Wow, reading these comments reminds me of how loud soccer (european football) fans tends to react and behave as soon as their team is underperforming for a few matches. Everyone starts to scream about how the trainer / manager needs to get fired because he is doing a horrible job with the team and how the team needs to replace pretty much the entire team with new and better players.
Two months later, the team is back on track and noone is complaining anymore. But as soon as you lose a few, the ********* starts all over again...
There is no point in firing Tim Cook at this stage. He has not done anything wrong after taking over as a CEO of the company. When we look at Apple's overall market value and profit, Tim has managed to make the tree grow even further into heaven something that in and of itself is impressive considering he took over a company that as already at an all time high.
But that's Tim Cook's biggest problem. He took over a company that was already skyrocketing towards heaven. And he took over for what must be the most popular CEO of any company of all time? The status that Steve Jobs had within the company was next to none, and I don't think the world has ever seen a CEO of a consumer products company like Apple having a CEO with such a enormous amount of fans out there.
There is simply no way Tim Cook could ever "deliver" what people want as a successor to Steve Jobs. No matter what he does, there will also be a large number of people complaining.
With that said, he has yet to really prove himself as a visionary. Apple has yet to release anything new after he took over as CEO of Apple. The only thing we've got so far is the new MacBook 12-inch and the Apple Watch and that's pretty much it. Both are great devices, but none of them are any marvels of the industry.
The Apple Watch is a great devices and arguably the best smart watch on the market. And it became the most popular one right away. The problem for Apple is that smart watches a market does not seem to be taking off, so having the best product in this category is always nice but it won't really give Apple much of anything in the long run unless something fundamental changes and smart watches suddenly become a thing that most consumers want to have on their wrist.
The MacBook 12-inch is a great notebook, it's my personal favorite of the whole line-up at the moment and it's yet again Apple delivering something that is perhaps the best on the market in its size and weight category. But it's nothing really that special, it's just a really great looking and well-built notebook that is really thin and lightweight due to the Intel Core M not requiring active cooling.
All the other products have not seen much of an improvement other than spec bumps. We still have the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro line-up that has yet to see any re-design for a couple of years now. They still look and works great, but the Air really needs to get better displays and the Pro's did take a awkward turn when they never got updated to Intel Skylake and Apple suddenly decided to ditch NVIDIA graphics for AMD in a time where NVIDIA is simply superior in every way. Both in terms of performance and power usage.
The iPhone did see a real upswing in sales with the iPhone 6, and that's a model that got released under Tim Cook. But the release didn't bring anything special other than increasing in size, something the market was demanding resulting in a huge spike in sales. And now rumours has it that we are going to get the third iPhone release with basically the same design, so that's two years with simply a spec bump and nothing else done to the phone.
People are asking for Apple to reinvent the wheel. And that is just not going to happen anything soon. It's not like new, revolutionary products and new groundbreaking product categories are created every few years. When looking at Apple's past, it's not like Steve Jobs walked on stage every two or three years and revolutionised the world.
So why people seem to expect and demand that Tim Cook should bring forth the "next-big-thing" already is beyond me. That's not how it works, and that's not how Apple did it under Steve Jobs either.
But it might seem like Tim Cook is being too much of "that nice guy". Where Steve Jobs was known to be ruthless, it seems like Tim tries to be a "buddy". If he lets all the others go rampant and do whatever they want it will cause a mess down the line. And he seems to be taking this "nice guy" approach towards the board as well, focusing on maximising profits of each product line.
Decisions like sticking with 16GB iPhones and iPads doesn't really make much sense. It starts hurting Apple when consumers gets frustrated by the lack of space on their devices. And tossing a "Pro" name onto the new iPad 9,7-inch just to be able to increase its price even though it features the exact same hardware as one would expect a iPad Air 3 to feature just feels dumb.
And the prices for Apple's first-party accessory have also increased to hideous levels under Tim Cook. Take that charing cryb/stand for the Apple Watch. Or the prices for case and smart cover for the iPad Pro.
