This shows that this is complete nonsense.
We could break up Apple into a hardware and software company and little would change in this respect.
That is…not at all what this shows. Just because software engineers writing a file system don’t know what the final industrial design is going to be like doesn’t mean there aren’t people fully responsible for end user experience.
Keep in mind that this kind of decide would be under development for many years, if you can keep the idea a secret until launch you’ll be years ahead of your competitors. But if it leaks your advantage is gone.
Uh, what? This makes no sense. It's not like the entire hardware and software teams were totally firewalled. Obviously higher ups and managers were in both circles and coordinated the development of both.
This is imho a better way of building things than having everything completely integrated in a single company. A fourth company could do the same thing as X and build an alternative iPod. And so could a fifth, etc.
