What the heck is going on at Apple?

I don't know if it's only because he left, but there are stories about how bad he was in his position for such a long time. If that's true, Apple must be blamed for keeping him there--until he voluntarily left. WTF?

TBH I don’t know much about the Mac eco except that I have been using a couple of MacBook Pro for work for the recent 5 years. My humble experience says hardware is easy but software is hard. Might be counterintuitive but that’s honestly what I felt.

With hardware there are only so many sanely quantifiable ways someone might use, abuse, or hack up your product. And you don’t have to care about some or all of them. Someone might desolder an Apple silicon chip successfully and do something neat with it, but they’re unlikely to use it to power an MRI machine.

But software - even inside the business that makes an application people will still find entirely surprising, realistically unpredictable ways to use it. Let alone the customers/users/tinkerers.

At a former place I worked we had one customer who was smart enough to be technically correct about how our software worked to use it in the most insane manner any of us had seen, and which no one had ever contemplated. Not even in a way that was sane to test manually or with automation. (I’m being a bit vague because it’d be very identifiable broadly and specifically.) Eventually we had to say “yes you can use it this way, but you’d end up paying far more than you should and the experience is going to be awful.” (Even sales agreed on the former!)