Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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;
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?
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 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.