Sure. Tim Cook was great at driving costs down and selling more devices and services.

Design is how it works, not just how it looks. Apple has focused much more on the looks instead of functionality and usability since Cook took over. You can even see it on Apple’s website. It’s looks flashy and elegant, but finding technical information is a hassle. The user interface is optimized to look clean and elegant in screen shots, not for usability.

I recently used an older Mac and was delighted with using it.

macOS has gotten noticeably worse in many aspects. The Human Interface Guidelines are often ignored. Some system applications like Disk Utility were rewritten with less features than before. QuickTime only has a fraction of the features of QuickTime 7. Hiding UI elements like scrollbars, excessive transparency made usability worse. The new System settings are a convoluted mess compared to the old one. The way permissions and app notarization are implemented is user hostile, while giving only marginal security improvements.

Also on the technical side it has been meh. Swift if a good programming language but it suffers from endless feature creep. Compile speed and debugging is still worse than Objective-C.

Apple used to dogfeed new APIs in house first for a few years and then open it up once it was working. They have changed this completely. New APIs are first introduced for public use while in an unfinished state.

SwiftUI being a major example. It’s a giant framework introduced with the idea of being cross platform between all of Apple’s platforms. However, it hasn’t managed to do that. SwiftUI is different on all of them. It even makes it harder to write proper Mac apps. All while being much slower, more buggy, and more limited than UIKit and Appkit.

Or look at the options for scripting and automation. Shortcuts is cross platform. However it’s limited and can’t do everything that’s possible with Automator, AppleScript, and shell scripting. It also doesn’t integrate with the existing Services menu in macOS. The share menu still feels kind of alien on macOS.

iPadOS is held back by lots of limitations. For example the file manager is a joke compared to Finder on the Mac. It’s still bogged down by design decisions that were made for the first iPhones that had extremely limited memory and no swap. The windowing and multitasking are clunky and inelegant.

Liquid Glass is so bad usability wise, the guy who lead it left the company.

The yearly releases of major versions for operating systems led to a less stable platform. Every year millions of developers spend time to test adjust to the new version. This means they can’t work ok features or other bugs. This has lead to lots of abandoned software especially on iOS, that could still work if Apple didn’t break stuff every year.