Tim Cook: Apple 'Spending an Enormous Amount' on 'Macs of the Future'

[rmatthewware]

Pretty sure one of the downfalls of Apple in the late 80's/early 90's was having too many products out there. I realize the desire to want to have innovative products, but I'm not sure how well the "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" will work.

Apple had too many products that no one was buying. Apple still doesn't make that many products:

MP3 Players
Phones
Desktops
Laptops
Apple TV
Wireless Routers/Backup
Tablets

It's a pretty tight ecosystem, with room to grow. Even if Apple makes the iWatch and a full-size Apple TV, that's only two more products, which only serve to augment what they're already doing. They're not out there trying to build printers or stand-alone cameras. And they don't leave failing products on the market.

 

[iLondoner]

Because we believe as people walk away from the PC, it becomes clear that the Mac is what you want if you want a PC.

This has a good chance of happening. The only problem is the entry cost into the Mac environment. Yes, overall cost of ownership isn't too bad given how long products can remain useful out there, but the entry cost is high.

 

[Goftrey]

"...we believe as people walk away from the PC, it becomes clear that the Mac is what you want if you want a PC."

This.

 

[Fattytail]

When has Tim Cook NOT said there are great products in the pipeline?

 

[WallToWallMacs]

Holy cobwebs Spider-Man! Dust it off and put it back in its time capsule ...



We still have servers not much younger than those still in operation, LOL. I worked on boxes of that vintage when first learning Unix (Solaris, IRIX, PH-UX).

I have to admit I have a real soft spot for the old UNIX Workstations - especially the SGI ones that were bold and beautiful such as the SGI Indy:

SGI O2+

and my person favourite, the SGI Tezro

 

[winston1236]

"Apple hasn't "given up on the Mac" like some of its competitors"

Well thats good competitors have given up on making Macs.

 

[Liquorpuki]

"culture of innovation!"
"culture of excellence!"
"great products!"
"enrich peoples lives!"
"really great stuff!"
- Tim Cook, from Marketing

 

[darkplanets]

Running a successful large business pretty much adheres to one fundamental tenet: the more you buck the trend and what the "Street" wants, the better off the company will be long-term. Bucking Icahn's advice is probably the best thing Tim can do.

Wallstreet investors don't give two ***** about long term growth or company stability. They want money, delivered yesterday. All this talk about "not meeting expectations" is translated to not returned the same, impossible to sustain YOY gains in almost every metric. There's a ceiling in every market where you eventually will match the growth of the market itself, +/- a few pct from competition. While it's understandable for investors to want more market diversity, you don't simply jump into an already existent market with a half baked product and expect to perform well, and the Street doesn't like to wait for the failures of rushed products to iron out either.

Better to ignore all the naysayers and whiners, and focus on what's proven to work long-term -- especially since Apple isn't dependent on investor cash infusions to run like early stage startups.

 

[08380728]

Tim Cook "We have new exciting innovative products this year"

He's been saying this for the last few years. All they've done is axed useful valuable products we used (MBP 17", MacPro), minimised and reduced features and functionality of other products and made them less useful or useless (rMBP, MP). They've made a mess of the Mac OS, plagued it with issues, over complicated it, slow to update and rectify issues, removed functionality (laziness) and strangled the OS with un needed sand boxing. Generally, proving incompetence at writing good quality software functional and feature laden.

Bring back Avie and Bertrand.

 

[bsmi021]

Carl Icahn can go sit on a pickle and spin.

You can sit there and damn Icahn all you want BUT he owns a lot of stock, he is on the board, and he has a lot of power, he had some to do with the huge stock repurchase. So in the long run apple is nothing more than a wall street patsie like every other company listed there, so you might need to think a little when it comes to what wall street wants??

 

[Renzatic]

I have to admit I have a real soft spot for the old UNIX Workstations - especially the SGI ones that were bold and beautiful such as the SGI Indy:

SGI O2+

and my person favourite, the SGI Tezro

Ahh, Silicon Graphics. Purveyors of the most 90's looking computers I've ever seen in my entire life.

They were cool, though.

 

[bsmi021]

This post about making a product they already have into something else will be like the last 3 versions of the iphone,(4s,5,5s) all the same (don't believe me look around the net) and as for "Oh we are going to put all this money into the mac's" is nothing more than trying to keep a fan base. It is simple the mac line in dollars makes less than 3% income to apple, so if you are a wall street patise like all companies listed why would yo put so much money into a loosing product line??
most of the money (income) that apple makes is from the iphone and even that has not been any great deal in the past couple of updates, so apple was forced to repurchase their own stock to use the cash for other things, people this is how big business works!!

 

[skellener]

Sure wish they would do something about getting the Macs of TODAY out! Still have to wait until March for a Mac Pro!!!

 

[UnfetteredMind]

I have to admit I have a real soft spot for the old UNIX Workstations - especially the SGI ones that were bold and beautiful such as the SGI Indy:

Image

SGI O2+

Image

and my person favourite, the SGI Tezro

Image

Worked on the first two, never even seen the latter! We did have Octanes and I don't even recall what server models in the data center ...

Many of the workstations were used for visualization, configured with stereo graphics and all

Sorry, getting off-topic, uh ... great to hear they're spending time on new Macs, yah!

 

[08380728]

I want a real Mac Pro with slots. A Macbook Pro 17" with matte 1920x1200 display, two storage PCIe SSD slots, SATA port and user upgradable RAM.

 

[MellowFuzz]

Reading between the lines on the PC applications quotes, I suspect Tim Cook might have woken up to the inadequacies of iWork and the necessity for it to be an Office competitor going forward. Or maybe I'm just deluding myself.

...

Definitely deluding myself.

 

[Mums]

Bring back the 17 inch MBP or something equivalent!
PLEASE???

YES PLEASE!! My MacBook Pro 17" (Jobs-era) is turning three this year ;(. I love it, but it won't last forever. What am I going to do when I need a new laptop? No way am I ever using Windoze. I'd get an iMac, but need portability.

Maybe Apple will come up with a keychain drive virtual projector computer one day, but until then I'll be needing a decent sized portable screen!

 

[iBug2]

Who cares? AAPL stock holders like me.

Why? If an "ultra-slim 12-inch Retina MacBook" is what Apple considers to be a new product category when it's really not, Wall St is going to slam the stock again. It's in Apple's best interest to not allow that to happen.

Why is it in Apple's best interests? It's in stockholders best interests, who don't really work for Apple. Apple's best interest is making products that turn great profit. Nothing else.

 

[HAMEYO]

**** Wall Street. Going to bed with Wall Street is like sleeping with a den of vipers. I agree with the following post;

http://www.manton.org/2014/02/we_love_music.html

Focus on making things better and not come up with new categories just to satisfy Wall Street.

AAPL is BADLY MANIPULATED by " VILLAIN " Across ATLANTIC !
This is A WAR:
Main Street ( Ordinary People ) VS WALL STREET ( Demon )

----------

Carl Icahn said - "Tim Cook again confirms $AAPL will launch new products in new categories (plural) this year. Wall Street apparently still not listening."

To which Tim responded "...anyone "reasonable" would consider Apple's upcoming products to be in new categories."

anyone "reasonable" - hardly reassuring, to the street, that's it's going to be anything other than evolution.

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in Cook's statement that would make anyone think innovation.

Wall Street ( LACKAY of VILLAIN ) Down Play EVERYTHING Apple Has Achieved and Going to Achieve FOR THE SAKE OF DEMON !

 

[217833]

Pleeeeeeeeeeeease give us a prosumer version of the new Mac Pro with an i7 and Radions!

They have. It's called an iMac.

Configurable with up to:
- 3.5 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz).
- 32 GB RAM
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M with 4GB of GDDR5 memory.
- Two thunderbolt ports (yeah, they need an update to thunderbolt 2)They have. It's called an iMac.

Well, the iMac is an all-in-one solution while the Mac Pro is only the main unit without display.

But I'm very convinced the next Mac Mini will be the "prosumer" version of the Mac Pro with an i7 and less expensive graphic cards (probably only 16 GB, even if I'd really wish 32GB).

Here's a mockup I found out on the web that illustrate really well what we could hope for the next Mac Mini (kind of two Apple TV stack one on top of the other):

Personally, I'd love that Mac Mini, with Quad i7, 32GB, 512GB SSD, Radeon... that would be good

 

[vomhorizon]

he is on the board

Nope..

https://www.apple.com/pr/bios/

 

[panther quest]

I'd love to be able to throw a sim in may Macbook Air.

I don't understand why my phone and iPad both have LTE, but not my MacBook Pro.

Pisses me off actually.

 

[mdelvecchio]

WHAT!!?? You want results? Just enjoy the corporate board-speak and fluffy empty words... and smile with glorious satisfaction that something is being done. But, don't expect anything to be done.

Sounds like Cook is saying this will be a year without major innovations or products. What else does an exec say when they have little on the immediate runway?

you're high. his english couldn't be any clearer.

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I want a real Mac Pro with slots. A Macbook Pro 17" with matte 1920x1200 display, two storage PCIe SSD slots, SATA port and user upgradable RAM.

and a pony?

----------

He's been saying this for the last few years. All they've done is axed useful valuable products we used (MBP 17", MacPro), minimised and reduced features and functionality of other products and made them less useful or useless (rMBP, MP). They've made a mess of the Mac OS, plagued it with issues, over complicated it, slow to update and rectify issues, removed functionality (laziness) and strangled the OS with un needed sand boxing. Generally, proving incompetence at writing good quality software functional and feature laden.

so much ignorance, so little time.

- do you have access to MBP 17" sales stats? nope.

- rMBP is terrifically exciting.

- nMP is an amazing machine.

- OS X (not "Mac OS") is my favorite desktop OS and still beats the pants of Windows, which by all accounts is awful.

- annual versions of OS X are a delight. that they're now free is even better.

- OS X sandboxing only applies to MAS releases, nothing stopping you from using non-sandboxed apps. you know that, right?

- using terms like "laziness" and "incompetence" to describe apple software just outs you as someone who has no idea what he's talking about. I'm certain you dont even write software. i do for a living, so take it from me -- you have no idea what you're talking about.

 

[QCassidy352]

Tim Cook "We have new exciting innovative products this year"

Tim Cook at WWDC2014. "I like to present you iPhone 27 and iPad 38"


Apple you have Billions of Dollars, USE IT. Why keep coming with the same rehash crap every year.

You can't just spend money to create new products beyond a certain point. Human talent and current tech limitations remain limiting factors no matter how much money you spend.

 

[Constable Odo]

They have. It's called an iMac.

Configurable with up to:
- 3.5 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 (Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz).
- 32 GB RAM
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780M with 4GB of GDDR5 memory.
- Two thunderbolt ports (yeah, they need an update to thunderbolt 2)

Wall Street is betting on Google and Chromebooks as the future of computing. I'm willing to bet Google reaches $1300 a share before Apple reaches $600 a share because Wall Street has already realized Tim Cook isn't Steve Jobs and never will be. Wall Street knows Apple will certainly fail without Steve Jobs introducing new products. Anyone can tell Wall Street has lost all interest in Apple the same way they lost interest in RIMM before that company completely collapsed. Do you realize that Apple hasn't increased institutional ownership by 1% since the 2012 fiasco when Apple back-stabbed all of their loyal shareholders? Nobody wants to get burned again. With Google they can't lose. With Apple they can't win. Being an Apple shareholders is almost an embarrassment of serial losses.