I don't agree with the conclusion that they should just have bought more AI chips

Good news would be them strategically repositioning in favor of their mid-90s image. Would be hard, but doable.

Green energy, autonomous devices, openness to tinkering, friendliness, "other companies mess with you and we don't", perhaps some retrofuturism. It wouldn't even be out of character, they sort of hold the window open, with the kind of series on AppleTV they are making, and part of their advertising, and even honestly with their devices being not yet as enshittified.

Just do that for real.

And honestly, Apple is not the worst of these companies. Perhaps they were just worse at baiting.

In general, over years I'm slowly becoming more and more appreciative of Apple. Their advertising is just atrocious and their stuff is very expensive in, eh, pretty outrageous ways (like a charger costing like some devices together with their chargers), but that's pretty open and honest. "We sell you that for our humongous price, we say it's miraculous and magically cool, and it seems like a scam, but you can say no". While with Google and Meta and such they first sell you something looking normal, and then farm and abuse you indefinitely.

So I'd wish for Apple to survive the bubble bursting (for which I hope they don't go the AI way) and become a more general-kind computing company. Maybe hold closer to 50% of personal computing in the world, not the luxury niche they are holding now.

All these tech giants have their own area where they are the absolute worst, and other areas where they're not as bad as some of the others.

Apple sucks on app store restrictions, but on the desktop OS, the respect user privacy more than Google and MS do. Google is the absolute worst on ads, tracking and using search to leverage their monopoly, but they've also made a ton of cool stuff, including Android. MS makes the worst piece of shit OS and forces everybody to use it while they make it worse, but I'm sure there's also something they do right.

but they’ve also made a ton of cool stuff, including Android.

Symbian and Maemo were better.

Also Nokia was the only non-US company of these.

They've just been deprecated to doing it the same way that every other custom operating system has been doing it for a long time. It makes it slower, but it doesn't make it impossible.

If these were seats on a plane, they got bumped from first class down to coach at the very back. They'll still get there. They just won't have the nice leg room and the extra peanuts.

I don't agree with the conclusion that they should just have bought more AI chips

All these tech giants have their own area where they are the absolute worst, and other areas where they're not as bad as some of the others.

Apple sucks on app store restrictions, but on the desktop OS, the respect user privacy more than Google and MS do. Google is the absolute worst on ads, tracking and using search to leverage their monopoly, but they've also made a ton of cool stuff, including Android. MS makes the worst piece of shit OS and forces everybody to use it while they make it worse, but I'm sure there's also something they do right.

Yeah, real shame Maemo never got anywhere. I really liked the idea.

I'm sure there's also something they do right.

VS code continues to be an amazing product. Of course it's Microsoft so it has a confusing name, there is VS code and VS Code Studio which is a different, and terrible product.

VS is itself short for Visual Studio, the first IDE I ever used, and the first MS product I liked. So VS Code Studio means Visual Studio Code Studio.

Why Visual? Because 25 years ago MS was pushing Visual C++, where you would drag and drop visual components together and then figure out where to put the C++ code to make them work.