So much of what Apple has lost over the last 10 years is a lower bar for what counts as good enough.

You see this most obviously in software and marketing - the kinds of decisions where only a few people sign off at the end, and where "good enough" is whatever those few people decide it is. You see it less in hardware and procurement where there's a powerful review cycle and scrutiny at every level of the stack. Work there is more immediately measurable: benchmarks for performance, dollars for cost.

The "vibe" of software, or of a PDF [^1], is much harder to catch that way. There's no benchmark that flags it and most conventional executives aren't drilling down in that level of detail to see it either.

You want distributed decision-making, of course. But that only works well if it's distributed to people who've cultivated their own taste and who will make good calls under pressure. I'm not sure how much of that gets fixed by leadership change at the top. Taste isn't really something a CEO can decree into a 60,000 person org. But I've only heard good things about Ternus, so I'm optimistic. Fingers crossed for a bright new chapter.

[^1]: https://www.apple.com/promo/pdf/US_FY26_Earth_Day_Promo_Tand...