> Another example of such uninspired CEO that keeps making good quarters but tarnishes his company advantages is Tim Cook.
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> but Tim Cook added $1.7 Trillion to apple's market cap since taking over as chief executive.
Steve was visionary, but Tim has taken that vision farther than anyone ever gives him credit for.
We're 10 years past Jobs and Cook was running quite a bit of Apple even before Jobs passed away. Not even Jobs is prescient enough to have predicted where the market would have gone this far out. He was good at being where the puck was going, but he didn't have a crystal ball.
Apple's valuation doesn't do me any good (or ill!) as a customer. I feel like there are a lot more bugs in Mac OS than there were in the past, and I'd happily trade Apple's market cap for a return to confident OS upgrades.
After having purchased most every iPhone release since launch, with the prior model gifted to family, this year we switched to iPhone-as-a-Service subscription on the Apple Card.
Post shift, Apple moves me out of making a $1300 buying evaluation decision to simply ‘staying current’ for forty bucks a month for the flagship model.
This was available for a while, took a while to break through my sense I should “own” my device each year instead of subscribe to it, but the mental stress of buying new and reselling old, inevitably ending up with some in a drawer (iPhone 6s anyone?) ... the subscription is hassle free for me, recurring revenue for Tim, and shockingly well priced given the convenience.
Imagine what their numbers would look like to Wall Street if he could turn most of their hardware buyers into subscribers...
In addition, under Cook, Apple also made great strides in ecological manufacturing and supplier accountability. And early on, Cook had the courage to fire a highly visible but toxic executive.
Do you have evidence of that? It seems like it is quite the opposite. Apple prefer to destroy not working phones or Macs instead of repairing them. They make sure independent repair shops cannot repair any of their products and design them in a way so that they fail in short space of time, so customers can either pay for repair through the nose or buy a new Mac.
Even Greenpeace acknowledges quite a bit of progress in many respects: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/GG... — keep in mind that they used to picket Apple annual meetings. Admittedly, they still have plenty of criticisms, and several of them echo yours.
Personally, I think "designed to fail" is a downright false charge, and "repairability" is a trickier trade-off than repair advocates make it out to be — how much weight, size, and fragility does the repairability add, and how often is the device in fact repaired?
Somebody should tell the UK Parliament, they need some feedback and Apple cannot spare anybody to clear up this "downright false charge" :
https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/62/environmental-...
There is concern about repairability there. I seem to recall that the UK was a member of a trans-national organization that recently passed tougher repairability legislation, and quit that organization to be rid of all that burdensome regulation.
For the life of me, I can't understand why Apple wouldn't take the UK seriously…
(I'm going by Apple's own claims here, would be interested to hear whether you have information contradicting these claims).
[1] https://industryeurope.com/5-tech-giants-sued-over-use-of-ch...
The complaint [1] is interesting and disturbing. But I'm not convinced it's entirely in good faith. It spends a lot of time expounding on the DRC's sordid history (Whatever you want to blame Apple for, they had nothing to do with King Leopold). It cites extensively from Amnesty's 2016 report on conditions in Cobalt mining [2], but entirely fails to mention Amnesty's 2017 followup report [3] that credits many of the defendants (especially Apple) of having taken significant steps in the right direction since 2016. And the complaint appears to dismiss any positive measures taken by the defendants merely as evidence that their prior bad conduct was knowing.
Of course, a company improving their conduct does not mean they cannot be found liable for their earlier conduct, but I would not take this complaint as an objective assessment of the defendants' current cobalt sourcing practices.
[1] http://iradvocates.org/sites/iradvocates.org/files/stamped%2...
[2] https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/AFR6231832016ENGL...
[3] https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/AFR6273952017ENGL...
That being said I'm also very impressed with Satya Nadella, and have recently been using Windows more and more again, something I thought would be pretty unlikely (to put it mildly) a decade ago when Ballmer was at the helm. I'm pretty excited about future products from both companies.
Jobs refused conventional treatment to treat his cancer until it was too late. He placed heavy emphasis on oriental mysticism.
I think there was some initial success in attaching vitamin d to some drugs to bypass the "firewall", but it was still hard.
Pancreatic adenocarcinoma is the fast killer.
It's funny how Apple has often been exhorted by industry observers to make large acquisitions, and instead has done quite well with smaller ones. Beats has been a commercial success. PA Semi (dating back to the Jobs era) was the foundation to a hugely successful VLSI design division. The success of Siri is a bit more disputed, but it's playing an important role in many products.
Apple's products are demonstrably supported in software far longer than other manufacturers. People rate the physical build quality of their products very high as well.
It seems that people like the benefits and features of Apple hardware enough to overlook the problems with self-repairability.
And regarding the app store, maybe because you're in the industry you think it's a generally big problem, because you're affected. But it's a 1% privilege issue to most of the world.
It seems Apple is doing enough right that its value is climbing.
I have seen that headline every year since 1984. Every single year.
Though with the size and cash reserves, it's more likely they get "doomed" the way Microsoft was in the last 10 years (still is, perhaps).
Remember when TV and radio repair shops were a thing? RadioShack in the US or Tandy in Europe? Kids these days don’t...
That has been some of my view as well. But some of their approach have changed.
The old Apple was about making something great, charge a premium. That is about the same with current Apple. Except its whole Services Strategy reeks of money grabbing. There is nothing about Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness that fits the definition of great.
I'm not sure how you'd consider Apple Music a money grab but are ok with iTunes music purchases? Basically they were expanding their business to follow the industry trend of streaming music instead of buying it. iTunes has been a revenue stream at Apple since the iPod was born.
Also, Apple selling supplemental services and software that are... not amazing is not new either.
The big one? iTunes. For a few years it was great, but for a long long time it was just a giant mess. iHome, iMovie (Garage Band is pretty rad), iPhoto (Photos is way better), Mobile Me, Ping didn't even last 2 years I don't think. Most of those products were meh at best, they did the basic thing they needed to do and that's about it.
The big difference between Apple then and Apple now is they have the money to contract out for their own content.
> Apple TV+, Apple Fitness that fits the definition of great.
Apple TV+ has a paltry selection because they didn't go out and buy a huge external library of content to bootstrap themselves. The content they have is—Decent and getting better. They know this and there is a reason they aren't really charging for it yet.
Apple Fitness doesn't even exist so not sure how you can criticize it.
Yeah, it's all a "Money Grab", they are growing the business, that's what companies do. Fortunately all of this stuff is optional. You can enjoy your computer/ phone/ tablet without any of it. IMO the only egregious "money grab" is their paltry 5GB free iCloud storage. Considering that's the best and for many only way of backing up their $1000 phone with their life stored on it, that's messed up.
How are you working out "most successful"? Beats aren't rated particularly highly apart from by label-followers; while blinkeredness has always been a notable criticism of Apple product appraisal, it did in the past occasionally lead the field - that's not at all obvious with Beats etc.
Sales. How else do you measure success of a consumer electronics product?
> Beats aren't rated particularly highly apart from by label-followers
While Beats haven't been highly rated by audiophiles, they are popular and sound quality and in particular Bluetooth performance has improved significantly under Apple.
AirPods... well they are AirPods. They are might well be the most universally loved product in Apple's product line right now. Maybe the most loved consumer electronics product on the market right now.
There are clearly many measures of success. It's best if you mean best-selling maybe just to say that, as it may be important to salespeople but not so much to (say) end users.
[Airpods...]Maybe the most loved consumer electronics product on the market right now.
That sounds more like a subjective or emotional claim than one measurable, and that's part of the problem with Apple in particular (though not only Apple) as I've already mentioned; the seeming lack of ability of its champions to consider it's products in a reasonably neutral way.
To an extent, that's a compliment to the way it has built it's brand over time, but it means it's important to bear it in mind when judging rather sweeping superiority claims.
People have been spewing nonsense like this for decades. As if customers being happy with a product is a worthless concept.
The AirPods are successful because people love them. When AirPods were first launched, they were widely panned and people laughed at the design, but everyone who bought them loved them. I could go into details about why, but it's irrelevant, if they hadn't been so well liked, they wouldn't be the best selling headphones on the market.
See also, Apple Watch.
More emotion.
As if customers being happy with a product is a worthless concept.
No, customers not being able to look at things with a reasonable sense of perspective and ability to judge things reasonably impartially is to be borne in mind when considering sweeping claims. Somewhat different.
Steve Jobs: We are still Better!
Bill Gates: Does it Matter?
Time will tell.
Everybody of us used to be a huge apple fanboy, now every one of us hates them with a passion.
They completely ignored their customers for the iPhone money grab. Their hardware and software used to be synonymous with quality, nowadays their shoddy quality has become a meme at work.
"Oops reboot." - "What did you expect, it's a mac."
We're looking for the door, and slowly started to introduce windows machines. We were shocked how fast computers got without apple catching up.
Apple used to he one of the pillars of our productivy, nowadays it's a liability.
And from a developer perspective, they murdered their own App ecosystem.
Mac software used to be really really good. But who do you expect to write great apps for 70ct per sale. That's just ridiculous. Also, why should I get an iPad pro, if I can't even write software on it.
They could've dominated the PC market if iPad Os was actually a real OS.
I doubt that apple can keep its brand relevant without opinion leaders like design professionals.
I mean, c'mon, even Ive left.
Apple is dead, it's only a matter of time for the rot to bring it down.
I know a fair number of developers and most of them still use Macs. Not because they are fan boys, but because MacOS still sucks less than Windows.
For me and likely many, OS choice is a pragmatic thing and for the moment MacOS is the least bad option. It's going to be interesting seeing what happens with the new CPUs which have the potential to push the Mac ahead of the pack in terms of price/ performance as well.
> I mean, c'mon, even Ive left.
Ive is 54 years old. He's was at Apple for ~26 years when he left. I have no idea how wealthy he is at this point, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's a billionaire based on his position and likely large stock option grants in the 00s.
You are a designer, how many years would you put in cranking out designs for mass consumption consumer electronics after you were a many times over millionaire? How many black aluminium iPhones would you design? Another 40 years worth?
About your last point, it would be every designer's dream to work in a company with as powerful a brand as Apple, with as big a war chest and as global a reach for massive adoption. Yet Ive left, perhaps due to feeling that Apple has drained itself of ideas and doesn't have any concrete plans in future. FWIW, most of its recent products were envisioned when Jobs was alive.
But I have a Ryzen 3950X desktop with a real GPU (RTX 2080) running Windows and Linux, for when I am not portable.
Same dotfiles for all, any operating system these days has the terminal + browser story covered, if you then use VS Code and languages like Go or Rust, you don’t really need to care what the OS is.
Getting religious over any one platform is a waste of time IMO.
The issue with Macs for me is not the usability of the OS (apart from the lock in that Apple tried to do), but because of its irreparability. Spilt a few dropfuls water on your PC while using? Tough luck, gotta go to the Apple Care centre and wait till they fix it in a week or more. Meanwhile once I accidentally spilt water on my ThinkPad, I just disconnected everything, left it to dry for a day and voila! All of my data was preserved, no issues at all. Another time, I accidentally dropped the ThinkPad from my desk, yet it still works as good as new. Even if some issue were to happen to it, I can be assured of getting out-of-warranty support anywhere in the world - heck, I've had an old Dell repaired at the bloke's who runs a computer shop in my grandfather's village in rural India.
Another gripe I have is with Mac's updates. People complain about Windows updates, but it just takes an hour or two tops if it's a big one, and can be done on restart. Compare that to Mac - last year, Catalina took more than 10 hours on my Mac. Those are wasted hours of productivity, and it's always the same story with Mac every year.
Gamers who use Windows and devs using Unix seem not to mind.
As an aside, I have almost the same setup as you(just waiting for the 5950x). Probably the most bang for buck setup for devs.
I completely agree that it's still less bad, but look at the language you're using. It's not that MacOS is a great platform, it's just less bad than the other options. It had a great starting position from which it declines. It's a lot worse than it used to be and it continues to decline, so the trend and outcome are clear.
> How many black aluminium iPhones would you design? Another 40 years worth?
EXACTLY!
The iPhone is now 14 years old. The iPod lasted 6 years until it got replaced with the iPhone.
Apples great advantage used to be that they competed with themselves. It was the Macintosh Team vs. the Rest of Apple for example. The Macintosh was allowed to completely cannibalise all other Machines, the iPhone was allowed to completely canibalise the iPod, the iMac replaced the Cube and was allowed to completely cannibalise most tower macs.
They didn't create a huge product portfolio trying to balance features so that they all sell equally well, crippling some for the survival of others (e.g. where's the iPad Pro with XCode, or a MacBook with LTE). They tried to make the best product that would revolutionise the markets, even if it would kill their other products. Because the Products were front and center, not the profits.
If apple was still apple, we wouldn't have Macbooks anymore. We'd all use iPad Pros with proper software and keyboards that can balance them on your laps.
We probably wouldn't use iPhones either, we'd simply have Airpods, an appleWatch, and an optional larger screen that you slide into your shirt pocket or your wallet, or carry as a pocket mirror. Doing 90% of interactions through Siri (which is also 8 years old now, ancient by computer standards, still worse than what it used to be, because apple wants to save money on compute).
Why would Ive leave if he had the power to shape that future.
Neither of these extremes are healthy attitudes. It's a company, making machines. That's all there is to it.
That's something Nadella hasn't even managed, let alone Ballmer.
More seriously, I shouldn't have put the comparison to Nadella in there at all. They are both great CEOs.
Cook probably wouldn't have ever been a good fit for Microsoft. His expertise is in physical products logistics.
Nadella is a great CEO.
Cook is a great CEO.
They've both done a good job running their respective companies. Which is better is endlessly debatable.
Since Satya took over, MSFT stock has been soaring... You can't deny the evidence. That's 100% clear
People wrote off the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad as gimmicks. Even the Mac was written off as a toy.
It's the ultimate hubris to assume you know more than the millions of people who buy a given product and enjoy using it.
https://fortune.com/2019/08/06/apple-airpods-business/
I don't think you can characterize that as a business failure.
Comments like this make zero sense to me. Apple might be better if Jobs was still alive. But without a time machine, and potentially better medicine, that's not an option.
Under Cook Apple:
- Increased profitability and market share massively.
- Created the most successful watch brand in the world.
- Turned Beats into Beats + AirPods, the two most successful headphone brands in the world.
- Massively increased Mac, iPhone, iPad, install base.
- Avoided the sort of ridiculous cash burning acquisitions to inflate growth Ballmer was guilty of.
Apple has a bunch of mis-steps under Cook, but none of them have had long term company damaging impact. Many of the things people beat Cook up over were actually things Jobs was as bad/ worse with. For example almost all the App Store policies everyone hates were created under Jobs. Jobs was also far more protective and litigious.
Cook isn't Jobs, since Jobs is dead the comparison is pointless. Cook has done better than the vast majority of CEOs who have taken over successful brands. Apple is doing just fine.