.
To be fair, we saw formerly what Apple without jobs did, it was a failure. So one might wonder when the new Apple might run out. The catch being that the iPhone, app store, and iTunes are all indefinite money machines, except maybe iPhone one day. So they had a steak of ever increasingly wildly successful products that culminated in the iPhone and then no mind blowing follow-up, but they don’t need one. Folks may like the narrative that Jobs death coincided with their last big product category though
We also saw Jobs without Apple, also pretty much a failure.
NeXT was successful at being an application for the position of CEO at apple.
NeXT was a mediocre BSD front end and a few interesting Objective-C libraries. Apple’s board of directors pretty much crawled back to Jobs hat in hand after the disasters of Sculley and Spindler.