Sorry if this has already been said and I missed it. I'm coming late to this convo.
I think part of the nostalgia people talk about isn’t actually nostalgia for skeuomorphism or the “old Apple vibe” so much as nostalgia for having a tyrant (more or less) who could just say “No.” Jobs obviously wasn’t prefect, and he definitely made mistakes, but he also had centralized authority and the willingness to correct course instead of doubling down. And, it had a tendency to get it right it really important ways. That alone is rare.
When Microsoft Stores started popping up near Apple Stores, I was an Apple employee. We’d joke about how different the philosophies were and compare it to the company as a whole. The Apple Store layout existed because Steve and Ron Johnson were deciding what was best for the customer (it's still a for profit, what's good for the customer is good for the company). The Microsoft Store felt more like each internal division got floor space based on its contribution to profit margins — Xbox gets X percent, Office gets Y percent, etc. I really wouldnt have been surprised to find tapped of quarterly square footage changes.
Apply that same method to software and it still tracks. A big reason quality has slipped is that no one inside Apple seems empowered to just say “No.” No one wants to disappoint a customer group or kill a feature for the sake of a cleaner, more cohesive experience. Instead they try to be everything to everyone.
I was a big Shake user back in the early 2000s. It killed me when they axed it, especially because it was so much better than competitors at the time. But the decision made sense (to Steve I guess, not to me), they were willing to disappoint a very dedicated group to focus on other priorities. I’m not convinced they’d do that today. Modern Apple would ship justify it not having to be rock solid, as long as it existed, so we'd get “Shake X” with a "modern" UI and half the depth, the way Final Cut Pro today barely resembles the rock-solid, reliably boring tool it used to be.
And to be fair, not all of this is self inflicted. Regulatory pressures matter. I’m not trying to start an “EU bad / DOJ bad” thread, but some required accommodations absolutely compromises the experience. Still, a lot of this comes from Apple deciding to compete on their competitors’ terms. They’ve started chasing specs instead of experience.
Back in the day, the whole “megahertz myth” argument boiled down to a simple question, "if your faster CPU feels slower, who cares about the number?" Apple didn’t try explaining pipeline depth, cache behavior, OS integration, or compiler optimizations to regular customers. They just said, “Which one works better?” Now the tone feels more like the PC world Apple used to mock, “Your specs are amazing, so if you’re unhappy, maybe you’re the problem?”
