l. I do, however, care about their OS, the stability and performance of which has been degrading steadily since the loss of Jobs.

That's just false. OSX stability and performance in 10,10 is far far better than say 10.4-6. Take for example the complexity of the video subsystems required to overlay 3 different screens for retina displays. The video subsystem handling of high performance video cards wasn't finished until 10.4 And wasn't stable or usable then. 10.7 is when what 10.7 does became possible. The memory handling for battery life requires a tremendously complex kernel. 10.10 is advanced over 10.9 over 10.8 and really before that you don't have anything remotely as complex.

So I'm going to throw it out this way. What subsystem is less stable or lower performance today and say 5 years ago? Let's hit your list:

Issues like the keyboard and trackpad freezing

That's a bug that gets fixed soon. Apple had bugs in 10.2, 10.3, 10.4...

Messages (which is now part of the OS) using over 2GB of RAM for its own process while making use of another kernel-level process that manages to eat 5GB (watching kernel_task go from over 6GB of RAM to 1.1GB just by closing Messages is freaking silly),

That is. You are loading something else. Run a diagnostic like etrecheck.

I experienced none of these issues in any version of OS X released while Jobs was active within the company.

There were many more bugs in Job’s day. You sound like you have a worm or something, that isn’t OSX.

Care to give any examples of what was un-balanced about Apple's machines under Jobs

Sure.
The G4 had terrible throughput for memory and hard drives relative to CPU speed. The result was that the machine pulled a lot of no-ops. It was a bad CPU in a period when Intel CPUs were cheap and much more powerful. The G5 was excellent but then Jobs wouldn’t commit to a laptop version so just as his CPU problems were fixed he migrated away.

Another area where Jobs made sacrifices was on his memory sourcing. Apple customers often had to pay 5x or more street price for memory.

2nd or 3rd in every category isn't beating Android. The players are iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry

By 2nd or 3rd I meant compared to individual phones. i.e. HTC One M9, Samsung Galaxy S6, HTC Desire Eye, Motorola Moto X, Lumia 1520

and major apps that exist on both platforms (like Adobe's suite) are routinely found to perform better on Windows.

While the opposite is true on Android vs. iOS. If this were about Tim Cook that shouldn’t be happening.

In the end we disagree that there has been slippage in the software to any great degree. I don’t disagree with your point philosophically: were OSX’s all around experience worse than Windows the hardware wouldn’t make up for that. What I disagree with you on is a matter of fact, that OSX’s experience is worse.

A trusted application is trusted to authorize applications. That's what it means to trust. If you want applications that are only semi-trusted: capability computing, sandboxing, virtual machines... permissions systems are not the way to go.

Well clearly it is not the best OS in 2015. Yet they continued using it for years. Ergo...

Well it requires special permission to get an app that can run execute internal code on the iOS store. They do exist. For example gambit scheme, and I have a calculator with a javascript interpreter... They just want reasonable protections.

OSX app store though is mostly wide open. There are some restrictions, for example sandboxing and use of external services, but mostly the idea is that the App Store for OSX should have 95+% the diversity of OSX applications.

And using the same logic I can get root on any Unix box.
1) Find an application that has root
2) Get it to load external content
3) The new content bypasses all the protections on the box.

Gatekeeper prevents downloaded applications that are untrusted from accidentally being run. It doesn't prevent trusted applications from doing anything.

Apple under Jobs was often a software company where they sold their software in a hardware / software bundle. Apple under Cook is more of a hardware company where software doesn't play as much of a role.

First off Jobs made a lot of sacrifices. There were many things far worse about Apple products during Job's tenure. Cook fixed a lot of the unbalanced aspects that Apple machines weren't particularly good in many ways.

I see Apple's momentum as coming from Cook. iPhone beat Android by being 2nd or 3rd in almost every hardware category: battery life, screen quality, weight, thinness... Software wise the OS and widgets are probably behind Android. I'd say that OSX is behind Windows in most areas. The most important reason people buy Apple is the culture of customer base their demand for high quality experiences leads to better applications. Apple is able to maintain their hold on those customers through the excellent hardware. Apple is able to get almost all the people willing to pay more.

You don't see ads like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
because Apple isn't selling better 1st party applications anymore (though they have become incredibly dominant especially on iPad for 3rd party applications).

I suggest you look at their financial report. Their music revenue is $4b (flat BTW) and other content is $1.7b. That's out of a total of $222.4b in revenue for all divisions.

Maybe it's more they're limiting how many they make in order to make it seem like they're selling more. It's not like they've ever done that before, or anything, right?

No mostly (or ever) they haven't done that before. That would be stupidly expensive for almost no benefit. The numbers will be out in July. Apple is going to want April-June sales to be high not low when they release numbers.

As for hatred, I don't think your comments sounded like you are hating Apple. I just don't think you understand the product line and how Apple is evolving it. Like I said above look at how the Air evolved 2008-2011 that's the pattern they likely follow. The need to get the weight down to make the advantages of OSX for battery life clear, they need to get retina and they need to not lose the $800 price point on the low end. They can't do all those things at once so they have forking lines.

What you're seeing now is the last of Steve's momentum

I don't see that. What I've seen from Apple for the last 6 years or so has been a shift towards massive innovations in manufacturing and logistics and a move away from a focus on "insanely great" software. Manufacturing and logistics is Tim Cook's baby. The 2015 MacBook may not be your or my cup of tea, but I can unquestionably say its the most complex laptop to manufacture on the market today bar none. I can't really think of much that's even close to that level of complexity. The Microsoft Surface 1, and the Chrome Books are about the only product I can think of that's pushing the envelope in manufacturing even close to the degree Apple is.

As far as being useful. In a world in which PC sales have been slipping for 6 years they have grown their sales. The results on marketshare are pretty good. http://cdn.macrumors.com/artic... That graph is the unit numbers. The ASP gap has been growing till it is approaching almost 3x what it is for PCs, and of course in terms of margin Apple has consistently pulled 85-92% of the margin from PCs sales for many years running.

They aren't failing to be useful they are exceptionally useful to end users. That doesn't mean they fit everyone.

It isn't a basic needs laptop. It is a specialized needs laptop: a customer who needs the absolute minimum amount of weight and thin. As for OSX being closer to Windows XP than Windows 8, I'd say that's not true.

Even people who buy luxury for the sake of luxury aren't complete morons and they'll seldom pay more than 2x the price of the "common person's" equivalent version of something, so this isn't even targeted at that crowd.

There is nothing like this. There is nothing at 2lbs that offers anywhere near this level of performance. That's the point. The custom is someone for whom 2 vs. 3 lbs is worth a lot of money. That's the feature they want.

As for sales figures. Apple is currently 6 weeks backordered on the new MacBook. They've sold every laptop they can make for the very least all through this quarter. But the sales figures aren't going to be what's critical. This laptop represents the future of their lower end product. They are going to get all their consumer laptops down to 2lbs over the next few years. The whole thing is R&D for the change to the product line.

I'm not sure an iPhone 4 is a good fit for the average bottom 60%.
The carrier they are using likely has no iPhone support.
There is no iPhone store in their language.
Even if they can get on the store Apple assumes you have a credit card.
The battery is probably shot and around $100 to replace.
Apple doesn't even support it with the current OS.

etc...

The New MacBook is a very expensive laptop for the performance that makes tremendous sacrifices to achieve an almost unparalleled degree of thin and light. That is a luxury good. I'd say this very much like the MacBook Air in 2008, an extremely expensive laptop designed for people with light needs who are willing to spend a lot for thin and light. Given Apple's history I'd assume overtime that the performance of the MacBook becomes comparable to the Air (i.e. they can mostly compensate for the lost pound) and the Air gets dropped.

I know lots of people who paid $4k for the Air when it came out, I can easily see them buying this thing over 1lb less of weight. People still on XP are not buying a $1300-2k laptop, when there are laptops available for $300 with better performance / storage / features.

I doubt that. Apple doesn't make all that much from content in the first place. What percentage of content do you think the bottom 16% purchases? I'd be shocked if it is even 1% at this point. The cost of support, especially in terms of a distraction factor in a company structured to only support a small numbers of products, could easily exceed the value.

That 16% represents the bottom of the market, the people who spend the least on computers. Look at the phone market where Apple is happily catering to the top 15% with no product even available for the bottom 85% (unless you could used and then still nothing for the bottom 60%). Apple has no problem dropping low margin customers. They aren't Microsoft.

People still on Windows XP would be terrible Apple customers. Mostly:

1) They are cheap.
2) They have basic needs
3) Quality of hardware and software doesn't matter much to them. They likely don't care about thin and light.
4) They don't like change.
5) As much as they care they like the Windows pre-Aero interface.

Certainly forced obsolescence is a fair criticism of single vendor. But let's use your analogy of HDTV

In 1936 the British invented the first HDTV, followed by a French model 1in 1949 and a Soviet model in 1958
In 1964 NHK decided to start producing HDTV televisions and broadcasts. They had those going by 1972
During the 1970s several other vendors in other countries got involved
In 1979 the Higher definition study group was created
In 1981 the first USA manufacturer got involved
In 1983 the 1979 was rewritten to include some digital technology
In 1993 the first HDTV broadcast in the USA took place
In 1994 there was field testing in almost 200 sites
In 1996 the first HDTV station came online
In 1998 the first national (coast to coast) HDTV broadcast happened
etc...

Notice the staggering speed of working with standards rather than a single vendor?