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Angela Ahrendts Departing Apple in April, Deirdre O'Brien to Oversee Retail and People

Wow. I did not see this coming at all. It’s kind of shocking. I think she did a pretty damn good job. Regardless who is in charge of retail, the stores are going to be crowded and you’re going to have to wait. That depends on where you live and what time you’re showing up.

Apple Retail for the majority of customers is great. Can’t tell that to some of the folks on this forum though....

I wonder where she’ll go next. She’ll barely be around to see the opening of Carnegie Library and the new Fifth Avenue.
 
Jumping ship while the stocks still have a decent value... Final Fantasy XI, I mean iPhone 11 + iOS 12+1 (13 would be a bad luck version number) will be the next nail in the coffin of the "I never hear you unless it is a PR mess" company that Apple is becoming. So much happiness you gave me Apple, so sad you shifted to care more about investors than users. Happy users will pay a lot more than unhappy ones... let's bet how many more jump away before iPhone 11 is announced?. So sad...
 
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It's pretty much taught in B school these days if you are at a firm more than 4 years and not making any upward move you pretty much have "loser" tattooed on your forehead and are done so and you better move on. She did. And at five years with 8 figures in vestments.
 
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Abazigal said:
I bet Ahrendts felt she had accomplished what she set out to do. It was a very creative overhaul. She probably had the time of her life. Now we seem to be moving much more into optimization of operations. (Sustainment, maintenance, optimization.) That may be less attractive.

Most people nowadays change positions every 3-5 yrs. She’s probably ready for a new challenge. Given her comment about missing fashion, maybe this creative freedom reenergized her and she’s ready to go back to the field she enjoys most. And given the optimization of operations stage, O’Brien sounds like a great person to take over. And given all the additional people operations around the training and Today at Apple stuff, her people focus is a natural fit as well.

Looks like once again, people here like to automatically assume the worst of whatever is happening at Apple. Sad, but hardly surprising.
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Creative freedom? I'm sure she had more creative freedom in the fashion industry than the tech industry.
 
The truth to her leaving is probably closer to the fact that she's the front line for dealing with the endless avalanche of disgruntled customers over lowering of quality to increase profit created by other departments. It's like a waitress having to deal with endless complaints about the cooking. Can't blame her since no job is worth getting cancer over.
 
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triton100 said:
Angela paved nothing. The Apple retail stories were already in great shape. There was nothing like it seen before. So much so that other companies took inspiration and started mimicking the Apple store style. This was all way before she arrived.
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THIS..! An Apple Store was always a bit of a destination for me whatever city I went to but since Angela took the reins, a lot of them feel very samey.

I hate how her new store style has been applied to my local store. It’s a beautiful building but soulless inside.
 
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It makes me feel a bit sad to see Angela leaving Apple. She did a great job overhauling the retail sector of Apple.
For the most part I thank her very much for giving Thailand it's first Apple Store. A long awaited thing.

Thank you Angela Ahrendts for making Apple better. :)
 
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lunarworks said:
The problem with the Apple Store isn't something she did wrong, but more something she didn't do. The stores are great, but the growth in demand for Apple's products over the last five years has far outpaced their expansion in retail, so many locations suffer from a crush in customers, making them difficult to navigate and increased the wait for service. If there were more or larger locations, many of the complaints would be gone. (There's nothing you can do about the complaints about her wearing fashionable clothes or having "big hands", I don't need to discuss where those complaints come from.)
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Being an executive earlier of a luxury brand, never had to deal with millions of customers and that too in stores, in great numbers across the country, globe etc...it was a new challenge for her, probably never had to deal such a thing earlier.

Personally, my feeling is that she was roped in to make Apple a luxury brand from aspirational one with VERY HIGH Price tags attached to it. Tim Cook anticipated (like a visionary) quite a few years ahead that iPhones can not make Apple more money in the long run and would be a rather risky to keep the identity same, hence he probably tried a different strategy and backfired.

Chances are HIGH that Apple product prices may get rationalized to meet consumer expectations.
 
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JohnApples said:
Is she the one who was responsible for the online-only launch of Apple Watch? I remember there being 0 stock in basically every single store on launch day and I believe she was at the helm at the time.
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She wasn’t responsible for production. She was told that they had nothing in stock so deal with it, and online-only was the least bad option.
 
At last. Angela was a big mistake. What a waste of money Tim Cook made Apple spend on her. She wasn't a fit for Apple at all which was obvious from the start and in the end she made the Apple Store's worse.
Don't come back.
 
Octavius8 said:
I mean iPhone 11 + iOS 12+1 (13 would be a bad luck version number)
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There's no such thing. 13 is just a number, like all other numbers. And they didn't have any such base superstitions about version 13 (High Sierra) of macOS.

--Eric
 
avanpelt said:
I don't think Angela really understood that in 2019, people don't want to go grab a cup of coffee and hang out at the Apple Store. That seemed to be her mentality behind the whole 'Today at Apple' push, and I think it was pretty out of touch with what most of Apple's customers are actually looking for from Apple.
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Maybe she was projecting her own behaviour at Apple HQ. Walk in, prance and grab a coffee, walk out.
 
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Shanghaichica said:
She made pre-ordering iPhones/ Apple devices more seamless. I’ve never had to que up to get an iPhone or other device on launch day since she took over. Ordering online is simple.
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you are correct about this.

and, although i do agree with your point (that this was a positive thing), in fact, she also was the single most vocal critic of there being any lines waiting overnight just before a new product launch (google it).

she just never got this point about apple and its product launches.

so, yes, give her credit for streamlining on-line product ordering.

and simultaneously absolutely taking away the magic of apple's product launches.
 
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drinkingtea said:
How did she “ruin” your days out?
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By banning the queues for new products and only allowing reservation pickups. I loved spending a couple of days camping outside the Apple stores for new products. You'd meet some of societies most interesting people....
 
niji said:
absolutely taking away the magic of apple
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I feel those words describe Ahrendts perfectly. She took away the magic of Apple replacing it with a lot of glass, chrome, wood, and money. Mostly money. Someone earlier asked "what has she done for us customers" – pffft. She didn't work for customers. She worked for a fashion label called Apple. Fashion, by definition, must be expensive (this worked) and out of most people's reach – which is where she couldn't get what she wanted, because Apple is also a mass product manufacturer. Their point is not to make an iPhone Edition for $10000 and nothing else and have only millionaires using the phone.

I feel the stockholders should be very grateful to Ahrendts for her years at Apple. She carried the brand successfully from an electronics-maker to a fashion-making company specialised in electronics. As for the customers? I feel Angela's vision is best reflected in the new Macbook Air: thin, shiny, powered by a Core 2 Duo processor that can't be upgraded, terrifyingly expensive, and with a keyboard that fails even faster than MBP2018. Which is what I expected shareholders wanted.

There are going to be thousands of conspiracy theories, but mine is that she tried to topple Cook and failed.
 
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GubbyMan said:
I never liked Angela Ahrendts, it’s finally time for her to go. I know she was just responsibe for the stores and not actual product design but I feel like she brought this feeling that Apple devices had to be luxury items with high prices.
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Now they are just items with very high prices that do not reflect their quality.
 
I bought my iPad Pro at a third-party Apple retailer. The sales staff was as enthusiastic as I about the product. When I bought iPhone X at an Apple store, the experience was as memorable as filling gas tank in a gas station - I even forgot if it was a male or a female that sold me the phone. However, I have always remembered the guy who handled the iPad Pro sale for me. Those two experiences did not happen in the US, nevertheless, showing one decline Apple is in.
 
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