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Apple Now the World's Most Valuable Brand, Knocks Off Coca-Cola
cagraham writes "According to consultancy firm Interbrand's latest 'Best Global Brands' report, Apple is now the world's most valuable brand, with an estimated worth of $98.4 billion. Since Interbrand began issuing the report in 2001, Coca-Cola has previously always claimed the top spot, but fell to third place this year, behind both Apple and Google. Tech companies now make up six of the top ten brands, but only 12 of the top 200. The report comes a week after Apple reported record sales numbers, moving 9 million iPhone 5s and 5Cs during their opening weekend."
Now that those brand-names raise only bile for me when I hear them, it figures the accountant class would value them.
That was a bit more powerful in the context of the personal computer revolution.
Today, it sounds empty. A bit more like "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me an sell premium personal electronics?"
Required reading for internet skeptics
Stock is trending down due to concerns over margins. Nothing to do with brand perception.
That sounds like sour grapes to me. Apple is one of many companies that has helped change the world with their "electronic devices". Just ten years ago, the average person would have to look up directions at home, or consult a paper map, or stop and ask for directions if they got lost. These days they pull out their smart phone and do the same thing. Sometimes they don't even need to key in anything and just use voice commands.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Soon they will replace Christianity as the #1 religion.
Giving Apple or really any "smart device" company any credit here is incorrect. Garmin,et al with the advent of their in-car GPS solutions made paper maps obsolete. Phones etc, didn't start replacing those devices until such a time as GPS chips became both cheap enough and power efficient enough to include in them.
Giving apple credit for things they didn't do is pretty much the point of an apple fan.
given that the largest manufacturer of phones at the time was already on the market with real gps enabled phones when apple was announcing it's first phone with what fanbois at the time called "virtual gps"...
that's the thing. they didn't invent the smartphone. they didn't invent mapping. had nothing to do with gps. nothing to do with battery technology. nothing to do with chip fabs. everything to do with sweaters and BRAND recognition, so this title is fitting for them.
but just like ford didn't invent the car or the modern assembly line, facts don't stop them from hogging the credit(or fanbois placing credit both on the company and taking credit to buy the products).
so, things would be the same without them. capacitive control chipsets factories would have come online without them too. now where the fuck is my 1 terabyte ipod classic that I'm still waiting for?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Also, my experience is that a phone is no replacement for a proper GPS. I got a proper GPS (Garmin Oregon 450) and the difference between using this and my phone (or any phone I've used) is quite significant. The time to acquire and maintain a signal, the ability to read the screen in sunlight, the ruggedness (+! for actually being waterproof), and many other aspects make the phone seem like a poor substitute. Sure a phone will do in a pinch, but given the option, I'll always bring my actual GPS with me when there's a chance it could be useful. I think the same goes for a lot of other things you can use a cell phone for. Most of them can use the LED as a flashlight, but it's a poor substitute for an actual flashlight. They work as a camera, but I'd rather use a real camera (even a point and shoot) over a phone any day. I still can't comprehend why they can't just put an actual flash on a phone. I think they are kind of like having the ultimate Swiss Army knife. Technically it has 87 tools, but in the effort to add more and more tools into the thing, the tools themselves have been all but useless.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
That's what I'm talking about. The Mac-ites act like St. Steve cured cancer.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
UnknowingFool said
That sounds like sour grapes to me. Apple is one of many companies that has helped change the world with their "electronic devices". Just ten years ago, the average person would have to look up directions at home, or consult a paper map, or stop and ask for directions if they got lost. These days they pull out their smart phone and do the same thing. Sometimes they don't even need to key in anything and just use voice commands.
Hmmm... at least you have the right username.
Woz created the consumer personal computer. and Jobs certainly gets credit for knowing better than the HP execs when they asked him what consumers needed computers for. After that, it all comes down to the "great artists steal" line. And Jobs was like a robber baron.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Having had to go through the process of creating Apple IDs and using false information*, not to mention the harassment Apple foists upon people who use their phones, and now finding they've automatically shoved out iOS 7 on new phones with no way to downgrade**, all I can say is their user experience just plain sucks.
If you wanted people to choose a title and phone number, why wait until they're installing an app to prevent them from continuing until they provide the information?
If they wanted people to choose 3 security questions, why wait until you're installing an app and not let them bypass that requirement? It's not their phone, it's the end user.
Linus' quote keeps coming back to be more and more true: You don't break userspace.
By their ineptness, Apple has officially become the new Microsoft.
* Have to use false information because these are for corporate use and apparently the 'geniuses' at Apple can't figure out a way to allow for corporate information to be used so I have to input false information to create IDs.
** The security software we use has not yet been approved for iOS 7 and as of today it appears the new phones are shipping with the new OS with no way to go back to the good version.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
There's many things that Apple might not have invented, but did nonetheless popularize.
I'm certainly not going to defend everything they've done as awesome -- but before the iPod came about, you probably couldn't explain to most people what an MP3 player was or why you'd want one.
And before the iPad came out, I doubt many people had ever even seen tablets because they were extremely specialized niche products. I know for a fact I'd never seen one, and you certainly couldn't walk into Best Buy and get one.
Apple hasn't made their money by inventing things in general, but in making a solid product with a really good user experience -- which in a few cases took the market by storm and established that there was widespread consumer demand. And I think that's what being valued here -- the brand recognition and awareness.
And in periodically having to work with stuff that has a terrible user experience, I wish more companies tried harder at that.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Valuation of intangible assets like a brand is (big surprise) very subjective. It's typically based on a combination of management data, management estimates, and extrapolation by the valuation consultants. Most likely it's primarily based on some estimate of how much of a premium Apple gets to charge it's customer for it's brand by carving that piece out of their margin and then extrapolating the income from that brand-distinction out into the future. Then they'd take that whole amount, then present-value it all based on an incremental borrowing rate to come up with a number, and compare it with some comparable brand values for reasonableness.
I've had to read through several valuation reports for start-up acquisitions, they're usually hundreds of pages of documentation of associated factors and weighting of different calculation methodologies, but when it all comes down to it, they hinge on inputs that are best guess estimates that are used because it's the best conclusion that management, valuation consultants, and their auditors could reach. Ultimately there is something intangible about the company causing it to be valued so much more than it's book value, and the assigned value of the intangible asset here is all they have in lieu of more reliable information like the sale of a comparable intangible asset in an open market (like how houses are valued).
Coca-cola, when you get down to it, just sells flavored sugar water. There's hundreds of sodas out there that taste just as good, but make terrible volumes and margins compared to Coke. Aside from their massive distribution and bottling contracting, all they've got is their brand which they juice up regularly with lots and lots of advertisement. Slashdot is constantly talking about how Apple's devices are overpriced, and come with an "apple tax" where customers are paying ridiculous premiums just to buy into the cult of Apple. I'm not terribly surprised that Apple's brand value would compete with Coke's. Which brand is valued higher is meaningless to me since both of them are just based on contrived estimates and a small change to the input estimates for either one would probably flip the ranking.
I think it's quite obvious he didn't.
on IOS you can buy tomtom, garmin, navigon and other apps that download maps to your device so you don't need a cell signal.
i've used navigon on an iphone 4s and it was accurate enough to know which lane of traffic i was in
Google Maps is awesome, but it sucks on android. every android phone i've used had crappy GPS where it wouldn't work unless the phone was on the windshield. and this includes the hyped and magical galaxy s3
Giving all the credit is incorrect, but they deserve quite a bit of it. To this day I know relatively few people who ever owned a stand alone GPS, as compared to almost everyone I know having a smartphone with a built in GPS. Also, every GPS I have ever seen was unable to recommend and locate a particular restaraunt, google for further information including reviews, and then direct me there. Apple changed the world. Saying they didn't is moronic at best. (Disclaimer: I personally don't use their products anymore, but I cut my teeth on an Apple II, and would never say they didn't do a great deal to change the world. See that GUI on your screen? Xerox PARC invented it, but Apple brought it to you, even if you now use a cheap imitation)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Your security software vendor wasn't on the ball enough to port to iOS 7 in time, even though they had plenty of time to do it, and this is Apple's fault why?
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Regardless of their matter of fact attitude toward Apple's influence, to change people's attitude towards technology takes a clear vision. Apple's was to make technology work the way people do. Products are just a consequence of that vision. I agree they didn't invent each single components in their products but they assemble them in such a way that it followed their vision. Then people bought them. What's lacking out there is not products or innovations it's delivering products which do not compromise the ultimate vision of a company (provided the vision is not just to make money).
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
"Brand" and "Knock-off" should be carefully used in the same sentence.
For 10 seconds I thought that Apple was branching off and selling some new cola that tastes like Coke(tm).
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Here's a better question: why doesn't iOS 7 work with iOS 6 compatible apps?
That officially rules Apple out of being "the new Microsoft:" Microsoft has never been dumb enough to break existing apps on their OSes. If there's one thing Microsoft deserves credit for, it's the ridiculous extents they go through to make sure old apps keep working.
Apple is the exact opposite way: if you allow Mac OS X to upgrade your iOS development environment, you will entirely lose the ability to target anything except iOS 7. There is no way to go back, other than to find "pirated" sources of older versions of Xcode. (Xcode is free, so "pirated" isn't quite the right word here, but you know what I mean - sources that don't use the Apple app store.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I'm well aware. You basically just recapped what I wrote using different words. For further clarification, not all of Xerox was uninterested. Upper Management was uninterested. The Xerox PARC engineers knew it was a game changing technology when they invented it, and there was a great deal of resentment toward upper management for not grasping the potential.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Their status as the new Microsoft has been cemented by the fact that you may find them completely unresponsive to and unsuitable for your needs, but you bought them anyway.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
And I think of the wonders XEROX brought to us every day when I fire up my Star and telnet about the Internet.
> given that the largest manufacturer of phones at
> the time was already on the market with real gps
> enabled phones when apple was announcing it's
> first phone with what fanbois at the time called
> "virtual gps"...
I'd rather have Google Maps as it shipped on the original iPhone with just cell-tower triangulation, than a "real" GPS and the shitty-ass, small-screen maps that came with Nokias and BlackBerries of the day. Apple's #1 innovation was doing things that didn't suck out loud. Ever use the browser on a pre-Apple cell phone? They weren't just bad compared to the iPhone -- they were bad, period. You didn't even need something great to compare them to. They were so bad I was inspired to write about them a href="http://slashdot.org/journal/156498/web-browsers-on-pdas">in late 2006. Oh, and before Apple was around to strong-arm companies into creating decent data plans, cellular data was expensive as hell.
> nothing to do with battery technology.
Hard to say how the battery life compared, because I used my company-issued BB for NOTHING but short calls and occasional emails, versus my iPhone, which did MANY things and did them all VERY WELL. The iPhone isn't perfect for everyone, but for most people, all they need to do is get through a day on a charge, and most people do. As long as you sleep in the same room with an electrical outlet, that's usually enough.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
if you allow Mac OS X to upgrade your iOS development environment, you will entirely lose the ability to target anything except iOS 7
No. It's just that the new default is to build armv7(s) + arm64, and arm64 is not supported on previous iOS versions. Build for 32 bits architectures only, and you will be able to choose older targets.
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
That's weird. I think of it when the administrative assistant copies something and bends over to put more paper in the copier.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Apple's strongest point for the last two decades has been a marketing staff second to none in the world. They've managed to convince millions of people that their proprietary GUI was somehow the best "user experience" possible on all platforms and that their hardware was somehow superior to any other premium brand, while at the same time proclaiming that limiting customers' choices to only those that would make the company money was exactly what consumers wanted. If Edward Bernays were still alive he would work for Apple.
The biggest mistake the NSA has made in their current debacle is not hiring the Apple marketing staff. People would be begging the agency to spy on them.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Everyone who used Napster and had MP3s on their computer knew what an MP3 player was. What held back early MP3 players was the inability to easily sync your music collection and playlists on your PC to the MP3 player. All the other MP3 players were competing on features. Apple correctly surmised that how you used it was equally if not more important than what you could use it for. The first iPod was non-competitive in terms of features ("No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."). But by incorporating it with iTunes they "solved" the sync problem, and turned the MP3 player into a device the 95% of people who aren't tech geeks could use. And that's when MP3 player sales took off.
Actually you could. I bought and set up a Thinkpad X60 tablet for a client who'd seen one and wanted to use it as a portable monitor and data entry computer around his veterinary clinc. It was 3.5 lbs, about an inch thick, and could take both pen and finger input. It was bulky by modern tablet standards, but still very usable in the intended application. The client was very happy with it, and it led to me getting a tablet PC as well.
The catch was it cost $2500. Microsoft and Intel knew from the early 2000s that there was a tablet market. But Microsoft being heavily vested in Windows and Intel being heavily vested in high-end CPUs, they tried to shape the tablet market in their image - one where tablets ran Windows and used high-end CPUs. Consequently they were ridiculously expensive (which was kinda the whole point - more profit for Microsoft and Intel). You saw a similar thing when netbooks showed up. Microsoft/Intel panicked at people buying these cheap computers which didn't use Windows nor Intel CPUs. In response Microsoft came out with Windows Starter, and Intel came out with Atom CPUs, and successfully brought the netbook market back into their fold.
The problem is, when the market is demanding a low-price tablet, and you are working your ass off to prevent a low-priced tablet from entering the market, that pent-up demand creates a huge opportunity. Which is what Apple tapped into with the iPad. It wasn't that there was this huge untapped market nobody knew about that Apple was smart enough to see. It was that Microsoft and Intel had been actively steering manufacturers away from that direction for a decade. Apple (which was no stranger to non-Microsoft OSes and non-Intel CPUs) wasn't as easily dissuaded and put out a (relatively) cheap tablet which didn't rely on Microsoft or Intel. If the iPad hadn't been released, Archos probably would've stumbled into the same tablet market. They made a Linux-based portable hard drive with a screen and touch interface for storage, but the screen kept getting bigger, and they kept adding more apps to increase its functionality.
Or some people just like their stuff, marketing or not. I like the build of the notebooks. Why? Strong hinges, metal body, solid keyboard. It doesn't take a marketing department to convince me, just a few mins with the device.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
Phones lock on to GPS a lot faster than a stand-alone receiver does because they can download the almanac over the mobile network or wifi, instead of having to receive it from the satellites. It takes 35 seconds to transmit from the satellites so even assuming perfect reception that is the minimum time to first fix from cold.
You can run much of the same navigation software on your phone too, including iGo and TomTom. You have a wide choice of apps that support offline maps. They make phones with daylight visible screens and that are waterproof too, e.g. the Galaxy Active or whatever the official name is.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
but where are the Chinese?
Ditto that. Even though I'm on Ubuntu right now for certain pieces of software, if I had intended on doing nothing but browse the net I would have booted into OS X because it's such a seamless experience. Even if I stopped using OS X completely I'd still buy Apple hardware. I have an HP laptop that goes with me in higher risk mobile situations (where there's an increased risk of it being broken/stolen) and damn does it feel cumbersome to use, even when running the same OS and software. I have to type slower, too.
I understand the marketing claims about Apple. My g/f loves her iPhone and when she saw the 5c announcement she got all giddy b/c of the prospect of getting a pink and green iPhone. Then she saw the 5s and it's fingerprint thingy and she was completely sold on that. But I have to admit, I like her iPhone more than any Android I've tinkered around with. I have a dirt-cheap flip phone because I don't text or Facebook or any of that shit those damn kids who won't get off my lawn do (no matter how loud I yell), but if I ever do decide to buy a smartphone it'd probably be an iPhone. It's not like my carrier charges any higher for iPhone data vs. Android data, and data charges are where the real costs are. Sorry Windows Phones, you don't even get my consideration.
Anyway, back to the point, just because some people buy Apple products for the fashionable factor doesn't mean that all people do. The brilliance of Apple products since 2001 has been the ability to package everything a geek wants into something the tech illiterate can use and crave. Nothing epitomizes this more than OS X.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."