No innovation? What do you call the "Touch Bar", the T2 chip and the iMac Pro cooling fans?
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Seven Years Ago Today: Steve Jobs Resigns as CEO of Apple, Tim Cook Named His Successor
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Who should he have placed in the position instead then? If he made a mistake, what should he have done?
I just bought one of the 2018 MacBook Pros and the cost of upgrading to a 1TB SSD was a little painful :/
Tim Cook did NOT get the job because he was the most qualified, he got the job because Jobs feared the Egos of the other internal candidates !
Yes... because it’s 7. The key number being 7. Not 6 and not 8, but 7!
Until next year when this anniversary is marked again.
There was a post yesterday about what kind of father Steve Jobs was. You should go read that if you really think naming Tim Cook as CEO of Apple is the biggest mistake Jobs ever made.
Tim Cook has done very well at following the vision that Steve Jobs set up for Apple. The shareholders and the customers (minus a vocal minority) are very happy with Apple these days.
Did he actually do this or was he simply CEO while this happened?
Well, it definitely wouldn't have happened under Sculley, so...
As would the 70s me but we all change. That's why whenever anyone rants about Apple changing too much, I assume that they have changed much more than Apple and simply do not see it themselves.
To be fair once Steve left this earth it was a sad day. Nobody could have done what he did. The guy was a genius and expect Tim or whoever to take his place was just not a real possibility.
Indeed! I am right with you. Cook is a money maker. Jobs was an innovator that made money. Big difference. Funny how he tried to look like Steve back then to give us the idea he would do things as Steve would...nope.
No, but he was handed over a goldcow with great innovation. Mostly Tim have expand Apple.
Been a few new products, give him that. Wouldn’t want to be without my AirPods.
Now it’s only ”think money money” more then everyone else.
Apple as a company isn’t anything that inspire me today, it did x yrs ago. There’s no vision there of interest for me. It’s just products I use.
Too early yet to say if it was right or wrong person Steve named his successor. Wait another 7 yrs. Tim have mostly been ridning on Steve’s innovation and done what he’s good at, expanding business, building tons of Apple Stores. Still none in my city though
We’ll see what all these stores sell in 7 more years.
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I agree to this.
Personally I don't think the next 7 years are going to look really good for Apple if they continue to neglect their former core user base. The tech excerpts and unofficial evangelists who brought non-tech family and friends over into the Mac (and later iOS) ecosystems.
I've had to give up and move on from Apples offerings. I'm in the process of building my own Windows tower to replaced a very aged and much customized Mac Pro 2008, have a Dell work laptop on order, and have given one relative a re-purposed iMac turned Linux box (because no more MacOS security updates for the machine) instead of a MacMini I would have normally considered.
In my cycle of family and friends I was the evangelists who would help support their Macs. Left are only two die hard Mac enthusiasts who I'd have pry their steadily aging Macs from their cold dead hands. Although one is getting continually frustrated as her Apps get aged out of usability, and got very screwed over by the iPhoto to Photos transition.
He's responsible for everything, so yes...he gets credit. That's how these things work. If you know anything about Wallstreet, good CEOs don't just show up and quadruple the stock price of an already Mega Cap corporation in 7 years very often.
He's done an insanely good job, maybe the best of any CEO. He's top 5 at least.
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None of those things are examples of failing products. Just quickly...
The 2014 MacBook isn't something that impacted every unit. Have numbers to support failure rate?
Current MacBook Pro overheating was fixed via software update and confirmed a good fix.
Butterfly Keyboards are a vocal minority...you have no idea how many hate or like, other than people complaining here. Apple knows better here.
MagSafe was evidently not that important, or it'd still be around.
Poorly trained staff is a complete generalization and your example is anectodal. I have great after sale experience. I think the facts are, Apple is known as the best tech support after sale...
Really, your examples were quite shaky. The sales data, customer satisfaction scores, and ecosystem stickiness are far better examples of Apple doing the right things.
Apple launches repair programs far after the regular warranty runs out if there are issues. They support from a software perspective for years and years and even support the hardware on 4+ year old devices in many cases. Who else does that?
When you sell 300M units of stuff annually, there are going to be problems. Apple takes care of them very well. If they had hardware issues, there would have been recalls on a Note 7 scale. All your examples are limited and we don't have data to know failure rates.
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Consumers have validated the strategy...Apple customers love their products, have never bought more and have never been happier. This is based on real data like sales, units sold, customer satisfaction surveys, etc. Period, end of discussion....at least for me.6-7 out of those 8 are great for shareholders but do just about nothing for individual consumers. Maybe that's your point? Cook is a fantastic CEO for delighting AAPL shareholders?
On a relative (smaller Apple company) basis, Jobs had similarly, impressive growth claims on the financial side (for AAPL shareholders), while also adding multiple bullets that seem more about individual consumers (delight) than so much about how much money Apple makes under his leadership. Through my own lens, that seems to be the fundamental difference: Jobs seemed to put product & consumer experience even above maximizing profits, while Cook seems to put maximizing profits first expecting the faithful to just roll with whatever decisions Apple makes. And yes, I know all about Job's book-pricing shenanigans, so I won't try to crown him Saint or something. Maybe he was just better at casting an illusion that to him it was about making incredible products and growing corporate profit numbers were a byproduct of that, instead of focusing so hard on the profits even at the expense of customer experience.
Even more simply: as an Apple product consumer, I can't do anything with "700 Billion in shareholder value" or "70M units to well over 210M." Slinging such stuff around in a forum to try to make points of how much better a corporation is than some other corporation doesn't really do a thing for me. Where's the next "wow!" product? In about 13 years, Jobs rolled out reinvigorated Macs, OS X, iPod & iTunes, iPhone & app store,TV, iPad and a variety of interesting accessories... iPod + iPhone + iPad in about 8 years. In 7 years, Cook's Apple has rolled out a Watch, the trashcan pro (to be replaced after 1 iteration), the HomePod and a few interesting accessories + the consumer burden of dongles to make Apple products work as they used to work with such commonplace connections built inside them. Otherwise, it's mostly screen-sized iterations of stuff already out under Jobs.
I can completely agree with you that for AAPL shareholders, Cook is doing a gangbusters, impressive job... an incredible CEO performance for stockholders. For us individual Apple consumers though, I'd sure like to see more Jobsian-like product innovations and product experience delights. Apple used to be about making wow! products. Now it seems to be about making wow! buckets of money. IMO: 7 years later, the best Apple products are still products launched by Jobs. Where is the next iPod, iPhone or iPad-like whopper? I suspect a Jobs Apple would have rolled it- whatever it is- out during this 7-year period. Will that "it" roll out before it's the 10th anniversary? Or will we still be trying to spin how much money AAPL makes as the pinnacle of innovation for the post-Jobs Apple... which, even if $1T becomes $2T or $20T still does pretty much nothing for individual Apple consumers.
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Since Tim’s arrival as CEO I do love the Pencil; but the image first, function second, neglect of hardware, software and rigorous testing before release of both, cutting corners in product assembly (glue & soldering), pushing services I have no interest in, along with obnoxious pricegouging makes this long time Apple user sad.
I truly wish they’d take their time in testing the software & hardware, stopping cutting corners, and focus on their computer divisions before spreading themselves too thin. I do not know what else it will take for them to give an orchard about these...
I truly wish they’d take their time in testing the software & hardware, stopping cutting corners, and focus on their computer divisions before spreading themselves too thin. I do not know what else it will take for them to give an orchard about these...
Also the 2013 Mac Pro. While controversial, it was an innovative design. IMO it was before it's time. Thunderbolt 3 or even 4 would need to be a standard on that for the external expandability to be very good.
Ton's of money with iPhones...
Zero innovation and a computer line up that is completely overpriced and outdated.
I always find these kind of topics and arguments funny. When Steve passed away or let go control, was Intel in the state it is in now where a processor from 5 years ago is not that much better than a processor today? Were tablets pretty much the norm for the general population?
Seriously, things have slowed WAY WAY WAY down in IT. My 2010 Mac Pro can render h.264 video at the same speed as my 2017 iMac can. I have gained nothing when editing and working with h.264 footage. What my 2017 iMac can do better is HEVC encoding. Compare this with 2003 computers to 2010 computers and there is a massive difference.
We have NO IDEA....ZERO....NONE on how Steve would react to all these changes in the IT industry. Also, as a public company, you go where the money is - as in Services in iPhones. It would be corporate suicide if Apple took from the iPhone business to focus on the Mac more when it only makes 10% of their profits.
What would you guys be saying if Steve was alive and was doing EVERYTHING that Tim has been doing?
Seriously, things have slowed WAY WAY WAY down in IT. My 2010 Mac Pro can render h.264 video at the same speed as my 2017 iMac can. I have gained nothing when editing and working with h.264 footage. What my 2017 iMac can do better is HEVC encoding. Compare this with 2003 computers to 2010 computers and there is a massive difference.
We have NO IDEA....ZERO....NONE on how Steve would react to all these changes in the IT industry. Also, as a public company, you go where the money is - as in Services in iPhones. It would be corporate suicide if Apple took from the iPhone business to focus on the Mac more when it only makes 10% of their profits.
What would you guys be saying if Steve was alive and was doing EVERYTHING that Tim has been doing?