Apple's Skating in the Right Direction, But the Puck is Still Ahead - Open for Business

Apple's leadership transition comes as competitors like Elon Musk's xAI have raced ahead in AI development. Can incoming CEO John Ternus (center) recapture the innovation magic of Steve Jobs (right) after Tim Cook's Vision Pro detour? (Illustration: Timothy R. Butler/Nano-Banana-Pro)">

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Apple's leadership transition comes as competitors like Elon Musk's xAI have raced ahead in AI development. Can incoming CEO John Ternus (center) recapture the innovation magic of Steve Jobs (right) after Tim Cook's Vision Pro detour? (Illustration: Timothy R. Butler/Nano-Banana-Pro)

Jun 17, 2026

Apple's Skating in the Right Direction, But the Puck is Still Ahead

By Timothy R. Butler | Posted at 7:13 PM

With the 2026 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), I’m cautiously optimistic Apple is finally seeing what some of us have been saying for years. Having fumbled its big unveilings since at least 2023, while AI whizzed right past it, a glimmer of hope is emerging. Is it well founded?

The company’s last decade provides the model for why I am optimistic and also why I am cautiously so.

The Puzzle Came Together Before

Consider: Apple started this decade at one of its most focused points ever. WWDC 2020 announced Apple Silicon, the chipmaking project impressive enough that even those now six-year-old first releases remain competitive for 2026 workloads. Impressive in isolation, it is even more so when you consider where the Mac had been mired in the years leading up to that unveiling.

Under the talented, albeit at times myopic, Sir Jony Ive, Apple had forgotten its founder’s guiding sensibility: design is how it works. Ive’s too often design-is-how-it-looks direction produced Macs with too few ports, eschewing useful features like MagSafe charging and HDMI output and good keyboards for the sake of ever thinner, but more frustrating designs. Like a person who begins a quest for a healthful slim down and ends up with an eating disorder, Ive without Steve Jobs’s veto to guide him didn’t seem to recognize when he’d gone too far.

The most infamous aspect of this was the butterfly keyboard introduced initially for a novel ultralight MacBook, but then deployed inexplicably to every Mac. A laptop keyboard ought to feel nice to type on and type reliably. Apple had checked both of those points off for decades until that keyboard. No piece captured the mess that was late-2010’s Apple keyboards better than Joanna Stern’s iconic 2019 Wall Street Journal column that intentionally retained all the keyboard-caused typos to visualize the brokenness. Apple relented with an old design christened with the new name “Magic Keyboard.”

The 2019 MacBook Pro may be pinnacle of all Apple laptop keyboards: a return to scissor switched reliability, travel comfort, a real escape key and a locatable power button fused with the most refined touchbar we were ever given. The touchbar was a missed opportunity to provide a portable Elgato Stream Deck. (Credit: Timothy R. Butler)

The older scissor switch mechanism had nothing genuinely magical about it and yes it had to travel further to work (that’s a feature, not a bug, to anyone who actually types), but it felt magical. Why? Because after a half-decade of slop, this one worked.

Ever since, Apple has resumed its place as producer of some of the best laptop keyboards.

Just seven months before Apple’s 2020 announcement of what would become the M1 processor line, Apple released a new MacBook Pro that was a beautiful mea culpa. The abandoned SD card slot and HDMI port came along with that beautifully magically un-magical keyboard. The company had made good on promises from April 2017 when it had admitted some missteps on the Mac, promises one might note for later reference, came in part via Apple’s Vice President of Hardware Engineering, John Ternus.

By the time 2020’s announcement bore its full 2021 fruit in Apple’s professional line, even the iconic MagSafe charging port — protector of countless laptops from unfortunate falls — had returned in the 2021 MacBook Pros. I’m typing on one of them. Is it chunkier than its predecessors? Yes. But who could complain? It was blazingly fast, functions well and still looked great to boot. Apple was locked in: great industrial design paired with best-in-the-industry chip engineering.

Apple has proven it can do a course correction that doesn’t just return it to its previous form, but exceeded it by any reasonable measure. So optimism right now isn’t mere pie in the sky fanboyism on my part.

The Elusive Search for Vision

But, my caution is also well founded. If Apple had just stayed focused, none of the columns I or others have penned in recent years critiquing the company would have even been warranted. But, in what I can only assume was CEO Tim Cook’s effort to prove, finally, that he too could be a visionary product...