Apple CEO Tim Cook Teases 'Great Innovation' in Product Pipeline on CNBC's Mad Money

[MadeTheSwitch]

It's interesting that Tim mentions great innovation at the same time he mentions buying companies every four weeks. That means you aren't innovating much and are trying to bolster your in house efforts. Also missing from that conversation, is that when you keep buying up companies like that getting bigger and bigger, you start becoming slower to innovate, not quicker. Apple should understand that better than anyone considering it's garage roots, but they seem to have forgotten that. It's just not the scrappy company it once was, and it shows with it's stagnant product lines.

That's not to say they cannot turn it around, but they need to innovate more than they have been lately. Apple TV should be more than what it is. The iPhone should be progressing, not reaching into the past for a "new" model. They seem reluctant to make a hybrid iOS/Mac type device, but maybe they should reconsider. It would spark my interest. I am sure a lot of other people would feel the same. I know the car is coming...someday. But until then they need to inject some sort of freshness into their product lines that just isn't there right now.

 

[Dr.Chroma]

They make up for it with the innovative 480p webcam, no functionality, and rose gold options...

Some people on here just don't understand what true innovation is...

Great. Maybe you can educate Fellow Macrumors on how Innovation is or is not incorporated into Apple products, other than Physical aspects?

 

[Karma*Police]

Continuity/Handoff is hardly innovations and it hardly working. Hand off is annoying when all your Apple devices start ringing when phone call comes in.

You seriously call 4 way speaker innovation? You call Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard innovation? Microsoft did that long times ago. It is merely overpriced stylus and keyboard accessories.

ATV is far from innovation, so is Mac Pro. Research kit, Carekit etc, other companies to that as well and far before Apple started those things.

So yeah. Not lot of innovation. I can call 3D Touch, Swift and Truetine display innovations. Other stuff are hardly innovations

Yes, I call those innovations. In fact, They're so innovative that a lot of those features are, or have been, copied by Apple's competitors.

Continuity/ handoff will be copied by MS this year and I wouldn't be surprised to see Google introduce something similar at IO. Android Auto is essentially a copy of CarPlay... The original implementation worked very differently.

No other company has research kit and Android's version of healthcare kit isn't even in the same ballpark.

4 speakers that automatically adjust the frequency in real time depending on orientation is pretty damn cool and a real innovation. Apple Pencil technology is completely different from active digitizers and the fact that it recognizes angles and is widely recognized as the best stylus... Again, real innovation.

You're right, the concept of a keyboard attached to a tablet is not new; in fact, Apple invented it and there have been tons of 3rd party keyboards for iPad well before MS introduced the Surface. But again, the implementation, with its advanced fabric, is all new and better than anything that came before it IMO. Oh, and Apple also did styluses before MS.

Lastly, I don't know how anyone can say ATV isn't innovative. I was blown away when I got it. While all the other TV streaming devices copied Apple's original d-pad remote, the new ATV4 remote essentially turns a huge TV into an iPad, but from 10 feet away. No other interface comes close.

 

[MH01]

Yes Tim, though you probably believe your own advertising, in that everything changed when you launched the 6S.....

 

[Dr.Chroma]

It's interesting that Tim mentions great innovation at the same time he mentions buying companies every four weeks. That means you aren't innovating much and are trying to bolster your in house efforts. Also missing from that conversation, is that when you keep buying up companies like that getting bigger and bigger, you start becoming slower to innovate, not quicker. Apple should understand that better than anyone considering it's garage roots, but they seem to have forgotten that. It's just not the scrappy company it once was, and it shows with it's stagnant product lines.

That's not to say they cannot turn it around, but they need to innovate more than they have been lately. Apple TV should be more than what it is. The iPhone should be progressing, not reaching into the past for a "new" model. They seem reluctant to make a hybrid iOS/Mac type device, but maybe they should reconsider. It would spark my interest. I am sure a lot of other people would feel the same. I know the car is coming...someday. But until then they need to inject some sort of freshness into their product lines that just isn't there right now.

I agree the iPhone line needs a major revamp, which in all likeliness is already in progress according to Macrumors for 2017. The Apple Watch is here to stay, contrary to what other supporters and or non-supporters may say. That being said, the Apple Watch needs to separate itself from the competitors and do something that only Apple could incorporate into a smart watch/health fitness device.

The Macs are in need of Something all in one incorporated. The Apple Car.....well....Time will Tell.

 

[chrismail627]

We're only 1 quarter through 2016, calm down. You should be aware by now that a lot of this stuff is being held up due to Intel/AMD chips(ets) and other emerging tech. I'm waiting for a 2016 MBP update but fully aware the chips that are needed aren't out til middle of the year. What do you think they're supposed to put in these refreshed machines you want so badly? If they had bothered with an incremental bump in between, you'd still be complaining.

Um, the Mac Pro has 2013 technology. That's been a problem going on for longer than 1st quarter this year. I still think that the Mac is the best computer out there, I just wish Apple wouldn't be as complacent with it as they are; I want them to put the best lineup out there they can.

 

[MH01]

Gotta love the financially and market illiterate trolls on this forum. What he's saying is beyond true and you know it. There's a network effect, people. The first few iPods didn't sell like crazy at first. It took a few iterations. Same with the iPhone. Same with Macs and the Apple brand as a whole.

Apple is heavily investing in the next stage of technology and you guys are too stupid to even acknowledge it.

Everybody at and around Apple, from the executives and employees to business partners and long-term stock-holders will be making a wealth from this company; meanwhile you guys will be complaining about Apple on a forum with their devices. Good luck.

So you called everyone here idiots, while actually not adding any of your own analysis/thoughts on the matter. is that investment, non upgradable macs, 5400rpm drives, soldered components.....please give is some higher intelligence insight, that we are missing......you may find the average IQ on so forum a lot higher!

 

[iMcLovin]

Tim Cook is always over optimistic about their future products. Calling a tiny product update amazingly magical and great...I remember Tim Cook and Eddy Cue calling every year the most amazing product year for apple over and over..... The fact that he is not over-the-roof optimistic about the future products, makes me feel that the next few years from apple is going the be rather dull and the stock will continue to fall.
Im starting to feel that Apple has become an old mans company with repeating products, re-branding and an over calculated product pipeline...everything lately is being released just to fill an empty gap were they can make an extra buck.

 

[jacobj]

Tim has said that ever since he became CEO and we have no innovation whatsoever.

3D Touch is an OK idea, but the implementation makes it useless.

The watch's only value is as a vibrating reminder with Siri built in. Overpriced for that.

iPad Pro is a joke.

Large format phones are copies.

Small format phones are reactions and an attempt to defend market share.

Onboard storage prices and entry levels explicitly show that Apple doesn't care what its customers want.

MacBook is underpowered and effectively an incredibly expensive web browser.

iOS 7+ looks different but is (in my experience) a bug laden behemoth.

Apple Music has great playlists, but is clunky and has poor interfaces and awful storage management.

Where is the success?

 

[chrismail627]

The lack of a headphone jack in 7 just to make it water proof is pure lunacy and crazy. Another example of what Apple wants not what the customer wants. Again They will vote with their feet and sales will suffer.


My whole family has a ton of different Sennheiser headphones and audiophiles laugh at Beats. I even have a small tube amp that goes to my studio monitor headphones from the phone, pod and pad.


What the world does not need now is another adapter. It won't increase Beats sales - just hack off the customer base. I can not believe Apple engineers could not design a water proof jack.

S7 is 100% waterproof with a headphone jack. It's possible, but Apple just wants to "innovate" and boost their bluetooth headphone/earphone sales.

BTW for me I actually like my Beats Solo 2 wireless. But shoving them down people's throats isn't the way to go.

 

[MH01]

Lastly, I don't know how anyone can say ATV isn't innovative. I was blown away when I got it. While all the other TV streaming devices copied Apple's original d-pad remote, the new ATV4 remote essentially turns a huge TV into an iPad, but from 10 feet away. No other interface comes close.

I own the new ATV, Amazon Fire TV and nvidia shield , the nvidia shield is clearly ahead. I'm not sure what you find so innovative about the ATV, it's only innovation was TV OS , in the hope that it would generate huge income on apps, the problem was that it was rushed out too early. Among the competition, I'd consider it average. I really like mine, does the job, but hardly innovative, just evolution. It's what your stuck with if you are heavily embedded into the ecosystem.

As for the remote, looks great, awful design. First remote from apple I've been disappointed with, cause they failed the most basic criteria , when you pick it up , you have no idea which way it's facing, poor design, leading to skipping on movies etc. A tiny surface area does not make it an iPad, made even worst by the fact that using search and entering text using the controller is a poor experience.

Overall the ATV is a product I really like, but like all the competition , it's just evolving . Calling the current one innovative, well, everything apple release can be seen as innovative in that case.

 

[SusanK]

Did steve ever give these boring financial interviews?

He didn't have to. Products spoke for themselves. Apple is boring now just like Cook.

 

[John.B]

How about you manage/Lead a Billion dollar company, make all these 'Necessity Changes' you listed. You seem very knowledgeable on implementing all these Gripe changes, being some of the Pro Products have not even reached maturity in less than a year of their release!!

Operationally I'm sure it makes more sense to skip entire processor architectures and financially I'm sure it makes sense to churn out three year old Macs at full price because that's what makes Wall Street happy is metrics like average selling price and gross margin, but that neglects the people who should be the most excited about Apple computers and that's the customers that used to be (to use Steve's word) delighted with their Macs.

Benign neglect only works for so long before that core demographic realizes that Tim Cook and company have been playing them for suckers in favor of Wall Street types who, just like Carl Icahn, will abandon Apple stock in a heartbeat.

We bought two PCs in my house this year and neither of them were Macs. For the first time since 2006. I myself am pretty much locked in to the Mac infrastructure at this point, but if Apple can't get off the schneid and update their product lines, there's no reason my family had to be as well.

 

[SusanK]

Barely and I don't think in plural. I learned nothing from your post. Facts would have been educational.

.

Your difficulty with learning does not alter facts.

 

[MH01]

S7 is 100% waterproof with a headphone jack. It's possible, but Apple just wants to "innovate" and boost their bluetooth headphone/earphone sales.

BTW for me I actually like my Beats Solo 2 wireless. But shoving them down people's throats isn't the way to go.

Agreed. The removal of the headphone jack will coincide with new Beats headphones.

The Beats solo 2 is a nice wireless set. They corrected the quality that was the 1st gen.

 

[tw1ll]

How about you manage/Lead a Billion dollar company, make all these 'Necessity Changes' you listed. You seem very knowledgeable on implementing all these Gripe changes, being some of the Pro Products have not even reached maturity in less than a year of their release!!

How about explaining why Tim was hand appointed by Steve prior to his passing as the CEO? As if you can make executive decisions and fully understand the bevy of a Company and all its tangibles. It appears you have 'Technical' issues with various product support, I can provide you with an Apple Technical Support phone number to express your tirade of concerns.

Running a mega company is easy - hire good people into the functional roles. Leading a mega company, that's where the challenge lies. Cook has allowed Apple to become a comical propaganda machine with all it's trivial updates and non-innovations (the best example being their gushing descriptions of being a micron thinner as a major innovation!). What he should be doing is getting the company back on track as the leader in user experience, product reliability and content delivery. Their acquisitions strategy should be shaken up (and the no doubt obscenely paid executive responsible fired) as despite a huge amount of effort and cash there is little sign of it paying off in innovation terms.

 

[Ghost31]

I remember back in the day whenever I thought of Apple I thought "yeah man. They get it. They know how to do this **** right". Seeing Cook on here talking...only vibe I got was desperation to be seen as relevant. I don't know. I'm probably wrong. It's just weird how over time my opinion has evolved to be what it is now. Promises of future innovation isn't going to hold everyone over. At some point, it's all just talk. We've been through this before of him saying "great things in the pipeline" and then we got a useless keynote talking about simply a smaller iPad and iPhone and some new watch bands. Innovation? We're waiting

 

[sw1tcher]

Additionally, is it only me or is anyone else having a hard time getting excited about a 1.3GHz dual core machine? Sure the bus speed is faster and faster memory plus SSD but my 2006 Macbook is a 2.0GHz dual core processor. Are we regressing in clock speed?

Your 2006 MacBook with 2.0 GHz dual core is significantly slower than the new 1.3 GHz M7-6Y75 used in the 2016 MacBook. Don't know which processor you have, but let's take a look at the two possibilities....

Intel Core Duo T2500 @ 2.0 Ghz has an average CPU mark of 866

Intel Core Duo T7200 @ 2.0 Ghz has an average CPU mark of 1175

Meanwhile, the 1.2 GHz M7-6Y75 (not seeing CPU mark for 1.3 Ghz version) has an average CPU mark of 3714

And if you need more performance, the 1.2 Ghz M7-6Y75 can kick up its turbo speed to 3.1 GHz

You cannot determine CPU performance by looking at CPU frequency. That processor in your 2006 MacBook is super slow by today's standards.

 

[kingofwale]

oh Timmy, you sure know how to tell a joke.

the only difference is... nowadays most people can see through those truth-distortion field of yours

 

[Basic75]

How about all around Skylake Macs with Thunderbolt 3, that would be enough to make a lot of people happy.
[doublepost=1462256076][/doublepost]

Additionally, is it only me or is anyone else having a hard time getting excited about a 1.3GHz dual core machine? Sure the bus speed is faster and faster memory plus SSD but my 2006 Macbook is a 2.0GHz dual core processor. Are we regressing in clock speed?

Who cares about lower clock speed when the performance is greater? That's one thing I wouldn't criticize Apple for. Hitting the greater performance with lower clock keeps the chips cool, or do you prefer a Pentium 4 heating?

 

[The Werewolf]

Yes, I call those innovations. In fact, They're so innovative that a lot of those features are, or have been, copied by Apple's competitors.

Continuity/ handoff will be copied by MS this year and I wouldn't be surprised to see Google introduce something similar at IO. Android Auto is essentially a copy of CarPlay... The original implementation worked very differently.

Well, except that Android Auto was announced Jan 2014 and CarPlay was announced March 2014. You could argue CarPlay was based on iPod Out which was sort of released in 2011 - but then you're stuck with Ford Sync by Microsoft in 2008... and which got a graphical display in.. 2011.

No other company has research kit and Android's version of healthcare kit isn't even in the same ballpark.

No other company has them.. well, except Microsoft who has Health Vault which is used by actual doctors and health care systems... including national systems in several countries... and it ties into their Microsoft Band product. It also supports many retail testing hardware and yes, it's designed to share this with doctors. BTW, most doctors aren't really interested in it. Contrary to how Apple presents it - most doctors won't want 24/7 monitoring of their patients unless they have a chronic/dangerous condition and in those cases, they prefer to push that to medical labs trained to filter out the details and hand them summaries.

4 speakers that automatically adjust the frequency in real time depending on orientation is pretty damn cool and a real innovation. Apple Pencil technology is completely different from active digitizers and the fact that it recognizes angles and is widely recognized as the best stylus... Again, real innovation.

I'll give you speakers - although I'm not sure why you'd want to adjust *frequency* when adjusting *amplitude* makes more sense. As for Pencil.. how do you know that it's 'completely different from active digitizers'. For one thing - 'active digitizers' isn't a technology - it's a broad class of them - basically any digitizer where the stylus provides information or signal as opposed to 'passive' where the stylus uses pressure or capacity to cause a sensor in the screen to detect the stylus. Ergo, Pencil is an active digitizer. More importantly, Apple's never explained the technology in the Pencil, but TechRepublic cut one open and guess what? Looks a lot like pretty much all other battery powered styli. The actual innovations seem to be a tilt sensor (which Wacom has had for a long time), and a rechargeable battery - which everyone else has avoided because of the short working time.

As for it being recognised as 'the best stylus' - I'm sure I could find a LOT of Wacom Cintiq fans who would be more than happy to disagree.

You're right, the concept of a keyboard attached to a tablet is not new; in fact, Apple invented it and there have been tons of 3rd party keyboards for iPad well before MS introduced the Surface. But again, the implementation, with its advanced fabric, is all new and better than anything that came before it IMO. Oh, and Apple also did styluses before MS.

Apple invented the attached keyboard? How exactly is that true? The Microsoft TabletPC started in 2002 and many models had attachable keyboards. In fact, they also generally came with Wacom pens... predating the iPad Pro by.. mm.. 14 years. The granddaddy of them - the Compaq TC1000 came with a detachable keyboard/dock and a Wacom pen - and looked uncannily like the iPad although it came out 8 10 years earlier.

Lastly, I don't know how anyone can say ATV isn't innovative. I was blown away when I got it. While all the other TV streaming devices copied Apple's original d-pad remote, the new ATV4 remote essentially turns a huge TV into an iPad, but from 10 feet away. No other interface comes close.

Let's go back to.. yes... 2002 again and Windows Media Center systems. Most of the current streamers are actually based on that by way of XBMC - now Kodi - which was an attempt to put WMC on the XBox.
As for the iPad interface.. interesting thing - most media centers aren't little boxes or even computers... today, most of them are *built right into the TV*. And they use grids of icons to represent the things you can watch and do. Sooo. No. Not terribly innovative.

Apple certainly has innovations - saying they have none is overdoing it - but it's equally silly to try and claim that Apple is the ONLY company that innovates.

For example: no one has anything like Microsoft's HoloLens.

But, let's let history make a comment.. in the form of a cartoon published in 2012 by Hijinks Ensue that not only sums up the problem so well - it actually predicted exactly what happened in the future...

 

[Dr.Chroma]

Running a mega company is easy - hire good people into the functional roles. Leading a mega company, that's where the challenge lies. Cook has allowed Apple to become a comical propaganda machine with all it's trivial updates and non-innovations (the best example being their gushing descriptions of being a micron thinner as a major innovation!). What he should be doing is getting the company back on track as the leader in user experience, product reliability and content delivery. Their acquisitions strategy should be shaken up (and the no doubt obscenely paid executive responsible fired) as despite a huge amount of effort and cash there is little sign of it paying off in innovation terms.

Agree to disagree. Anyone can say "Running a mega company is easy." I think that statement is far fetched and easier said than done in retrospect. I do agree Leading a Company induces someone who is willing to commit to all ends of every aspect of a success or failure in any situation, hence leading is a leader.

And I do agree the Apple's thinness infatuation seems bloated and redundant, I.e....Apple Watch 2 -30-40% thinner, thinner Mac Books, thinner iPhone 7 by eliminating 3.5 Jack, thinner iPad's. Apple does a lot of things right, but Cook is now in the Spotlight more than ever.

 

[Basic75]

And I do agree the Apple's thinness infatuation seems bloated and redundant, I.e....Apple Watch 2 -30-40% thinner, thinner Mac Books, thinner iPhone 7 by eliminating 3.5 Jack, thinner iPad's. Apple does a lot of things right, but Cook is now in the Spotlight more than ever.

Look at the iMac, it would make much more sense to give the iMac and the Thunderbolt Display the same looks when viewed from the front. The iMac would need to be thicker, and nobody cares by how much, to accommodate the actual computer instead of the ugly as hell chin in the front.

 

[jhudgins]

The Apple Watch is a dud that has generated zero excitement because, quite simply, THERE IS NO USE FOR IT. With larger smart phones on the market, including their own, Apple is having a hard enough time justifying the existence of their iPad, the last thing they should have done is attempt to invent a fourth category. I wish they would let the Apple Watch die and instead focus on their core lineup - iPhone, iPad, Mac. Right now they have their fingers in too many Apple pies and they are falling behind in everything.

 

[dumastudetto]

The overwhelming positive of the comments in this thread are there are a lot of people with long lists of features they want in new versions of products they love. Complaints yes, but almost a universal craving for better versions of all the existing products they own, use and love.