You can argue that a lot of Steve's design decisions were questionable rich Corinthian leather skeumorphism, lickable Aqua widgets, brushed aluminum window title bars, but he owned them. I have been in design meetings with Jony, and Scott Forstall, and many others whose decisions were micromanaged by Steve at every step. People are commenting this post and saying it is speculation, and until someone who directly was involved in these discussions shows up to comment, I suppose it is. Ive is gone and every one of those decisions has been reversed or at least significantly amended. It was about shaving off a small amount of volume. Personally I don't believe this was about forcing users to pay for upgrades primarily. Replaceable RAM and SSD being lost is still painful. You were better off charging from the right (IIRC) rather than the left. Worst of all, it was the loss of the much-beloved MagSafe. The USB-C cable situation was and continues to be a nightmare as different cables support different subsets of data, power and video and, worse yet, different versions of each of those. USB-C only was a philosophical move rather than a practical one that forced people everywhere to carry dongles. The butterfly keyboard was Ive shaving off 0.5mm of the width for a worse user experience with a higher production cost and less reliability.

Touch Bar? This was nothing more than adding expense to raise the ASP (Average Selling Price) of Macbooks, that had fallen precipitously low from a shareholder perspective because of the superb value-for-money proposition that was the 13' Macbook Air.

The 2016 wasn't leadership, it was Johnny Ive without Steve Jobs bringing him back to reality.

Industrial strength macbook pro covers