A week doesn't go by without me seeing Steve Job's name in some click-bait headline and inasmuch as the author has identified current problems with Apple we can add the cult of Jobs to that list.
Yes, of course, Jobs had amazing charisma, and bringing Apple back from the brink of bankruptcy with well designed products by Johnny Ive deserves its legend. But as the novelty of these products wear off (as they should) Apple still strives to distinguish itself (and continue to charge its premiums) by designing superior hardware. The hardware market is somewhat saturated, but since the tech is always improving, planned obsolescence means we get to take advantage of superior tech and better products every few years.
The real growth market is the cloud and internet-of-things, and I think the author got it right by imagining Jobs describing the watch as a product for the "personal universe". Tethering to an iPhone is the first step to tethering to the Cloud. Apple is still trying to figure out the cloud, and they keep stumbling, and the celebrity leak (of which nothing was said to a room full of celebrities), and the live stream screw up are the latest examples. Also, egregiously, their indifference to producing a responsive website. They're still a hardware company, and the hardware, combined with their tightly controlled OS X / Unix based software, provide a solid platform for the design of superior software, by others.
The first iPhone was severely limited and it didn't become the democratized smartphone until after the App Store and the 3G, that is to say, after they crowdsourced software development. The watch seems like the iPhone 2G and the Nano watch hack as revised by Ive. I don't want this version, but I'll probably want the one after the next, when its twice as thin, and Ive makes another pompous video extolling its bullshit (I can't have been the only one rolling my eyes at the "horological experts" and the "conferring on how different cultures care about time" ... the clock was perfected years ago).
The thing about Apple is that they keep making the Modernist Future come true - handheld communicators, tablets, and now walkie-talkie watches. Tim Cook is proud of the fact that they pulled off the Dick Tracy finally, and who cares whatever Samsung did a year ago. What they really need to pull off next are the holograms.
It just seems to me as well that to everything there is a season, and Apple has had a glorious turn of the century. It integrated itself with youth culture, but do you think the kids of the 2030s will still crowd Apple retail stores, presuming they still exist? Or will they see the brand as that of their parents, and thus lame.
My greater point though is that Jobs is dead and let him rest in peace, and let Apple grow beyond Jobs, and don't worry if one day in about twenty years you hear some kid say Apple is lame. Apple did that to Sony, and presumably some startup out there now, or about to be created, might do that to Apple.