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> Another example of such uninspired CEO that keeps making good quarters but tarnishes his company advantages is Tim Cook. I can't wait for him to be replaced.

> Another example of such uninspired CEO that keeps making good quarters but tarnishes his company advantages is Tim Cook. I can't wait for him to be replaced. Comments like this make zero sense to me. Apple might be better if Jobs was still alive. But without a time machine, and potentially better medicine, that's not an option. Under Cook Apple: - Increased profitability and market share massively. - Created the most successful watch brand in the world. - Turned Beats into Beats + AirPods, the two most successful headphone brands in the world. - Massively increased Mac, iPhone, iPad, install base. - Avoided the sort of ridiculous cash burning acquisitions to inflate growth Ballmer was guilty of. Apple has a bunch of mis-steps under Cook, but none of them have had long term company damaging impact. Many of the things people beat Cook up over were actually things Jobs was as bad/ worse with. For example almost all the App Store policies everyone hates were created under Jobs. Jobs was also far more protective and litigious. Cook isn't Jobs, since Jobs is dead the comparison is pointless. Cook has done better than the vast majority of CEOs who have taken over successful brands. Apple is doing just fine.

godelmachine 6y ago
>>potentially better medicine Jobs refused conventional treatment to treat his cancer until it was too late. He placed heavy emphasis on oriental mysticism.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  There is a lot of conjecture about Jobs death, I try to avoid delving into speculation too much.
- FreeFull 6y ago
  While that's true, pancreatic cancer is nasty enough that even with prompt treatment, there was a good chance he'd succumb to it anyway, although he'd definitely have way better chances.
  - baldfat 6y ago
    His cancer was the least deadly of the cancers and with treatment he would have lived much longer. My mom had stage one pancreatic cancer 4 years ago and she is still alive today and cancer free for over four years. So it is possible.
    - Beldin 6y ago
      There's pancreatic cancer and cancer of the pancreas. (There might be more, i know about these two). The difference in life expectancy is staggering. One is basically starting the clock (in months to a handful of years), with the other, recovery is possible.
      - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
        Pancreatic cancer essentially forms a barrier around the cancer that prevents drugs from reaching the tumors as I understood layman's descriptions of the disease when one of my friends died of it. I think there was some initial success in attaching vitamin d to some drugs to bypass the "firewall", but it was still hard.
    - microtherion 6y ago
      FWIW, Jobs was diagnosed in 2003, so he lived another 8 years after his initial diagnosis.
      - jonny_eh 6y ago
        Which says to me that he was a good candidate for real treatment.
        stjohnswarts 6y ago
        Yeah, I'm not sure how such an intelligent person could get suckered in by that mumbo jumbo. I guess one can be a savante in some things and dumb as a rock at others.
  - 6y ago
moolcool 6y ago
Those bullet points mostly focus on scaling existing products, and seem more Ballmer-like than Nadella-like IMO.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  Airpods/ Beats/ Watch is a $25 Billion/ year business with 40%/ YoY growth. Neither product existed when Jobs was alive. That's something Nadella hasn't even managed, let alone Ballmer.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jayd16 6y ago
    Azure seems to have made $12B in Q3 2020 and that didn't exist when Jobs was alive.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      So Nadella is half as effective as Cook? More seriously, I shouldn't have put the comparison to Nadella in there at all. They are both great CEOs.
      - cryptica 6y ago
        Exactly, Satya Nadella is an awesome leader. Who is to say Tim Cook could have taken all these difficult challenges which MSFT was facing at the time? It's 100% speculation.
        ogre_codes 6y ago
        > Who is to say Tim Cook could have taken all these difficult challenges which MSFT was facing at the time? Cook probably wouldn't have ever been a good fit for Microsoft. His expertise is in physical products logistics.
      - 6y ago
j-pb 6y ago
We're a 40 person Design agency, that has been running on Mac hardware for almost 40 years now. Everybody of us used to be a huge apple fanboy, now every one of us hates them with a passion. They completely ignored their customers for the iPhone money grab. Their hardware and software used to be synonymous with quality, nowadays their shoddy quality has become a meme at work. "Oops reboot." - "What did you expect, it's a mac." We're looking for the door, and slowly started to introduce windows machines. We were shocked how fast computers got without apple catching up. Apple used to he one of the pillars of our productivy, nowadays it's a liability. And from a developer perspective, they murdered their own App ecosystem. Mac software used to be really really good. But who do you expect to write great apps for 70ct per sale. That's just ridiculous. Also, why should I get an iPad pro, if I can't even write software on it. They could've dominated the PC market if iPad Os was actually a real OS. I doubt that apple can keep its brand relevant without opinion leaders like design professionals. I mean, c'mon, even Ive left. Apple is dead, it's only a matter of time for the rot to bring it down.
- outworlder 6y ago
  > Everybody of us used to be a huge apple fanboy, now every one of us hates them with a passion. Neither of these extremes are healthy attitudes. It's a company, making machines. That's all there is to it.
  - cutler 6y ago
    That's a gross oversimplification. If Apple were just another Dell turning out machines you'd have a point but Apple, above all else, is an aesthetic brand designed to inspire passion. It's like comparing Ruby with Java. Ruby appeals to the developer's aesthetic, inspring passion in its community. Java does not.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > I doubt that apple can keep its brand relevant without opinion leaders like design professionals. I know a fair number of developers and most of them still use Macs. Not because they are fan boys, but because MacOS still sucks less than Windows. For me and likely many, OS choice is a pragmatic thing and for the moment MacOS is the least bad option. It's going to be interesting seeing what happens with the new CPUs which have the potential to push the Mac ahead of the pack in terms of price/ performance as well. > I mean, c'mon, even Ive left. Ive is 54 years old. He's was at Apple for ~26 years when he left. I have no idea how wealthy he is at this point, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's a billionaire based on his position and likely large stock option grants in the 00s. You are a designer, how many years would you put in cranking out designs for mass consumption consumer electronics after you were a many times over millionaire? How many black aluminium iPhones would you design? Another 40 years worth?
microtherion 6y ago
Agree with all of this. I also think Cook should get credit for the Apple Pay / Apple Card ecosystem, and for Car Play. In addition, under Cook, Apple also made great strides in ecological manufacturing and supplier accountability. And early on, Cook had the courage to fire a highly visible but toxic executive.
- varispeed 6y ago
  > Apple also made great strides in ecological manufacturing and supplier accountability Do you have evidence of that? It seems like it is quite the opposite. Apple prefer to destroy not working phones or Macs instead of repairing them. They make sure independent repair shops cannot repair any of their products and design them in a way so that they fail in short space of time, so customers can either pay for repair through the nose or buy a new Mac.
  - microtherion 6y ago
    See e.g. the annual reports in https://www.apple.com/environment/ https://www.apple.com/environment/ regarding environmental responsibility and the graphs in https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/ https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/ regarding improvements in supplier responsibility. Even Greenpeace acknowledges quite a bit of progress in many respects: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/GGE2017_Apple.pdf https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/GG... — keep in mind that they used to picket Apple annual meetings. Admittedly, they still have plenty of criticisms, and several of them echo yours. Personally, I think "designed to fail" is a downright false charge, and "repairability" is a trickier trade-off than repair advocates make it out to be — how much weight, size, and fragility does the repairability add, and how often is the device in fact repaired?
    - codebolt 6y ago
      Perhaps there has been an improvement in other parts of the supply chain, but the situation in DR Congo (where e.g. coltan used for capacitors is mined) seems to only be getting worse.
zebra100 6y ago
+1. I'm far from an Apple zealot, but Tim Cook added $1.7 Trillion to apple's market cap since taking over as chief executive. He certainly isn't the product visionary that Jobs was, but a rare few are. IMO Cook may have even been a better executer than Jobs, even if his decisions are more risk averse. And he has still taken a few notable ones – e.g. Apple's recent shift to services revenue (news, music, card, etc) was a surprisingly smooth & fast success. Barring some huge future misstep, I'd be surprised if he didn't go down as one of history's most successful company leaders in his own right.
- admax88q 6y ago
  I don't really have a horse in this race, but I'm not sure that the best defense against > Another example of such uninspired CEO that keeps making good quarters but tarnishes his company advantages is Tim Cook. is > but Tim Cook added $1.7 Trillion to apple's market cap since taking over as chief executive.
  - whynotminot 6y ago
    Good thing that's not the only feather in Tim's cap. He's vastly expanded Apple's valuation while simultaneously introducing new, successful products, and growing Apple's place in the tech world. Steve was visionary, but Tim has taken that vision farther than anyone ever gives him credit for.
    - fakedang 6y ago
      Most of the stuff was in development during Jobs' time, including Airpods, the latest one. With Jony Ive gone, I doubt Apple has the prowess to continue that finesse. It would be akin to von Holzhausen leaving Tesla, imo.
      - amluto 6y ago
        I think it may be the other way around. In the Jony Ive post-Steve-Jobs era, we got the iPhones 6-11, and, in my opinion, all of them are considerably worse physical designs than the 5. Now Apple has (imminently) the 12 and 12 Mini, which are, IMO, the best designs from Apple in years.
mellosouls 6y ago
Beats + AirPods, the two most successful headphone brands in the world How are you working out "most successful"? Beats aren't rated particularly highly apart from by label-followers; while blinkeredness has always been a notable criticism of Apple product appraisal, it did in the past occasionally lead the field - that's not at all obvious with Beats etc.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > How are you working out "most successful"? Sales. How else do you measure success of a consumer electronics product? > Beats aren't rated particularly highly apart from by label-followers While Beats haven't been highly rated by audiophiles, they are popular and sound quality and in particular Bluetooth performance has improved significantly under Apple. AirPods... well they are AirPods. They are might well be the most universally loved product in Apple's product line right now. Maybe the most loved consumer electronics product on the market right now.
  - mellosouls 6y ago
    Sales. How else do you measure success of a consumer electronics product? There are clearly many measures of success. It's best if you mean best-selling maybe just to say that, as it may be important to salespeople but not so much to (say) end users. [Airpods...]Maybe the most loved consumer electronics product on the market right now. That sounds more like a subjective or emotional claim than one measurable, and that's part of the problem with Apple in particular (though not only Apple) as I've already mentioned; the seeming lack of ability of its champions to consider it's products in a reasonably neutral way. To an extent, that's a compliment to the way it has built it's brand over time, but it means it's important to bear it in mind when judging rather sweeping superiority claims.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      > That sounds more like a subjective or emotional claim than one measurable, and that's part of the problem with Apple in particular (though not only Apple) as I've already mentioned; the seeming lack of ability of its champions to consider it's products in a reasonably neutral way. People have been spewing nonsense like this for decades. As if customers being happy with a product is a worthless concept. The AirPods are successful because people love them. When AirPods were first launched, they were widely panned and people laughed at the design, but everyone who bought them loved them. I could go into details about why, but it's irrelevant, if they hadn't been so well liked, they wouldn't be the best selling headphones on the market. See also, Apple Watch.
microtherion 6y ago
> Avoided the sort of ridiculous cash burning acquisitions to inflate growth It's funny how Apple has often been exhorted by industry observers to make large acquisitions, and instead has done quite well with smaller ones. Beats has been a commercial success. PA Semi (dating back to the Jobs era) was the foundation to a hugely successful VLSI design division. The success of Siri is a bit more disputed, but it's playing an important role in many products.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  This is exactly why I mentioned it, Microsoft burned through 10s of billions in bad acquisitions, Google has a few massive multi-billion dollar mis-steps.
varispeed 6y ago
Apple under Tim enjoy short term gains and greed has blinded them. The company will soon start failing because of their anti-consumer and anti-environment culture. They create false image of themselves to be super friendly innovative brand for creative people, but the truth is far from this. Their products are designed to fail and to be only repairable by Apple. If your charging port dies on a new Mac, you cannot repair it yourself even if you have all required tools and skills. Their policy is essentially if it breaks you have to pay us through the nose or buy a new model. Then there is the anti-competitive Apple Store that is milking the iOS ecosystem and developers.
- D-Coder 6y ago
  "Apple Doomed!" I have seen that headline every year since 1984. Every single year.
  - necovek 6y ago
    Well, at a point it was pretty doomed before iTunes and iPod (and Jobs) brought it back. Who's to say it won't happen again? Though with the size and cash reserves, it's more likely they get "doomed" the way Microsoft was in the last 10 years (still is, perhaps).
- supernova87a 6y ago
  Sounds like you've got an axe to grind with Apple though, and are biased negatively because of it. Apple's products are demonstrably supported in software far longer than other manufacturers. People rate the physical build quality of their products very high as well. It seems that people like the benefits and features of Apple hardware enough to overlook the problems with self-repairability. And regarding the app store, maybe because you're in the industry you think it's a generally big problem, because you're affected. But it's a 1% privilege issue to most of the world. It seems Apple is doing enough right that its value is climbing.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Yeah I don't like the walled garden myself, but the hardware I've bought from them has been well designed, supported for quite some time, and trustworthy. I never even had to get anything repaired. My line of work requires me to have both Linux and Apple machines and Apple is working just fine along with Linux.
hartator 6y ago
Hum, I think this is missing the main points. AirPods and Watches are gimmick. Nothing crazy innovative happened to the iPhones - apart the flatnessisation of iOS which in my opinion was a mistake - and Macs actually went backwards. The real Tim Cook test will be the ARM Macs. Can be game changing or it can’t sink Macs for good.
- Eduardo3rd 6y ago
  Gimmick or not, wearables (Watch + Airpods) are a massive business for Apple. Large enough that they would be a F500 company if spun out at current revenue numbers. https://fortune.com/2019/08/06/apple-airpods-business/ https://fortune.com/2019/08/06/apple-airpods-business/ I don't think you can characterize that as a business failure.
  - cam0 6y ago
    Yeah, hugely successful products are by definition __not__ gimmicks.
    - mark-r 6y ago
      You've obviously never heard of Pet Rocks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > AirPods and Watches are gimmick. People wrote off the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad as gimmicks. Even the Mac was written off as a toy. It's the ultimate hubris to assume you know more than the millions of people who buy a given product and enjoy using it.
reissbaker 6y ago
+1. Apple isn't the same as it was under Steve Jobs, but it's stayed successful and relevant. I miss the old Apple software quality — the Apple apps were once a reason to use macOS or iOS, and it's pretty rare I actually use them anymore — and the stronger hardware innovation (Watch is cool but not industry-defining on the scale of the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad), but the overall Apple ecosystem has if anything grown stronger under Cook... And their edge on hardware has grown significantly, especially with respect to chip design, to the point where their in-house-designed ARM chips are likely to give them not only a generational advantage on phones, which they already have, but also soon on laptops and desktops as well. Apple under Tim Cook isn't going to wow the world with innovative new products to the same degree it did under Steve Jobs, but its product lines will relentlessly improve and Apple will in many ways stay ahead of the competition because Tim is a great operator. I can't say the same for Ballmer: not only did Microsoft innovate less successfully under his leadership than Apple has under Cook (at least Cook has Watch and Airpods!), but also Microsoft's cash cow product lines didn't do well under his leadership — Windows 8, for example, was a travesty. That being said I'm also very impressed with Satya Nadella, and have recently been using Windows more and more again, something I thought would be pretty unlikely (to put it mildly) a decade ago when Ballmer was at the helm. I'm pretty excited about future products from both companies.
sys_64738 6y ago
Apple lost its way when they shoved Scott Forstall out the door for refusing to take the blame for the Apple Maps debacle. Apple has been gliding on the backs of Steve's vision since then and they're terrified to make any wrong decision. That's why they overlap generations of products as they don't have a clue what will succeed.
- ksec 6y ago
  > Apple has been gliding on the backs of Steve's vision since then and they're terrified to make any wrong decision. That has been some of my view as well. But some of their approach have changed. The old Apple was about making something great, charge a premium. That is about the same with current Apple. Except its whole Services Strategy reeks of money grabbing. There is nothing about Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness that fits the definition of great.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    > There is nothing about Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness that fits the definition of great. I'm not sure how you'd consider Apple Music a money grab but are ok with iTunes music purchases? Basically they were expanding their business to follow the industry trend of streaming music instead of buying it. iTunes has been a revenue stream at Apple since the iPod was born. Also, Apple selling supplemental services and software that are... not amazing is not new either. The big one? iTunes. For a few years it was great, but for a long long time it was just a giant mess. iHome, iMovie (Garage Band is pretty rad), iPhoto (Photos is way better), Mobile Me, Ping didn't even last 2 years I don't think. Most of those products were meh at best, they did the basic thing they needed to do and that's about it. The big difference between Apple then and Apple now is they have the money to contract out for their own content. > Apple TV+, Apple Fitness that fits the definition of great. Apple TV+ has a paltry selection because they didn't go out and buy a huge external library of content to bootstrap themselves. The content they have is—Decent and getting better. They know this and there is a reason they aren't really charging for it yet. Apple Fitness doesn't even exist so not sure how you can criticize it. Yeah, it's all a "Money Grab", they are growing the business, that's what companies do. Fortunately all of this stuff is optional. You can enjoy your computer/ phone/ tablet without any of it. IMO the only egregious "money grab" is their paltry 5GB free iCloud storage. Considering that's the best and for many only way of backing up their $1000 phone with their life stored on it, that's messed up.
ksec 6y ago
That is the same argument with Microsoft in the 90s. Windows are selling great, they have great Market Share etc.... Steve Jobs: We are still Better! Bill Gates: Does it Matter? Time will tell.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  Just an aside. Steve Jobs was only CEO of Apple for a few months in 97,98,& 99. The rest of the 90s he was running NEXT & Pixar after getting the boot from Apple in the 80s.

godelmachine 6y ago

>>potentially better medicine Jobs refused conventional treatment to treat his cancer until it was too late. He placed heavy emphasis on oriental mysticism.

ogre_codes 6y ago
There is a lot of conjecture about Jobs death, I try to avoid delving into speculation too much.
FreeFull 6y ago
While that's true, pancreatic cancer is nasty enough that even with prompt treatment, there was a good chance he'd succumb to it anyway, although he'd definitely have way better chances.
- baldfat 6y ago
  His cancer was the least deadly of the cancers and with treatment he would have lived much longer. My mom had stage one pancreatic cancer 4 years ago and she is still alive today and cancer free for over four years. So it is possible.
  - Beldin 6y ago
    There's pancreatic cancer and cancer of the pancreas. (There might be more, i know about these two). The difference in life expectancy is staggering. One is basically starting the clock (in months to a handful of years), with the other, recovery is possible.
    - AtlasBarfed 6y ago
      Pancreatic cancer essentially forms a barrier around the cancer that prevents drugs from reaching the tumors as I understood layman's descriptions of the disease when one of my friends died of it. I think there was some initial success in attaching vitamin d to some drugs to bypass the "firewall", but it was still hard.
  - microtherion 6y ago
    FWIW, Jobs was diagnosed in 2003, so he lived another 8 years after his initial diagnosis.
    - jonny_eh 6y ago
      Which says to me that he was a good candidate for real treatment.
      - stjohnswarts 6y ago
        Yeah, I'm not sure how such an intelligent person could get suckered in by that mumbo jumbo. I guess one can be a savante in some things and dumb as a rock at others.
- 6y ago

moolcool 6y ago

Those bullet points mostly focus on scaling existing products, and seem more Ballmer-like than Nadella-like IMO.

ogre_codes 6y ago
Airpods/ Beats/ Watch is a $25 Billion/ year business with 40%/ YoY growth. Neither product existed when Jobs was alive. That's something Nadella hasn't even managed, let alone Ballmer.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jayd16 6y ago
  Azure seems to have made $12B in Q3 2020 and that didn't exist when Jobs was alive.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    So Nadella is half as effective as Cook? More seriously, I shouldn't have put the comparison to Nadella in there at all. They are both great CEOs.
    - cryptica 6y ago
      Exactly, Satya Nadella is an awesome leader. Who is to say Tim Cook could have taken all these difficult challenges which MSFT was facing at the time? It's 100% speculation.
      - ogre_codes 6y ago
        > Who is to say Tim Cook could have taken all these difficult challenges which MSFT was facing at the time? Cook probably wouldn't have ever been a good fit for Microsoft. His expertise is in physical products logistics.
    - 6y ago

j-pb 6y ago

We're a 40 person Design agency, that has been running on Mac hardware for almost 40 years now. Everybody of us used to be a huge apple fanboy, now every one of us hates them with a passion. They completely ignored their customers for the iPhone money grab. Their hardware and software used to be synonymous with quality, nowadays their shoddy quality has become a meme at work. "Oops reboot." - "What did you expect, it's a mac." We're looking for the door, and slowly started to introduce windows machines. We were shocked how fast computers got without apple catching up. Apple used to he one of the pillars of our productivy, nowadays it's a liability. And from a developer perspective, they murdered their own App ecosystem. Mac software used to be really really good. But who do you expect to write great apps for 70ct per sale. That's just ridiculous. Also, why should I get an iPad pro, if I can't even write software on it. They could've dominated the PC market if iPad Os was actually a real OS. I doubt that apple can keep its brand relevant without opinion leaders like design professionals. I mean, c'mon, even Ive left. Apple is dead, it's only a matter of time for the rot to bring it down.

outworlder 6y ago
> Everybody of us used to be a huge apple fanboy, now every one of us hates them with a passion. Neither of these extremes are healthy attitudes. It's a company, making machines. That's all there is to it.
- cutler 6y ago
  That's a gross oversimplification. If Apple were just another Dell turning out machines you'd have a point but Apple, above all else, is an aesthetic brand designed to inspire passion. It's like comparing Ruby with Java. Ruby appeals to the developer's aesthetic, inspring passion in its community. Java does not.
ogre_codes 6y ago
> I doubt that apple can keep its brand relevant without opinion leaders like design professionals. I know a fair number of developers and most of them still use Macs. Not because they are fan boys, but because MacOS still sucks less than Windows. For me and likely many, OS choice is a pragmatic thing and for the moment MacOS is the least bad option. It's going to be interesting seeing what happens with the new CPUs which have the potential to push the Mac ahead of the pack in terms of price/ performance as well. > I mean, c'mon, even Ive left. Ive is 54 years old. He's was at Apple for ~26 years when he left. I have no idea how wealthy he is at this point, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's a billionaire based on his position and likely large stock option grants in the 00s. You are a designer, how many years would you put in cranking out designs for mass consumption consumer electronics after you were a many times over millionaire? How many black aluminium iPhones would you design? Another 40 years worth?

microtherion 6y ago

Agree with all of this. I also think Cook should get credit for the Apple Pay / Apple Card ecosystem, and for Car Play. In addition, under Cook, Apple also made great strides in ecological manufacturing and supplier accountability. And early on, Cook had the courage to fire a highly visible but toxic executive.

varispeed 6y ago
> Apple also made great strides in ecological manufacturing and supplier accountability Do you have evidence of that? It seems like it is quite the opposite. Apple prefer to destroy not working phones or Macs instead of repairing them. They make sure independent repair shops cannot repair any of their products and design them in a way so that they fail in short space of time, so customers can either pay for repair through the nose or buy a new Mac.
- microtherion 6y ago
  See e.g. the annual reports in https://www.apple.com/environment/ https://www.apple.com/environment/ regarding environmental responsibility and the graphs in https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/ https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/ regarding improvements in supplier responsibility. Even Greenpeace acknowledges quite a bit of progress in many respects: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/GGE2017_Apple.pdf https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/GG... — keep in mind that they used to picket Apple annual meetings. Admittedly, they still have plenty of criticisms, and several of them echo yours. Personally, I think "designed to fail" is a downright false charge, and "repairability" is a trickier trade-off than repair advocates make it out to be — how much weight, size, and fragility does the repairability add, and how often is the device in fact repaired?
  - codebolt 6y ago
    Perhaps there has been an improvement in other parts of the supply chain, but the situation in DR Congo (where e.g. coltan used for capacitors is mined) seems to only be getting worse.

zebra100 6y ago

+1. I'm far from an Apple zealot, but Tim Cook added $1.7 Trillion to apple's market cap since taking over as chief executive. He certainly isn't the product visionary that Jobs was, but a rare few are. IMO Cook may have even been a better executer than Jobs, even if his decisions are more risk averse. And he has still taken a few notable ones – e.g. Apple's recent shift to services revenue (news, music, card, etc) was a surprisingly smooth & fast success. Barring some huge future misstep, I'd be surprised if he didn't go down as one of history's most successful company leaders in his own right.

admax88q 6y ago
I don't really have a horse in this race, but I'm not sure that the best defense against > Another example of such uninspired CEO that keeps making good quarters but tarnishes his company advantages is Tim Cook. is > but Tim Cook added $1.7 Trillion to apple's market cap since taking over as chief executive.
- whynotminot 6y ago
  Good thing that's not the only feather in Tim's cap. He's vastly expanded Apple's valuation while simultaneously introducing new, successful products, and growing Apple's place in the tech world. Steve was visionary, but Tim has taken that vision farther than anyone ever gives him credit for.
  - fakedang 6y ago
    Most of the stuff was in development during Jobs' time, including Airpods, the latest one. With Jony Ive gone, I doubt Apple has the prowess to continue that finesse. It would be akin to von Holzhausen leaving Tesla, imo.
    - amluto 6y ago
      I think it may be the other way around. In the Jony Ive post-Steve-Jobs era, we got the iPhones 6-11, and, in my opinion, all of them are considerably worse physical designs than the 5. Now Apple has (imminently) the 12 and 12 Mini, which are, IMO, the best designs from Apple in years.

mellosouls 6y ago

Beats + AirPods, the two most successful headphone brands in the world How are you working out "most successful"? Beats aren't rated particularly highly apart from by label-followers; while blinkeredness has always been a notable criticism of Apple product appraisal, it did in the past occasionally lead the field - that's not at all obvious with Beats etc.

ogre_codes 6y ago
> How are you working out "most successful"? Sales. How else do you measure success of a consumer electronics product? > Beats aren't rated particularly highly apart from by label-followers While Beats haven't been highly rated by audiophiles, they are popular and sound quality and in particular Bluetooth performance has improved significantly under Apple. AirPods... well they are AirPods. They are might well be the most universally loved product in Apple's product line right now. Maybe the most loved consumer electronics product on the market right now.
- mellosouls 6y ago
  Sales. How else do you measure success of a consumer electronics product? There are clearly many measures of success. It's best if you mean best-selling maybe just to say that, as it may be important to salespeople but not so much to (say) end users. [Airpods...]Maybe the most loved consumer electronics product on the market right now. That sounds more like a subjective or emotional claim than one measurable, and that's part of the problem with Apple in particular (though not only Apple) as I've already mentioned; the seeming lack of ability of its champions to consider it's products in a reasonably neutral way. To an extent, that's a compliment to the way it has built it's brand over time, but it means it's important to bear it in mind when judging rather sweeping superiority claims.
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    > That sounds more like a subjective or emotional claim than one measurable, and that's part of the problem with Apple in particular (though not only Apple) as I've already mentioned; the seeming lack of ability of its champions to consider it's products in a reasonably neutral way. People have been spewing nonsense like this for decades. As if customers being happy with a product is a worthless concept. The AirPods are successful because people love them. When AirPods were first launched, they were widely panned and people laughed at the design, but everyone who bought them loved them. I could go into details about why, but it's irrelevant, if they hadn't been so well liked, they wouldn't be the best selling headphones on the market. See also, Apple Watch.

microtherion 6y ago

> Avoided the sort of ridiculous cash burning acquisitions to inflate growth It's funny how Apple has often been exhorted by industry observers to make large acquisitions, and instead has done quite well with smaller ones. Beats has been a commercial success. PA Semi (dating back to the Jobs era) was the foundation to a hugely successful VLSI design division. The success of Siri is a bit more disputed, but it's playing an important role in many products.

ogre_codes 6y ago
This is exactly why I mentioned it, Microsoft burned through 10s of billions in bad acquisitions, Google has a few massive multi-billion dollar mis-steps.

varispeed 6y ago

Apple under Tim enjoy short term gains and greed has blinded them. The company will soon start failing because of their anti-consumer and anti-environment culture. They create false image of themselves to be super friendly innovative brand for creative people, but the truth is far from this. Their products are designed to fail and to be only repairable by Apple. If your charging port dies on a new Mac, you cannot repair it yourself even if you have all required tools and skills. Their policy is essentially if it breaks you have to pay us through the nose or buy a new model. Then there is the anti-competitive Apple Store that is milking the iOS ecosystem and developers.

D-Coder 6y ago
"Apple Doomed!" I have seen that headline every year since 1984. Every single year.
- necovek 6y ago
  Well, at a point it was pretty doomed before iTunes and iPod (and Jobs) brought it back. Who's to say it won't happen again? Though with the size and cash reserves, it's more likely they get "doomed" the way Microsoft was in the last 10 years (still is, perhaps).
supernova87a 6y ago
Sounds like you've got an axe to grind with Apple though, and are biased negatively because of it. Apple's products are demonstrably supported in software far longer than other manufacturers. People rate the physical build quality of their products very high as well. It seems that people like the benefits and features of Apple hardware enough to overlook the problems with self-repairability. And regarding the app store, maybe because you're in the industry you think it's a generally big problem, because you're affected. But it's a 1% privilege issue to most of the world. It seems Apple is doing enough right that its value is climbing.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Yeah I don't like the walled garden myself, but the hardware I've bought from them has been well designed, supported for quite some time, and trustworthy. I never even had to get anything repaired. My line of work requires me to have both Linux and Apple machines and Apple is working just fine along with Linux.

hartator 6y ago

Hum, I think this is missing the main points. AirPods and Watches are gimmick. Nothing crazy innovative happened to the iPhones - apart the flatnessisation of iOS which in my opinion was a mistake - and Macs actually went backwards. The real Tim Cook test will be the ARM Macs. Can be game changing or it can’t sink Macs for good.

Eduardo3rd 6y ago
Gimmick or not, wearables (Watch + Airpods) are a massive business for Apple. Large enough that they would be a F500 company if spun out at current revenue numbers. https://fortune.com/2019/08/06/apple-airpods-business/ https://fortune.com/2019/08/06/apple-airpods-business/ I don't think you can characterize that as a business failure.
- cam0 6y ago
  Yeah, hugely successful products are by definition __not__ gimmicks.
  - mark-r 6y ago
    You've obviously never heard of Pet Rocks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock
ogre_codes 6y ago
> AirPods and Watches are gimmick. People wrote off the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad as gimmicks. Even the Mac was written off as a toy. It's the ultimate hubris to assume you know more than the millions of people who buy a given product and enjoy using it.

reissbaker 6y ago

+1. Apple isn't the same as it was under Steve Jobs, but it's stayed successful and relevant. I miss the old Apple software quality — the Apple apps were once a reason to use macOS or iOS, and it's pretty rare I actually use them anymore — and the stronger hardware innovation (Watch is cool but not industry-defining on the scale of the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad), but the overall Apple ecosystem has if anything grown stronger under Cook... And their edge on hardware has grown significantly, especially with respect to chip design, to the point where their in-house-designed ARM chips are likely to give them not only a generational advantage on phones, which they already have, but also soon on laptops and desktops as well. Apple under Tim Cook isn't going to wow the world with innovative new products to the same degree it did under Steve Jobs, but its product lines will relentlessly improve and Apple will in many ways stay ahead of the competition because Tim is a great operator. I can't say the same for Ballmer: not only did Microsoft innovate less successfully under his leadership than Apple has under Cook (at least Cook has Watch and Airpods!), but also Microsoft's cash cow product lines didn't do well under his leadership — Windows 8, for example, was a travesty. That being said I'm also very impressed with Satya Nadella, and have recently been using Windows more and more again, something I thought would be pretty unlikely (to put it mildly) a decade ago when Ballmer was at the helm. I'm pretty excited about future products from both companies.

sys_64738 6y ago

Apple lost its way when they shoved Scott Forstall out the door for refusing to take the blame for the Apple Maps debacle. Apple has been gliding on the backs of Steve's vision since then and they're terrified to make any wrong decision. That's why they overlap generations of products as they don't have a clue what will succeed.

ksec 6y ago
> Apple has been gliding on the backs of Steve's vision since then and they're terrified to make any wrong decision. That has been some of my view as well. But some of their approach have changed. The old Apple was about making something great, charge a premium. That is about the same with current Apple. Except its whole Services Strategy reeks of money grabbing. There is nothing about Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness that fits the definition of great.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > There is nothing about Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Fitness that fits the definition of great. I'm not sure how you'd consider Apple Music a money grab but are ok with iTunes music purchases? Basically they were expanding their business to follow the industry trend of streaming music instead of buying it. iTunes has been a revenue stream at Apple since the iPod was born. Also, Apple selling supplemental services and software that are... not amazing is not new either. The big one? iTunes. For a few years it was great, but for a long long time it was just a giant mess. iHome, iMovie (Garage Band is pretty rad), iPhoto (Photos is way better), Mobile Me, Ping didn't even last 2 years I don't think. Most of those products were meh at best, they did the basic thing they needed to do and that's about it. The big difference between Apple then and Apple now is they have the money to contract out for their own content. > Apple TV+, Apple Fitness that fits the definition of great. Apple TV+ has a paltry selection because they didn't go out and buy a huge external library of content to bootstrap themselves. The content they have is—Decent and getting better. They know this and there is a reason they aren't really charging for it yet. Apple Fitness doesn't even exist so not sure how you can criticize it. Yeah, it's all a "Money Grab", they are growing the business, that's what companies do. Fortunately all of this stuff is optional. You can enjoy your computer/ phone/ tablet without any of it. IMO the only egregious "money grab" is their paltry 5GB free iCloud storage. Considering that's the best and for many only way of backing up their $1000 phone with their life stored on it, that's messed up.

ksec 6y ago

That is the same argument with Microsoft in the 90s. Windows are selling great, they have great Market Share etc.... Steve Jobs: We are still Better! Bill Gates: Does it Matter? Time will tell.

ogre_codes 6y ago
Just an aside. Steve Jobs was only CEO of Apple for a few months in 97,98,& 99. The rest of the 90s he was running NEXT & Pixar after getting the boot from Apple in the 80s.