I use most of what Apple makes. Their hardware design is top notch. Their iOS and OS X systems are better than the competitions. Nobody beats them at retail or operations. Their service was always pretty good, but I think it's improving.
After that, things get dicey. Consider iWork ...
C’mon Apple, upgrade Numbers! | ZDNet
… Numbers performance is anything but speedy. In fact, it’s abysmal. I have a relatively tame no-formula five column table with 6000 rows and changing a value in a single cell requires 20 minutes to update the graph. That’s 20 minutes – not 20 seconds. With all the processing horsepower of a MBP, that’s absurd...
I'm amazed performance is that bad, but I've never done anything serious with Numbers.app. I have done a bit more with Pages.app, enough to suspect it doesn't scale well either. Overall iWork is an excellent start -- that needed a major follow-up in 2011.
Reading this, I thought about the other Apple products I use. The latest release of iPhotos is dismal. Aperture doesn't seem to try to compete for the pro market any more. Final Cut Pro is being abandoned by power users.
Their bundled apps are similarly miserable. ICal. iChat. Address Book. It's a veritable Hall of Software Shame. Safari is stabilizing again, but its performance issues have driven power users to Chrome on OS X.
The only Apple product that seems to rule its niche is iTunes.
Really, Apple is no better at applications than it is at Cloud services. If it didn't own the OS, none of its products would survive in the marketplace.
This is a Steve Jobs legacy. Tom Cook can't do worse. I'll close my eyes and cross my fingers and hope Cook's Apple can do better.