I'd love to be confident that the company's strategy is sound enough to keep the same long-term goals from that far back, but I don't think I'm sure enough to make strong assumptions about what the overall motivations of products launched in 2025 are from his comments in 2012. I do think that it's a plausible explanation, but there's plenty of room for humility in attempting to interpret whether intent has changed in the light of over a decade of new circumstances that may or may not have been expected.
That’s how privately owned companies with BDFL founders still running them operate.
No shareholders. No dopey stock market magazine articles. No quarterly “did you make the line go up? why not?” reports. You can execute on a 10 or 20 or 50 year vision when youre beholden to only your customers, your staff, and yourself and not a pack of rabid wolves.
All of their hardware released since then seems to be aligned with this concept and they have clearly put a huge amount of R&D and funding into this approach.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18996377