This dollar a year thing is often bandied around, it's not quite as simple as it sounds. Many CEO's do it including Facebook's Zuckerberg. If you think that's all the income they get then that's naive.
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Apple Became World's Most Valuable Company Seven Years Ago Today, Two Weeks Before Steve Jobs Resigned as CEO
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This dollar a year thing is often bandied around, it's not quite as simple as it sounds. Many CEO's do it including Facebook's Zuckerberg. If you think that's all the income they get then that's naive.
Ah, but a classic story needs to be retold. 54 times according to your post history.
Here are some highlights:
But the real question is whether or not you're a fan of Tim Cook…
The AAPL "House of Cards" will, @ some point, come tumbling down !
NOT many iPhone X units have been sold the past 100 days ! ... less than 10M units !!
You class those as fiascos? Obviously you've forgotten about iOS 5/6 and OS X Lion.
Lion was a revolting OS. Terrible memory management compared to Snow Leopard. Systems were paging with absolutely no usage. It was unusable if you had less than 8GB RAM. iOS 5 turned the iPhone 4 from a buttery phone on iOS 4 to a laggy mess in just one iteration. Today's users would have been frothing at the mouth with that kind of performance deficit in just one generation.
And remember, there weren't anywhere near the number of devices or the number of features in the OS by then. More features + more users = more random stuff that can go wrong which you just can't test unless you have an enormous userbase doing lots of random tasks and unorthodox steps to create a problem.
Let's just go with iOS. You had just under 200 million iOS devices at that time. You've got over a billion now.
Say back then, 1% of iOS users were affected by a bug. That's 2 million affected users.
Say now, 0.4% of iOS users are affected by a bug. That's 4 million affected users.
In this hypothetical, double the complaints today doesn't mean the old OS was twice as reliable. It's quite the opposite. More users = more complaints.
It may seem more unreliable due to more complaints but let me absolutely assure you from my personal experience, iOS and MacOS are far, far, far more reliable than they were. Plus things get patched a lot quicker these days.
Utter trash. Snow Leopard and iOS 6 were by far the best releases ever.
I miss Mike Markkula...
(This is to preempt all of the I miss Steve Jobs remarks).
(This is to preempt all of the I miss Steve Jobs remarks).
Tim Cook isn't a bad CEO. He knew how to capitalize on Apple's success and make the right decisions to turn it into a very profitable company for shareholders. Apple's stance on user privacy is also much stronger than the competitors, and stronger than it was under Steve Jobs, which is great to see.
But as a customer, I couldn't care less about profitability for shareholders. Just let us buy a decent Mac mini after five years, and stop shipping Macs without SSDs when MacOS clearly needs an SSD to achieve reasonable performance.
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A lot of Jobs backpatting too, who remains a failure as a father.
As a human being, Tim Cook is far ahead of Jobs.
Probably licensing Mac OS to third parties and got out of hardware, no iMac, iPod or today as we use computers - no iOS.
My personal view is he couldn't have got Apple through those hard years, taking those risks and being generally a hard ass with decisions BUT Cook is a good custodian for the modern Apple.
My example would be the Tim Cook and the Apple Watch. Reserved launch, took a while to update from S0 to S1, few price bumps, the gold version, watch band pricing quite high, keeping old models around..... the Watch is a success though.
Take the iPod, Jobs was far more cut throat with it and those days Apple was tiny and poor (in contrast to the circumstance's Tim Cook released the Watch when today's Apple had billions sat in the bank, shops in every major city etc etc).
That’s your opinion and I respect that. But I Admire Tim Cook for what he has accomplished with Apple and how he Has lead this company on a different path many may not agree with, but a successful path at that. I think he really was the appropriate successor to Steve Jobs when appointed before he passed, and I think Steve Jobs would be more than happy with how Cook has helped shape this company today.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
Jobs seemed to LOVE cash and HATE debt. All the gush & praise defenders for the post-Jobs Apple should look up the AAPL debt number. It is NOT trivial... and continuing to grow, yet we tend to sling around only the cash number as if there is no debt (like an army of volunteer PR agents in "focus on(ly on) the positives" mode). That's a big difference vs. when we slung around a cash number with Jobs as Captain (when there was no debt). Apple's debt line would probably still be nill if he was steering this ship in 2018.
And yes, I know that debt is relatively cheap right now. And yes, I know that being able to use cash like Apple is using debt would likely mean having to bring foreign cash to the U.S. and pay a tax bill. Etc. I get WHY Apple is taking on so much debt. The point is that Jobs HATED debt. I presume (perhaps naively or RDF-influenced) he would have probably preferred to pay the taxes than to pile up corporate debt... even if the accounting math led to the other recommendation. It appeared one point of pride with his Apple was that it was a debt-free company. IMO: relative to the vast majority of modern corporations (and even governments/countries), that was a DAZZLING position to hold for such a big corporation.
And, whether true or false, I perceive Jobs was much more about the product and customer experience than harvesting every possible nickel of revenue out of consumers. In other words, if there was a few more dollars to be squeezed out of consumers in exchange for jettisoning something pretty useful or beneficial, I perceive Jobs would have generally chosen the "we're rich enough" option over creating segments of Apple consumers aggravated/frustrated at select "courageous" decisions and similar. And I don't imagine it would be dongle-mania in a Jobs-run Apple either.
And yes, I am fully aware of bad-Steve moves like that whole book pricing maneuvering, so this is not trying to crown Sainthood or something- just pointing out a few points of contrast as viewed through my own personal (consumer) lens. As a consumer of lots of Apple products, I personally wish 2018 Apple felt more like 2010 Apple, that product decisions seemed to lean heavily toward delighting over profit maximization and that rich, RICH Apple wasn't yet another corporation playing the huge debt game (though the bankers always appreciate getting their hooks deep into every possible profitable hold).
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Market cap represents how well people that actually put their money where their mouth is, see a company.
Seems like a good measure to me...
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Any.day.now.
Stock buybacks don’t meaningfully impact market cap:
market cap = shares outstanding × price
The number of shares outstanding goes down, and the price goes up in response. Market cap doesn’t move. Math is hard.
Caveat: The announcement of a buyback may briefly drive demand which would artificially drive the price up, but that’s a short-term impact, at Apple’s scale it can be pretty difficult to move the needle, and Apple hasn’t announced any new buybacks since May.
AAPL hit the $1T market cap on the heels of a well-timed very strong quarterly report after years of building its value up to over $900B. Stock buybacks had nothing to do with it.
If anyone says similar or the same, they are off their heads. For a start Cook wouldn’t bring NS with him to underpin OSX; that alone should kill off any the idea he’d do a Steve.
Did I say Snow Leopard was crap? No. I said Lion. Lion was a memory dump compared to SL. Compared means the difference between one thing and another. In my post I was comparing 10.7’s terrible resource usage to SL’s incredible performance on just 2GB RAM and a spinner.
iOS 5 was so slow on the iPhone 4 and iOS 6 was a dumpster fire on it. People cite iOS 7 as killing the IP4 but it was already dead on iOS 6. If people got that sort of performance these days in just 2 generations of OS updates they would be raging.
It may well have been gorgeous on the new model but it sure as heck wasn’t on a phone just one or two generations old. That’s considerably less the norm these days.
People always need a single individual to put on a pedestal. One man to give all the credit for all the hard work of everyone under him. There are countless examples like that. One obvious example is perhaps too PRSI to mention here, but I'm sure most can figure out what I mean. Very few things in life are all about one person. It's foolish to think otherwise.
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...looks like a fan. Yes indeed.Ah, but a classic story needs to be retold. 54 times according to your post history.
Here are some highlights:
But the real question is whether or not you're a fan of Tim Cook…
Agreed. I remember one of the many worries was that Apple’s profits and stock price couldn’t possibly continue to grow as they had been. That if they levelled off it wasn’t a sign if Tim Cook doing a bad job, it would simply be incredible if the growth continued.
Within 5 years the profits had doubled and market cap has more than doubled. I know these aren’t the only measures of success/company health, but the narrative that Apple peaked in 2011 and is in decline just isn’t supported by any measurable facts.
There seems to be a “I think Apple was reliant on Steve Jobs and is in trouble without him” crowd who are determined to cling to whatever they can to support this narrative and ignore anything that implies their over simplified theory wrong.
Apple's turnaround through the late-90s and 2000s was a <i>miracle</i>. We shouldn't hold Cook—or anyone for that matter—to that standard. And, regardless, a lot of Apple's success in that era was a direct result of Steve Jobs's personal experience leveraging NeXt etc.; put shortly: (1) only Steve Jobs could have turned Apple around in the late-90s in the way that he did; (2) it doesn't really matter what would have happened if Cook became CEO in the late-90s because it never happened; and (3) neither of (1) nor (2) undermine Tim Cook's considerable ability as CEO in the present era.
I think the better question is "What would the Apple of 2018 look like if Steve Jobs were CEO instead of Tim Cook?" It's possible that there would be (significant) differences in Apple's product or services lineup. Simultaneously, however, the mythologizing of Steve Jobs, however deserved, needs to be tempered at least a bit.
this shows a willful ignorance of how and what the stock market is.
first of all, if suddenly there was a big movement of Apple stock indicating mass buy, this value would go up (yay!), if however, there was a sudden rash of sell off for whatever eason, this value goes down
it is subject to far more whimms than Apple's performance and isn't actually reflective of Apple's financial position.
For example, while the market cap based on today's trading might be 1t. tomorrow it could be 900m, or 1.5t, based entirely on the whims of the Exchange and supply/demand of the stock.
in relation to Apple financial statements, this doesn't reflect the actual valuation done by auditors that are reflected in those books.
For example, Apple's own financial statements show a total assets of 350Billion. Total liabilities at 235Billion, with a total shareholder's equity of 115 Billion.
Total shareholder's equity of 350Billion.
these are generally the only numbers that actually have pertinence to Apple. The sTock market's pricing of it's stocks doesn't have direct impact to Apple. people trading it's stocks doesn't give Apple money. Claiming that Market Cap is somehow indicative of Apple's actual value is disingenous. This is a number that is relevant ONLY for investors. using it as a barometer of Apple's actual performance is not accurate.
(this isn't saying bad performance or anything, Apple's performance is excellent, just pointing out the constant misuse of Market Cap as some benchmark of the companies current value()
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/Q3FY18ConsolidatedFinancialStatements.pdf
Sceptical, Apple went downhill when Jobs initially was booted out, only upon his return and simplifying products did Apple reinitiate the gradual road to success. Had the iPod not been allowed for Windows users and Mac not transitioning to x86 processors, things would have been stagnant or worse. Initially iPhone required iTunes to manage, if iTunes was not released for Windows, iPhone would not have received the same amount of success similarly to the initial release of iPod.
If Cook was running the show instead of Jobs in late 90’s, the company would have been in ruin if not non-existence, as Apple needed a visionary which is Jobs. Cook is a supply management expert and all this says is that Apple has been able to manage supply and demand relatively well. Running a company is different from momentum, there are many well managed companies. However how many have market/industry momentum, the residual press/momentum that Apple receives is all from the Jobs era. I was always excited to watch a Jobs keynote even if there were leaks, with Cook the keynotes are blah. Musk is a lot like Jobs, he creates momentum, excitement and interest in his companies. Cook is just maintaining what was already established. Only time will tell if Jobs made the right choice for Apples future.
The other problem is that most stocks are overvalued today compared to 7 years ago, does this also include Apple, It is hard to say for sure. It is not the question of if a market correct will occur, it is when. It is easy to label people as haters, when it is opinion on a forum. I have nothing against Cook, however I have no excitement I once held for this company,
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No, he's a stock investors dream CEO.
There's often a disconnect between demands of the exchange and actual company directive.
There's a modern belief that the only purpose of a CEO is Profit.
This is a myth and is dangerous to business. A CEO's focus is Fiscal responsibility combined with long term strategic planning for company longevity and sustainability. Sometimes, that must come before pure profit margins. It's the CEO's job to balance these and direct the company towards being around not just 5 years from now, but in perpetutity. This can often come in direct opposition to stock market demands of continuous profit growth.
This mindset of "profit above all else" has to end. there is numerous examples of companies who have focused on profit as prime motivator who end up causing themselves significant problems when those margins start having to eat into quality and delivery of goods. This is where many long time Apple fans (I've seen quite a few flip even on this site) are getting frustrated, as profits keep going up, margins keep going up, but many people don't see the quality matching those increased prices.
It's also potentially evidenced that this turn is starting to happen (though Q3 is just one Quarter and not indiciative of trend), but iPhone sales, despite record quarterly revenues, actually were flat in volume, implying price increases made up the difference. In addition, Mac sales were the lowest since 2010.