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Tim Cook Defends Apple, Teases Exciting New Products In The Pipeline (bgr.com)
anderzole quotes a report from BGR: Apple's earnings report last week saw the company report a year over year decline in profits for the first time since 2003. The biggest contributing factor to the decline, not surprisingly, is that year over year iPhone sales dropped by 16%. Notably, Apple's most recent quarter represents the company's first iPhone sales decline in history. Consequently, the usual contingent of pundits and analysts have come out of the woodwork, all exclaiming that we've reached 'peak iPhone' and that Apple at this point has nowhere to go but down. In an effort to inject a bit of good news and all-around optimism to a particularly negative Apple news cycle, Tim Cook earlier today appeared on CNBC with Jim Cramer where the Apple CEO teased that Apple's still has a lot of innovation left to do and some interesting items in the product pipeline. "We've got great innovation in the pipeline," Cook said to Cramer. "New iPhones that will incentivize you and other people that have iPhones today to upgrade to new iPhones. We are going to give you things you can't live without that you just don't know you need today. That has always been the objective of Apple is to do things that really enrich people's lives. That you look back on and you wonder, how did I live without this."
So their great new innovation in the pipeline is.. a new iPhone.
Stick a fork in them.
Do you remember when instead of telling us that the next trick will be impressive, They would just do the next trick and let us be amazed? If you need an applause sign, you've officially failed. Just sayin,
Within the arms of tragedy, there is little comfort in being right.
If they're going to do new iPhones, they need one that costs $99 or less. He spends time talking about the Chinese market, but they're not going to grow in that market anytime soon unless:
1) the phone is capable and cheap, as the market of Chinese people who can afford a $699 phone is saturated
2) the phone is made in China and likely co-marketed by a Chinese phone manufacturing company as the Chinese government wants to move their industry up the value chain
Those two things will be really hard for Apple to do. Outside of that:
Apple Watch - a big misstep
iPad Pro - it's a cheaper version of the Surface Pro with a mobile OS instead of a laptop OS. A misstep
For that reason, anything "enterprise" related they're just not that good; they've gotten better in recent years but Windows and Office are too universal in the enterprise setting.
MacBook Air - this is a pretty good product
iPad Air - eh, good product but the tablet market is starting to wind down or be saturated so the growth isn't there
After that, what have they got? Apple Car? They're not a car company; how the heck is this going to work? I'm not a Tesla fan but Tesla's way ahead of them on advanced modern cars, and GM, Ford, Toyota, and Honda are still churning out millions of cars; I don't see how Apple actually launches this successfully unless it's some Apple developed tech that is licensed to a real car manufacturer. Besies, Apple is in the business of high-margin hardware; in cars margins are slim on the hardware and all the money is made on financing to the consumer. This would be a very strange business for Apple to get in to.
Apple Home Automation? Maybe, but I doubt it. As much as Nest is making missteps these days by force-bricking their old products, they're still way ahead of Apple and have Google's backing and there are plenty of other guys out there in this space.
The only one i see is some form of consumer healthcare product to make the Apple Watch a health sensor platform integrated with other Apple products, but the drop in FitBit's sales and stock show that step counters won't cut it; it needs to be something a doctor can act on and that means getting loads of doctors and research behind the use of something as well as getting FDA approval. That's hard and expensive, but something Apple likely has the resources to tackle. To me that's the best shot at a big growth area and fits their customer base who are generally hipster quantified selfers who would love to brag and share how healthy they are via iMessenger.
Innovation is not making something slightly thinner or lighter or faster or missing a port or with a better screen.
Can anyone explain to me why anyone would use Apple products? I suspect I'll be modded down to -1 so people can pretend my post doesn't exist and not answer the tough questions.
I have an iPad, an iPod touch, mac book pro and iMac at home. (However my day job involves an awful lot of Microsoft based products and systems)
I find for the systems I have that "they just work" , no need to fiddle with them to get something working that should have been there out of the box. Yes they have their own quirks as to how things are done. Yes they keep changing things ahead of the curve (EG loss of floppy). Yes they annoy this shit out of me at times ( as does MS and linux systems I have used) . In the end I tend to agree that OS X is what linux on the desktop *should* be.
BTW the Apple tax is an old chestnut that has been discounted many times. I'll willing to bet that if you try and configure *any* laptop to meet the same specs as an Apple system you will end up at the same or greater price - and by that I mean all specs including weight and volume. (however don't mention the premium they put on additional memory for drive space :P)
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1. Invent marketing-changing product (Apple II, Macintosh, iPhone)
2. Be unable to demonstrate wider relevance
3. Watch as competitors zoom by
4. Repeat
As a disclaimer I have an Android phone, have owned two iPads (one is still used by my wife), but own a Surface Pro 4 now. My last laptop was a Macbook Pro with Windows installed, but now I have a Lenovo. I am certainly not an Apple fanboy but still feel they offer great products.
Apple's hardware is underpowered.
This is rarely true. Because there is only one manufacturer of Apple devices and they only refresh them about once a year, there are usually more powerful Android / Windows devices on the market for most of the year. But you rarely have to wait more than 6-9 months for Apple to catch up. Apple also tends to wait for the bugs in newer drivers to be solved, which as an owner of a Surface Pro 4 I can tell you is not how Microsoft handled their device launch. It took about 5 months before my Surface Pro 4 drivers started functioning properly all of the time.
The OS software is so oversimplified that it's hard to use.
This is probably only because you are a power user. I also sometimes find OSX difficult to use, but not for 95% of my usage. Only when I am trying to customize my experience do I run into problems, and I assume the primary reason is I am used to other OSes.
There aren't many useful applications unless you're doing audio or video editing
I would agree that Apple doesn't really have a killer app on the desktop, but in the iOS world they are clearly #1 in applications. You may not find those applications useful, but the majority of consumers disagree with you.
Apple hasn't innovated in ten years.
That is nonsense. It still takes innovation to incrementally improve products. You don't have to reinvent an industry to be innovative. I may agree that Apple hasn't innovated much in the last 2-3 years, but certainly not 10.
The Apple Watch was a mistake that tried to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
Agreed.
Apple products are incredibly expensive but wouldn't even be worth the cost of a typical Android or Windows product.
The apple tax is mostly a myth, and at best comes to $50 on many devices. For instance the iPhone 6+ cost $50 more than my Note 4 when I purchased it two years ago. Apple also tends to only build devices with top of the line hardware, so they are more expensive that the vast majority of other devices. But when compared to Android / Windows devices with similar specs the prices are very similar.
Can anyone explain to me why anyone would use Apple products?
Overall I don't use Apple products because I don't think there is enough variation of products, and I generally feel a more open marketplace creates better products in the long run. For at least 5-6 years I have felt Android phones were superior primarily because I had more options to choose from. If I had to choose between Samsung and Apple I probably would have chosen Apple until 4 years ago, but I never had to make that choice since I also had Motorola / HTC / etc to choose from. Same thing with other Apple devices. For a short time I felt the Macbook Pro 17" laptop was the best on the market, so that is what I bought, but I don't think that has been true for a while.
But regardless of my complaints about options from Apple, they still make great devices. Its just not for me.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Apple has made mountains of cash selling iDevices for years now, and will continue to do so. They will also take a cut of all music, entertainment and apps people purchase on these devices. I'm not worried about them disappearing like they were about to in the mid 90s. What they may end up becoming is an IBM. IBM has guaranteed revenue streams from its mainframe business, which are basically safe until people don't need to bank, book airline tickets or consume vital government services. IBM has been able to survive every single attempt by their board of destroying the company. They've sold off most of their hardware production, moved most of the services jobs offshore, and they're still alive.
If Apple does come out with a self-driving car after all this, the pundits will be eating their words if they're able to hit that consumer sweet spot with it. Their products are shiny and nice, and work fine in the hands on non-technical users. I expect an Apple car to have the same level of "UX safety" while being super-complex under the hood. They're just facing a mature market for smartphones - even poor people have them and there's no reason to replace them every single contract cycle. Intel has the same problem and is scrambling to find the next big thing, even though it's clear people still need PCs and servers (but not to the same degree.)
I'd like to see Apple return to making at least a couple of laptops and workstations that are professional-focused and don't just look pretty. Having no way to expand memory or storage on a laptop just to make it thinner is a bad trade-off for anyone other than a throwaway gadget consumer. If they win back the professional users, they can still make the margins they want on hardware. Look at HP, Dell and Lenovo - they sell consumer crap PCs but they also sell workstations that cost five figures and sell well within their niche.
Try not to laugh but, and it pains me to admit this, I am really enjoying my time with a Windows phone. I haven't upgraded it to Windows Phone 10 yet but I guess I can and it's supposed to work just fine. I'm a pretty happy Linux user but I gotta be honest and say that this Windows phone isn't bad at all. It's actually good. The specs make one think it's slow or whatnot but it isn't. Contrary to popular opinion, there's a number of apps for it - there just aren't 803 versions of Candy Crush and 9254 versions of a flashlight. The apps are all fine and I'm not seeing any compelling reason to swap back to Android.
I did pre-order an Ubuntu tablet. I did not order the phone. If the tablet is any good and the reviews of the phone indicate that it is worth it then I'll order a phone. It's hard telling. Maybe... I really am pretty happy with my Windows-based phone. It's snappy and responsive. It does everything that I want it to do - I am, literally, not missing any features that I'd get with any other phone. I'm sure there might be a few apps that it doesn't have, for example, but I'm not missing them.
Get this... I'm not even being paid (or coerced) into making this post. It's all good that you pick what you pick but there are other options besides Google and Apple. They range from Ubuntu to Microsoft to a few custom things - and BlackBerry still has their own OS going on. So, there are options.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."