But if Apple designs at its best when attending closely to details like those revealed in the construction of its spaceship headquarters, then presumably the details of its products would stand out as worthy precedents. Yet, when this premise is tested, it comes up wanting. In truth, Apple’s products hide a shambles of bad design under the perfection of sleek exteriors.

Take Apple’s late-2016 MacBook Pro, its latest flagship laptop. The new model ships only with USB-C ports. But all of Apple’s current devices, including the iPhone 7 and a rechargeable Bluetooth keyboard and mouse come with USB-A cables, which cannot connect to the new laptop. A replacement cable can be had— for $20. Over time, this problem will work itself out as USB-C replaces USB-A entirely. But if good design is in the details, why should anyone spending thousands of dollars on a supposedly well-designed machine have to wait on the details?

The iPhone is no better off. Starting with the iPhone 5S, first released in 2014, Apple adopted a software-controlled fingerprint sensor mounted on the home button. Known as Touch ID, the feature allows users to authenticate to unlock the phone, download products from the App Store, and make payments at participating retailers with Apple Pay. But even the slightest disturbance on a finger makes Touch ID unreliable. Washed your hands recently? Ate a banana? Dug in the dirt of the garden? Touched something too warm, or too cold, for too long? Good luck authenticating with your fingerprint. A mere inconvenience when unlocking the phone, but Apple Pay won’t work at all without Touch ID. So fat chance using that new digital wallet on a rainy day, or after tactilely interacting with worldly substances.

And what about autocorrect? As funny as it once was to guffaw over its foibles, the feature hasn’t become smarter, so much as its users have become more acclimated to managing its errors when writing and reading smartphone-composed messages. How much typing has become retyping, correcting corrections. One of Apple’s solutions to the problem, revealed in a 2016 patent filing: just to punt, highlighting corrected words and inviting an interlocutor to “request clarification.”

Likewise, the larger, 4.7-inch screens offered since the 2014 iPhone 6 made reaching the edges of the screen with one palm difficult, even for users with large hands. Apple’s solution, dubbed Reachability, was an awkward one: double-tapping the home button would lurch the whole screen down for easier address.

Some Apple fanatics will blame these more recent misfortunes of design on the vacuum created by Steve Jobs’s death. After all, his tight control over the company’s products was legendary. But this explanation isn’t sufficient. After all, Apple’s design chief Jony Ive, who is considered to have taken over Jobs’s design dogmatism, has remained in charge of the company’s design efforts throughout Tim Cook’s tenure as CEO. And moreover, Apple products’ inattention to detail in design was already easy to see during the Jobs era anyway.