Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Tim Cook in Memo to Employees: 'There Has Never Been a Moment of Such Great Potential As This One'
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
He can talk all he wants about moments and potentials. Bottom line? Not one revolutionary or transformative product has been created on his watch.
„It's been an amazing journey so far, yet we have barely begun” bold statement in the light of human species extinction within the next 30 years.
Apple is not a design company anymore, it's a financial company that makes iterated appliances with great chipsets. Apple is actually REALLY bad with (product, UX, UI) design at this point, and as a designer I can elaborate why for days so please don't get me started.
We've had the "design" discussion before and how present day Apple has fallen far from that tree, let's close at that.
Last edited:
The company is worth over $2 trillion. Plenty of people would disagree with you on that.
Last edited by a moderator:
There, there. Show me on the doll where the Apple critic touched you.
Cook may have taken Apple's valuation to the stars, but their creative culture of design/engineering excellence and innovation is indeed gutted. In a way you're both right but you're comparing apples to oranges.
Last edited by a moderator:
'There Has Never Been a Moment of Such Great Potential As This One'
Greed really has no end does it? The first company in history to hit $2T mark and he calls this the great potential? How big and how rich do you want to grow?
I understand its a business and they have to continue to make money, but everything has a limit after all..
I like Apple but I think its getting a little bit too big for society's own good...
Yes this also applies to Microsoft, Amazon, FB, and Google....
I wouldn't say completely gutted. MacOS and iOS still good, iPhone and iPad hardware still good. M1 is an amazing feat. I always preferred Jobs over this guy but M1 makes me think he is a good successor.
Its much more corporate-y I guess, and became "IBM" somehow as revenues and profits are the bottomline. I would like if he would concentrate more on the MacOS side of things, kind of neglected. They no longer much care about Mac vs Windows.
Gordon Gekko and "greed is good" comes to mind. ALL that money and you would imagine Apple would have some of the top research labs in the world. They could have teams of scientists, designers, engineers and researchers on the payroll to just let them come up with amazing new technologies they could brand and market. Instead, they're content with re-releasing the same thing year on year with an extra lens and a different finish on the sides, as long as it sells in droves.
Apple isn't doomed by a long shot, it's just so lame and penny pinching compared to what they could have been instead and given their past. It really feels like Tim Cook has become the big head in the jumbotron of the 1984 ad.
No, it really has no end.
Last edited:
Considering that Apple is already at this size despite their products having minority share in their respective markets. And how Apple is able to use its large iPhone install base to enter adjacent markets (eg: use iPhones to sell Apple watches, AirPods and possibly even AR glasses as well).
The next milestone will be hitting 2 billion device users.
Apple is only just getting started.
Jesus what’s up with the negativity? In what way should a CEO be different to be accepted by macrumors forum members?
In a way it is the most ungrateful job - being compared to the Apple before Jobs passing. No one would ever be able to fill those shoes.
Lol what nonsense, it’s another hollow statement from Tim Cook, people have every right to call it out. The CEO of a company like Apple doesn’t get to be the good guy, no amount of product (red) sales or pride watch bands will compensate for the misery Tim Cook’s supply chain has created. Virtue signaling from apologists does nothing to change reality. It’s so great you think you are superior (self esteem is important), but nobody else cares.
He's been CEO for 10 years. At some point he has to stop "getting started" and actually start.
It's also true that he inherited a rocket mid-flight and all he had to do is keep it airborne. He never had to "save" the company from anything, the brand was already colossal, and he turned it into a cookie-cutter appliance megacorp with a sky high stock valuation.
In what way you ask. Well, off the top of my head: foster Apple's culture of design and engineering, have a product vision, walk the talk, innovate frequently, be a thought leader in technology. Not use their immense profits to buy back their own stock, pontificate like a beauty pageant and replace designers/engineers with floating middle managers and MBAs.
This from a CEO who has said they don't built their products to a price point - they just build them and charge whatever. From a company that strives to make its products non user serviceable, leading to an increase in forced redundancy and waste.
For the fewer and fewer who can afford Apple's wares - congrats on having your lives improved.
For the rest of us keeping Apple's wares out of landfill by fighting over the previous owner's table-leavings... we'll just keep dreaming of the day today's tech will be cheap enough for us to afford.
There’s a reason behind the Chinese saying - wealth rarely lasts 3 generations. Inheriting a fortune by no way means that you know what to do with it. Much less grow the company into the juggernaut it is today.
Apple’s threats today are no longer Samsung and google, but the FBI and the governments of various countries. When it comes to playing politics at least, I will say that Tim Cook probably has a way better temperament than Steve Jobs.
I personally don’t care for politics, but I am not going to let it become an excuse to not succeed. And if you are going to have to play it, then may as well play it to the best of your ability. Till the day those rules no longer apply to you.
That Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs is his biggest weakness, and also his biggest strength. Different people are needed at different points in a company history. Jobs was right for his era, but he would have been a disaster for the Cook era. Cook may not have been responsible for the initial innovation and concept that Jobs provided, but he Cook has refined Apple’s culture and expanded it, and has done as fine a job as any CEO in American history, if not world business history.
He's Eisenhower, not Churchill.
I don’t see what’s wrong with Apple using their money to buy their own stock back. It makes perfect sense from a financial perspective, not least because Apple was sitting on a ton of cash it clearly had no use for. So may as well return that to the shareholders who would presumably be able to put it to better use (eg: invest it on other higher-yield endeavours).
In the very least, this wouldn’t have impacted Apple’s operations one bit.
I agree.
Which is why my money is on wearables and more specifically, Apple to thrive in this new computing paradigm.
Wearables in and of themselves are never going to be a platform, AR is the key to that and they've got a lot of competition.
You also have to take risks to innovate, we haven't seen any of that from Tim Cooks Apple its all been very safe.
Therein lies the problem with your Jobs/Cook comparison, Jobs had the temperament to gamble on the next paradigm shifting idea.
Last edited:
How long? Do you have a timeframe? It’s been almost 10 years since Tim took the helm. Another 5 to go for Mr. Cook. He will get his own slice of the history books.
While Apple has not done some things perfectly over the years and there is always room for improvement, the universe has laughed in the face of Apples most vocal MR critics. Those who talk illogic, with false equivalences, mistruths, hyperbolic nonsense and the like. They remind us that people buy because they’re hyponotized with the reality distortion field. Let’s not forget the ever moving definition of innovation. The most ardent critics, the ones who say the fans are biased, but haven’t written anything other than scathing criticism in 10 years, are/were wrong.
So it’s time for some acknowledgement for the job Tim Cook has done from these people, but I don’t see that coming, and round and round we go.
Here’s my reasoning on why I feel Apple is uniquely positioned to thrive in the wearables market.
1) Like the Apple Watch, it’s going to be a while before wearables are powerful enough to be an independent computing platform. Until this day comes, the smartphone is likely going to have to double as the brains of any such pair of AR glasses.
Apple has a strong iphone install base. Thanks to this, Apple also has a large user base that is willing to spend on accessories. Just look at the prices that the Apple Watch and the accompanying bands command, vs what people are willing to pay for alternative android smartwatches.
This results in a scenario where Apple is able to charge a premium for Apple glasses, and are in turn willing and able to invest more into improving it relative to the competition.
It’s why I often say that there is only an Apple Watch market as compared to a smartwatch market, and why there may well only be an Apple Glasses market, as compared to a smart glasses market.
Because Apple is one of the few companies capable of crafting premium experiences that people are willing to fork out good money for. Which in turn leads me to my next point.
2) Apple gets both tech and design. Odds are way higher that Apple will make a headset that people will be willing to be seen in public wearing (see AirPods). Heck, with the Apple brand, people may well want to be see wearing Apple glasses, compared to something like say, Google Glasses.
3) Apple has spent years working on miniaturisation and wireless connectivity (as evidenced with their experiences creating the Apple Watch and AirPods). Apple is in better control of the technologies needed to make wearables work. This is why I say people who say Apple uses yesterday’s tech only look at the surface level of things, and ignore things like the W1 chip in AirPods.
4) Apple’s strong command of their ecosystem means they should be better able to get developers on board. We also see Apple setting the stage for AR glasses, from App clips, to AR support in iOS, to the rumoured upcoming Airtags. Everything Apple does makes more sense when we consider what they intend to release in the coming years.
Based on this, I am not too dismayed by Apple’s apparent lack of risk-taking. I am sure that even as we speak right now, they are working hard on making their smart glasses into a viable product, but also realise that there are many challenges that need to be tackled first, and have decided to first build up the infrastructure via numerous iOS updates first.
Once everything is in place, flip a switch, announce said product and let rip.
"Majority WINS
Minority Loses"
So funny!
Yet Apple has managed to scrape by and become on of the most valuable tech companies in the world, with over a billion active users, and many millions of customers (many repeat) willing to open their wallets and reward Apple with their currency paying premium prices for the products they make. Year after year after year!
What risk came out of the Jobs' era? Exactly one, and that was iphone. That was definitely a risk and that was the only risk to come out of the Jobs' era.
What risks has Tim Cook took?
- A7
- iphone 6
- Apple Pay
- Apple Watch
- OG Airpods
- Apple Pencil
- HomePod
What risk is the competition taking or took?
- hideable front face camera (it's an innovation, but I think a bad innovation)
- front camera through the glass (it's an innovation but totally relies on computation photography. Is the picture quality up to par yet? I don't know)
- periscope lens in smartphones (not really a risk)
Maybe others can add on to the list
This is one of the silliest posts i've ever seen on here. Almost all of Apples current sucess is built on the back of the iPhone and iPad and the development of those products.
Last edited by a moderator: