>> "My theory is that a lot of the really experienced engineers (the one who started with NEXT and OpenStep) left when they were rich after the iPhone stock jump."

While possible true I think the real issue is resources being spread too thin. Remember they had to delay the release os OS X one year as all their engineers were working on iOS? Now they're doing yearly releases of both OS's. I'm sure they've hired more engineers but pre-iOS there were probably lots of engineers who had been working exclusively on OS X for years and were able to maintain quality. New people take time to get up to speed.

I agree. I don't think this is a Steve Jobs thing at all. In fact, I think post Steve Jobs Apple actually pays a lot more lip service to better software than they did before.

I simply think the attempts to build stuff in common with iOS is taking its toll.

Aren't you contradicting yourself? If post-Jobs they only pay lip service to quality but with Jobs they actually took action, doesn't that suggest Jobs may have been a positive influence on quality?

I think the action they take is about the same. They pay more lip service these days. I wouldn't be surprised if they are actually putting more work into better quality these days, but stuff is just more complex (e.g., everything is cloud based. Imagine OSX today, except running MobileMe, .Mac, etc. as the cloud backend instead of iCloud, which while it has its issues, is way better than those disasters).

Ah ok... maybe you have a different usage, but "lip service" is used to indicate "all talk, no action". So paying more lip service to something means they're churning out more empty words without the activity to back it up.