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Apple Product Delays Have More Than Doubled Under Tim Cook's Watch, Says Report (wsj.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): Of the three major new products since Mr. Cook became chief executive in 2011, both AirPods earbuds in 2016 and last year's HomePod speaker missed Apple's publicly projected shipping dates. The Apple Watch, promised for early 2015, arrived late that April with lengthy wait times for delivery. Apple also was delayed in supplying the Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard, two critical accessories for its iPad Pro. The delays have contributed to much longer waits between Apple announcing a product and shipping it: an average of 23 days for new and updated products over the past six years, compared with the 11-day average over the six years prior, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Apple public statements. Longer lead times between announcement and product release have the potential to hurt Apple on multiple fronts. Delays give rivals time to react, something the company tried to prevent in the past by keeping lead times short, analysts and former Apple employees said. They can stoke customer disappointment and have cost Apple sales.
The world is filled now with products that ship fast and suck until v2.0.
So why am I supposed to find it a negative that Apple will delay shipping products until it feels they are ready? Doesn't that imply the products they DO ship are relatively more stable than competitors, and will be more usable out of the gate?
The iPhone X did not ship until a few weeks after the 8. Yet FaceID works great, the screen works really well (Apple's first OLED), and generally the finish of the software and hardware is really good. Would I have preferred to have a shakier release earlier? Not really.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
One, perhaps new products are reaching the point of diminishing returns, where it takes more and more effort for a seemingly incremental bit of progress, simply because the bar is already so high and we're already so close to the limits of what existing technologies can provide. Two, maybe Cook isn't the tyrant / asshole that Jobs is reputed to have been? If so, then it's a refreshing change from the 'at any cost' bullshit mentality that is sucking our souls dry and robbing our descendants of their chance at a good life here on Earth.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
It doesn't matter if some product is a few days late. What matters is that people camp out before the stores to buy it. If it is late, then they well camp out longer, nobody cares. Least of all the campers. Lateness only costs sales cause they don't really really want it anyways. If it's a "must buy NOWWWWWW!" then it doesn't matter how late it is. If it's "meh... oh a new phone..." then it matters
Cook's failing is he's a bad salesman and a totally useless visioneer. He is simply not Jobs. Cook is a great lieutenant, the guy that actually does the hard daily work so the general can give the big speeches and make the big decision and get all the glory. Jobs was the general, Cook the lieutenant.
Then the general died and they had to promote the lieutenant to do the general's job cause good generals are impossible to find. He doesn't do the job really badly, but what he does isn't that sustainable in the long run for a company like Apple imho.
Jobs constantly made his underlings develop new stuff, new gizmos and then was great selling them to the masses. Not all of it was actually good, but more than enough was. Jobs basically was a venture capitalist for apple products, he invested apple in products instead of startup companies. Some became a multibillion dollar IPO like the Imac, iphone, etc and some failed like the cube Mac or maybe AppleTV. Obviously far more than simply enough stuck and made Apple what it is.
Right now Apple only has really one great product: their CPUs. All other things they are meh, pretty much same as the rest of the pack. Nothing that you can't get elsewhere (no people, don't care that much which OS they run, only Linux people do and they are 0.x% of the market). Apple is with their CPUs around where Intel was with Sandy Bridge: best thing by a wide margin around. But as we see today: it's great, but it won't last forever. You need new products, new product categories like this to sustain a valuation and margins like Apple. Apple is where Microsoft was 15-20 years ago. Still top dog, margins out of this world, but the sign is on the wall, even when they still have a rising stock price and rising profits. They will be able to ride this for a long time, but they still end where Microsoft is: many long years of going sideways on the NASDAQ. And ultimately Sun, SGI, DEC if they are unlucky.
First-world problems are so tragic.
Because https://science.slashdot.org/story/18/01/05/1940255/arbitrary-deadlines-are-the-enemy-of-creativity-according-to-harvard-research/
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Apple tanked the last time Jobs left the company. Why would this time be any different?
Because this time, Steve Jobs is not coming back.
Probably. They didn't cremate him, did they? So I'm going with "probably not coming back".
Perhaps Apple should stop announcing products before they're ready to ship them, or, if they want to blame it on leakers, add a clause to work contracts that allows them to cut off the hands and tongue of anyone found leaking information on products before they're ready. Harsh? Perhaps.
I think the point is that it's not comparing Apple vs its competitors but Apple under Cook vs Apple under Jobs.
That may be true, but *what if* the quality of released products is higher under Cook? That is what I am saying, maybe it's actually better we are seeing longer delays (or products never released like the Apple Car) so products are more fully baked.
I think Jobs would have been willing to ship some stuff sooner just so people could see how cool it was.
But the job of a good supply manager (and CEO, especially if that CEO used to be head of supply chain) is to make sure manufacturing can scale
Which Cook does an amazing job of considering the scale of any new Apple release. His job is ALSO to ensure quality, so I think he (in combination with Ives) are just more meticulous before shipping than Jobs was.
To say nothing of the difference in innovation speed under Cook...
We are only just starting to be able to measure that. Apple generally has a really long roadmap planned out, and frankly innovation came from lots more people than Jobs (Ives for one) so I don't think that is changing much.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Apple tanked the last time Jobs left the company. Why would this time be any different?
There's actually a real answer to that. It's not just because Apple was not taken over by a soda maker who doesn't understand technology.
It's because, just as lawyers are trained how to think in a uniform manner, so too are Apple employees trained how to think after they arrive - to think about products the way Jobs did.
Now it may not always take to a great depth but the basic fact is that everyone technical working at Apple is looking at product design using very similar criteria to what Jobs would be using. Apple has become a kind of like a large somewhat lossy AI simulating Jobs mind, using employees as the processors.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So much not to care about, so little time.
Eat my monkey ass.
I want you to eat my ass.
Taste my monkey shit.
When Tim Cook became CEO, there was one model iPhone, and one model iPad. Today there are 3 iPhone models and 4 iPad models. Meanwhile, the number of Apple employees (non-sales) has not tripled. So there are fewer designers, artists, engineers assigned to each product. More delays are inevitable.
Personally I think it's a step in the right direction. Apple's product line under Jobs was woefully thin. Even at the height of its success the company was literally a single bad iPhone model away from bankruptcy.. Diversifying their product line was exactly what they needed for stability and expanding their customer base (for example, the many Android phone users held off switching until Apple released an iPhone with a bigger screen).
Seriously, the iPhone 7&8 are more of the same minus a headphone jack and two new expensive and easy to lose bluetooth devices that need charging called airpods.
The new MacBook Pro is a step backward without any USB ports and a near useless touch bar.
The new iMac is actually pretty sweet but at $5K+ I will be editing video on a Hackintosh.
The new iPad Pro is pretty sweet but the price point is premium along with some Pro iPad Apps requiring a subscription instead of a one time purchase. The"Pro" gives away the fact that you are consumer with extra money.
I am not sure what is up with the MacPro (2012 Diaper Genie) edition, but that is another innovation I can live without.
The Apple watch is a solution in search of a problem, plus it gives you one more thing to charge each day.
Until something new and amazing comes out, I will stick with the iPhone 6s (with headphone jack), MacBookPro 2013 (with USB ports and magsafe charger), and iPod 4th Gen (upgraded to 128GB of flash memory).
If Apple wants to innovate try this:
1. Create a phone that only needs to be charged once per week.
2. Create Modular laptop called the Phat Book Pro that can be tweaked for the pro user, just make it fat on the bottom and that is where option hardware can live (extra battery, I/O ports, more storage, etc....)
3. Reassign Johnny Ives to cafeteria lunch menu management at the new HQ and stop making everything so flat. Flat is cool to a point where I lose all useful ports.
4. Make your products serviceable and upgradable. If we are going to pay double for your stuff, we want to cascade it to the next person on the family pecking order and being able to max out RAM, CPU, and Storage before the handoff is very nice.
5. Maybe get really crazy and combine the iPad with the MacBookPro. Maybe even make them complimentary products like the iPad could be a portable second screen or integrated touch surface/drawing pad.
6. If you are going to take all the ports and buttons off of the phone, it better be waterproof to 50ft.
Instead we get... ... Gone ... Gone ... Gone ... Gone ... Gone ... soldering in, not upgradable .. soldered in, not upgradable .. soldered in, not upgradable
1. Magsafe power adapter
2. Headphone jack
3. USB 1,2,3 ports
4. Thunderbolt
5. Firewire
6. RAM
7. SSD/M.2 storage
8. CPUs
9. Expensive iPhones with useless new features and missing old features.
10. Bring back the iPod clickwheel and 8-Track Tapes, and get off my lawn.
It takes longer for all that glue to dry instead of letting us replace the components.
Soooo,
Then you are a shareholder and not a customer?
Because otherwise, you are an idiot.
Shareoholders may be happy (in the short run), customers should be pissed.
Unfortunately, in the long run, pissed customers leads to pissed shareholders, however I realise The American Dream (tm) disallows long term though.
I agree 100% with Jenningsthecat, but also:
When Job was CEO, Tim Cook was his supply chain guy. From what I hear, Cook was very good at Supply Chain Stuff.
Now that Cook is CEO, Who is the Supply Chain guy? Is he as good as Cook was?
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
This is a highly amusing claim.
The first product that Apple *ever* preannounced under Steve Jobs was the Intel switch, and that was already being leaked because of the T-1 developer systems Apple had to ship to developers so that it would have software to run on the hardware, by the time the hardware was released.
The only time you "miss targets" or "miss projected ship dates" is when you announce a product prior to it shipping.
Steve announced products, for the most part, by getting up an a stage, and at the end of the Keynote presentation (which would always include a lot of demonstrations, which, when the screen changed, resulted in an "...and BAM!"), he'd say at the very end... "...and one more thing...".
And there'd be a new Apple product.
You never missed a ship date, because the "... and one more things ..." always ended with "...and these are available in Apple stores TODAY".
So it's great that Apple pre-announces and all these days, and has a 1/2 cycle opposite the WWDC cycle for computers vs. consumer products -- so it's kind of not possible to do the Steve thing, because there's one WWDC, and you need two keynotes to cover the release cycles, and there's no other thing to keynote at.
But.
If Steve didn't have product on the shelves, in stores, ready to buy... ...you didn't get it shown in the "... and one more thing".
It still missed it's ship date -- but you didn't know about it.
So unbunch your panties, people: this is not a news story, unless you want to write about how the marketing and announcement culture has changed under Cook... because the release date thing?
It's not news.
"We didn't double delay times, we extended your Apple Anticipation Subscription for free."
Not only can you not change the memory on almost all Apple's devices anymore and are Apple's laptops flimsey, overpriced and underpowered, but they stopped making the wired keyboard for the iMac (which is infinitely better than the wireless one because it doesn't use batteries and, more importantly, has a numeric part), they stopped making Mac Mini, which was a great little thing, and they discontinued the Time Machine and Airport Express and Extreme, which were by far the best wireless routers on the market because they never break down.
-- Cheers!
So where is it? It appears to be neither abandoned nor being developed further.
It is moving, though slowly... more and more devices are co,mimng around to support it, and the HomePod (whenever that comes out) will have HomeKit integration. It's more a matter of device makers coming on board, but they are (slowly).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Apple suppliers fall in Asia following local news report of weak iPhone X demand
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.