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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.
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;
"$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.
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
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
Apple was founded by a product manager, Microsoft by an Engineer. Engineer's think features are cool. Product managers are more focused on all of it just working together seamlessly even if has far fewer features. Apple has never innovated and been the lead on any technology. It has always been the fast copier and copied other people's innovations, simplified them, rounded the edges and come out with a product which "just works".
For Apple's model to work there need to be other companies in the market doing the innovation. With the iPhone becoming a monster and capturing 90% of the profits in the smartphone market there is not much money left on the table for other companies to innovate so I do not expect any great advancements in the smartphone market.
However there are other markets like voice assistants, AI, Cars etc where Apple can take the innovations of Engineer led companies like Google, Amazon, Tesla and repackage them as iProducts which "just work". Thats where Apple's growth will come from.
**Life is too short to be serious**
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...
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... 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.
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