Can you believe anybody’s still talking about Steve Jobs?

If you ignore its share price, Apple is doing incredibly well under Tim Cook, thanks in large part to the success of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. But its newest offerings, Apple Watch and Apple Music, may be off to rocky starts.

This leads us to ask, once again, whether Apple has lost its spark without Steve Jobs. Is the company as exciting or as innovative under Cook? If Apple Watch can’t get us all to wear smartwatches and Apple Music doesn’t put Spotify out of business, does Apple have what it takes to revolutionize another industry?

Join us as we battle it out over those questions in this week’s Friday Night Fight between Cult of Android and Cult of Mac.

Luke Dormehl (Writer, Cult of Mac): Okay. I’d like to get a few things out of the way up top. This isn’t an Apple doom prediction. God knows we’ve seen enough of these, and I’ve enjoyed watching the predictions fail as the years have gone by and Apple has gone from strength to strength. I know Apple is an enormously successful company, and I don’t see that changing imminently — even with the current China-induced stock price troubles.

But is Apple as exciting a company as it’s ever been? I’m not sure that it is.

I became an Apple fan in the early 1990s, around the time that former CEO John Sculley stepped down. In a lot of ways, Sculley has been treated badly by the history books. He took on a company that was being moderately successful and transformed it into a business which was the most profitable PC company in the world, selling more computers than any other vendor, and with $2 billion of cash reserves in the bank. But he was no Steve Jobs. And Apple, circa 2015, doesn’t have the same level of excitement it had under Jobs, either.

The iPhone business is amazing, but we’ve seen a number of notable hiccups — from quality issues on both iOS and OS X that defy Apple’s classic mantra of “It just works,” to subpar launches like Apple Music. The Apple Watch is doing okay by all accounts, but it doesn’t feel like the next big thing, and nor does an Apple Car.

I love Apple, but marketplace success doesn’t always correlate with quality. And, quality wise, Apple has gone downhill in many areas since Jobs passed away. As a fan, can you genuinely say differently?

Killian Bell (Writer, Cult of Android): I do think differently (pun intended). Although I tend to battle against Apple and its products in these Friday Night Fights, I have to take the company’s side in this one. I think it’s easy to look back at the Jobs era with rose-tinted spectacles, but I believe Apple is as exciting now as it ever has been — and it’s not as if everything was perfect under Steve.

You say Apple Music’s launch has been “subpar,” but I think we should really wait for the trial to end and the paid memberships to begin before we can properly judge that. As things stand, I think it’s off to a good start. Sure, there have been a few hiccups, but it’s been greeted by rave reviews for Beats radio, and many will switch from rival services just to take advantage of its $14.99 a month family plan.

I’ll tell you what was a complete flop, though: Ping. Remember that? That was a product of the Jobs era, and while the idea was… okay, no one was really interested in it past day two. What about the iPod Photo, which was billed as a music player that would let you enjoy your photo collection on the go in stunning 220×176 resolution? No, thank you. The Power Mac G4 Cube? Dead within a year.

Jobs had his fair share of quality controversies, too, what with “Antennagate,” and the complete and utter hell that is iTunes (the application rather than the service). iCloud’s many problems were also present in its predecessors, .Mac and MobileMe, which were launched under Jobs.

I think it’s a hugely exciting time to be an Apple fan. The company has just launched its best iPhones yet, and they’re about to get a big refresh with Force Touch, improved internals, and much better cameras. The iPad is the best tablet money can buy, and with the iPad Pro on the way, I think it’s really going to become a notebook replacement for a lot of people. The Apple TV is also going to become a must-have once it gets an App Store.

As for the Apple Watch, I think it just needs time, like every other smartwatch. It’s a terrific device with some fantastic features — I wear one every day — and as it improves and smartwatches become the norm, it’s going to be hugely successful. As for the Apple Car, how can you not be excited about that?

Luke: You make some valid points. Certainly there were misses under the Jobs era. Some of them were quality based; others, like the failure of my beloved G4 Cube, were more about a failure to catch on with the general public. But you’d be hard-pressed to say that Apple’s not seen an increase in these kinds of challenges in recent years.

It’s still a world more responsive to problems than Android, but we’ve had iOS updates which have completely bricked people’s brand new iPhones. In fact, I think you even wrote about one under the heading “Hey, Apple! What happened to ‘It just works’?”. Apple today is a bigger company than it was under Jobs — in almost every way imaginable.

Hardware for new versions of products like the iPhone have been great, but software has often been another issue entirely. There’s pressure to push out a new OS X and iOS version each year, which has hurt quality along the way. Yes, some of this started under Jobs, but remember also that Jobs was CEO when OS X Snow Leopard came out — promising “no new features” but instead lots of bug fixes.

As I mentioned, I’m also not entirely convinced by the direction things are headed in. Watches and cars seem more like the kind of categories wealthy people want to be a part of; lacking Jobs’ ability to predict what it was that your average user wanted to buy.

In a lot of ways, Tim Cook seems a nicer guy than Steve. But there’s less of the obsessive perfectionism that made Apple products great. They’re still the best tech devices out there, but that says a lot more about the lack of competition than it does about Apple being everything it can be.

Killian: I don’t deny that there aren’t some issues now. The iOS update that prevented the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus from connecting to cellular networks just days after they were released was unlike Apple, and should have been avoided. But what I’m saying is, there aren’t necessarily new problems; there were bugs and failures under Jobs, too.

I do agree that innovation isn’t as spectacular now, but I think smartphones and tablets are at a point where it’s hard to make major changes every year. It would be great to see breakthroughs in battery life and wireless charging and things of that nature, but we just don’t have the technology yet — though I’m sure Apple’s working on it.

I do think Apple is still innovating in big ways when when it comes to the Mac. The new MacBook is an incredibly feat of engineering, and unlike anything else on the market. Sure, it has its flaws, but so did the original iPhone and the original iPod. It’s going to get better and more affordable, and I’ll bet it becomes Apple’s more popular notebook.

The things Apple is famous for revolutionizing — smartphones, tablets, music players — were all in existence before Apple came along and made them better. It’s not going to pick a whole new product category out of a hat and make it a billion-dollar business, and we should expect that. But at the same time, it’s hard to imagine other products it could revolutionize without losing its scope. Perhaps the TV, but profits from TV sets are dire.

I think it’s unfair to expect Apple deliver groundbreaking innovation every year. No company is capable of that. But if anyone can continue to innovate enough to stay ahead, it’s Apple.

Luke:I’ll 100 percent agree with that last point. Again, I’ve been an Apple fan for *counts gray hairs* coming up to 25 years. As much as it might gain clicks, this isn’t me saying Apple will be out of business in ten months. I have no doubt it can continue innovating. I’d just like to see some more of that maniacal focus it had under Jobs. That’s easier said than done but, again, when has that ever troubled Apple?

But let’s leave this one up to our readers. Is Apple exciting you as much as it ever has, or do you think it could do with remembering some of the lessons we learned during the Steve Jobs era? Whatever your thoughts, leave them in the comments box below.

And have a good weekend.

Friday Night Fights is a series of weekly death matches between two no-mercy brawlers who will fight to the death — or at least agree to disagree — about which is better: Apple or Google, iOS or Android?