David McManus may be falling out of love with the other big Apple...

I have a confession to make which I suspect to regular readers of this column may be about as revelatory as those adages regarding the Pope and bears. For about the past 15 years I have been teetering on the edge of being an Apple fanboy.

That is to say that I have generally bought into that company’s new products and software, while managing to keep just enough of a critical eye on it to avoid going full-on, unquestioning fanatic.

It just so happened that I started a new job which provided me with an Apple Powerbook at about the same time as the first iPod was introduced. The double whammy of the two was enough to set me off on a journey that has taken a mostly clear path and cost me a small fortune in the process.

I was quite late to the Apple party. The hardcore fans had been worshipping at the company’s doors ever since it launched the first Mac (then still sporting the full Macintosh moniker) way back in 1984 but to an already unashamed computer and gadget geek, those two sleek and desirable objects seemed to have been sent back from the future; they really were like nothing else around at the time.

Since then my habit has seen me embrace each new line of Apple computer, music device and phone that has come on the market and it is a technological leaning that I have handed on, both literally and philosophically, to my daughter who this year set off for university armed with a Macbook, iPad and iPhone in her study arsenal.

Now, I am not about to fall into the trap of commentary that has gone before me which decries that Apple’s demise is imminent. That would be a foolish thing to say about the world’s most profitable company that is well on its way to becoming worth $1 trillion.

However, as someone with a decade and a half of full immersion in its output, I do feel legitimately poised to suggest that for me at least, the veneer is starting to wear off in patches that are becoming increasingly and more rapidly apparent and it is hard not to coincide that decline with the death of Steve Jobs. He was known for his laser-like attention to detail. He would constantly reject entire product lines for reasons that anyone else would never even consider relating to design aesthetics and ease of use.

There is no doubt that it was the rigid focus on these two philosophies that brought Apple the stratospheric rise in success that it enjoyed over the first decade of the new millennium .

For me things started to get a little shaky underfoot with the release of iOS 7 in 2013.

The radical new design of the iPhone and iPad operating system introduced a much-needed freshening up of an interface that had become old and stale. Out went the 3D buttons, shadows and real world analogies of faux wood, leather and baize and in came an aggressively different look of flatness and fluorescence which swept away all the interface hints that had built up for years in the minds of its users.

It was a daring change in direction but did it pay off and was it a sign of things to come?