This video showed up in my Twitter timeline today:

steve jobs talking about what happens when the marketing/sales people take over from a 'product' founder is… eerie pic.twitter.com/LQgpaZ6OyU

— Owen Williams⚡️ (@ow) October 29, 2016

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The video is short, and the juxtaposition with Apple this week is almost painful. Apple is not the underdog it once was – and it hasn’t been for some time – and the marketing machine that was so critical to its success is now, I believe, running the show in ways that are holding back the products that it’s creating.

I no longer believe the design team at Apple is innovating to make the best product experience, rather they’re deep in “pure math” territory, exploring the boundaries of innovation itself. I feel like this can go one of two ways. One of these is a future where Apple is a pillar of the desktop and laptop community, one of these is a future where the Mac is both expensive and underperforms.

I fear that we’re heading toward the second future.

The cost equation for the Mac got a shot in the arm last week at the Jamf Nation User Conference, where IBM revealed that the Mac is substantially cheaper to support. 48 hours ago, Apple essentially raised prices on everything in the field. While the MacBook Air remains on sale, Apple is instead pushing a machine $500 more expensive as a “replacement” to that model.

Couple that with a machine that can only handle 16GB of RAM for “battery and performance reasons”, and a total dearth of desktop updates, I’m left with more questions than answers. The first one is: “Why is thinner and lighter always better?” and I can’t come up with an answer that leaves me satisfied.

In the meantime, I’ll likely line up and replace my MacBook pro, maybe buying another cable case from Skooba to hold all the extra dongles I’ll need. Don’t count me as mourning the Mac just yet, but like any friend who’s started to veer off from the path you’re taking together, I’m starting to wonder what’s up over there, and I hope I’m shown to be foolishly wrong sooner rather than later.