HP had been making bad decision after bad decision for a while long before this happened. HP laptops were a joke and loaded with bloatware, etc. There was clearly nobody who cared about the user experience at all. It made Apple's job very easy.
I would make the argument that they run a much better PC business now than they did back then.
Back then they had a rough reputation on product quality, while now I’d say they are the premier high volume brand with a pretty difficult to beat value proposition. They have a wide range of products where none of them are miserable.
yeah, this whole post feels super revisionist to me - HP was a bad company making bad decisions and awful consumer technology products for a long time before the touchpad disaster. everybody knew HP buying palm was going to be the death of palm.
or at least, everybody except HP knew that.