Posted on 03/26/2014 6:44:52 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Apple may be the most valuable company on the planet, but two and a half years into the Tim Cook era, it already looks like a different outfit. Though Cook has brought revenue up 58 percent, and profits up 40 percent, the Steve Jobs-led fervor to innovate seems to be subsiding. Apple is in an industry where it has to keep coming up with daring new breakthroughs, and the famously bland Cook doesn’t seem like the man to deliver them. Revenues in the last fiscal year were up only 9.6 percent, the slowest increase in a decade, and earnings fell for the first time since 2001.
Former Wall Street Journal reporter Yukari Iwatani Kane‘s book Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs has been denounced as “nonsense” by Cook, but Cook has good reason to bristle at the book, which paints him as a mere caretaker, not a creative genius. Sony was once the coolest kid on the block too. Here are some early warning signals that stasis and even decline beckon for Apple.
1. Regression to the mean. Apple came up with the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010, in each case not only creating a blockbuster new product but a whole new category. Like a football quarterback who throws for 400 yards a game for a month, Apple is overdue for a slump. “Apple was essentially in violation of business physics for an extremely long time,” says Harvard management professor Gautam Mukunda in the book. Today, portable music players are an aging product category and competitors are stealing market share from the phone and tablets. Will Apple be able to pull another rabbit out of its hat?
2. Tim Cook doesn’t think different.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Good answer! Apple’s been more into iteration since Jobs was brought back, and despite my frequent complaining about it, precipitously abandons updates for older lines in a coherent fashion (dropped G3, then dropped PPC after 10.4.something, dropped Core 2 Duo I think at some recent time) while seeming to rush into new platforms (a process that is in fact deliberative in the quick-changing modern context).
Somehow I think we’ll see a merging of their Mac desktops with AppleTV/iCloud/iTunes/iPod/iPhone) in a high-end way, such as 60, 70, and 80 inch models that cost about the same as such TVs cost now. Smart TVs have been tried, but they are not cheap, and there’s no compelling reason to choose one over another.
Apple is returning to America. They lead in that area as well, btw.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2966198/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/3023407/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/3107750/posts
Apple also burns coal (sic) and in response built a privately funded solar farm.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2799651/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2873345/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2873891/posts
Once my phone starts dying every day, it is worse than useless to me. I have announced to the World that I can be reached by any means at any time, and half the time I am carrying around a dead brick, and pissing off everybody who tries to contact me. I have disabled as much as I can, but the battery suck continues. It is almost as if the competing feature architects have insulated their little contributions to the battery suck and leave it to some other department to invent the Magic Battery Fairy to make it all work.
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As the man told me: The pocket computers that are phones are useless.
So I hold stubbornly to my LG ENV3 It is first and foremost a phone.
I was an early adopter of Apple phones and tablets, and have been 100% in the Apple column until fairly recently. But haven taken a good look at Samsung products recently, I decided to buy one of their tablets a few months ago... and couldn’t be happier! And I plan to switch to their phones from my current Iphone 5 when I get the next upgrade opportunity from AT&T
Apple today is where IBM was in 1980, and the result will be the same.
Good to see.
Let’s see the jobs. Apple, let’s see the jobs.
To all US companies: Bring jobs back to America.
Apple hasn’t released a revolutionary product since the Apple II.
Apple is not in the revolutionary product business. It never has been.
Apple has been in the business of identifying emerging markets, and producing cheap reliable stripped down offerings for those markets at inflated priced. Running on hype, it introduces the product to mind numbed Apple zombie masses, who then are convinced against all evidence that Apple invented the product category.
This is why the vast bulk of Apple users are liberal. They use the exact same thinking process for their political thought and their technological thinking.
“The big failure so far has been AppleTV...”
It’s not really a failure - $1,000,000,000 in revenue from it last year.
Most conference rooms have one and presentations can be displayed almost magically via AirPlay.
One building I teach in has four AppleTV’s- they would not have added even a second one if it was not a benefit.
At home, I have two AppleTV’s.
They allow me to access 700 CD’s and over 400 movies wirelessly - I can play music anywhere in the house or view any of my movies on either of our TV’s. No searching for a DVD/BluRay, inserting into a player, waiting for the menu to come up then select play. It just plays a movie within a second or two.
It’s a remarkable product when coupled with an iPhone or iPad with the Apple Remote app.
Just thought you might like to know.
Integrating a laptop, iPad and iPhone? I don’t think so.
I’m off on a hike today. Should I take my portable laptop with me so I can make cellphone calls?
Nope. Too heavy.
I’m at a picnic and want to watch the Superbowl. Should I watch on my new 4.7 inch iPhone.
Nope. Screen is too small.
And for the ladies. Should they carry their iPad to the market along with all that other stuff that the carry in their purses just so they can receive a phone call.
I don’t think so.
“Apple hasn’t released a revolutionary product since the Apple II.
Apple is not in the revolutionary product business. It never has been.
Apple has been in the business of identifying emerging markets, and producing cheap reliable stripped down offerings for those markets at inflated priced. Running on hype, it introduces the product to mind numbed Apple zombie masses, who then are convinced against all evidence that Apple invented the product category.
This is why the vast bulk of Apple users are liberal. They use the exact same thinking process for their political thought and their technological thinking.”
Are you OK? If so, then you couldn’t be more wrong - and I’m NOT an Apple fanboy.
MBA’s crawling out of the woodwork does tend to stifle innovation. Such companies become very good at delivering what they already do, and at delivering what customers are capable of envisioning. But, beyond that, there are no metrics and hence they’re blind to anything else.
Apple doesn't think so, either.
So, sooner or later, somebody is going to come along and eat their lunch.
Well Samsung is the obvious candidate for integrating laptop, iPad and iPhone functionality. We’ll see. I don’t see it happening. There would be a market for such a device but not a big one.
I just think it is a Human Engineering issue. You need to scale screen size vs. keyboard size vs weight vs. functionality to match human need. But there is no magic point where you can get a one size fits all solution to that design problem.
Ak yourself: How big would this 3-way device be?
Not an expert on the history, but I believe numerous tablet type devices had been marketed and none took off. While the iPad wasn't the first tablet, it was the first one that consumers perceived as being worthwhile.
Same with the smartphone, IMO. Blackberries weren't true smartphones, they were advanced dumb phones. But never had a BB, so I could be wrong on that.
What sets smartphones apart is the apps. Different and new uses can be created simply by software. Much as the PC did for computers.
MBAs kill businesses, IMO. At least businesses that want to be dynamic and creative.
A beancounter should never be #1 in such a company. You need a good one to be #2, to keep the visionary #1 guy grounded in something vaguely resembling reality. But never as #1.
Not in any way.
I am a technophile and I tend to be on my second or third product in any given category by the time Apple finally enters the market with their stripped down offerings.
For example; Only iPple zombies and complete idiots would try to insist that SD memory drives are not a feature, or that running multiple apps at the same time was a feature, yet iPple zombies tried just that in their sad attempt to claim the first iPhone was as good as the existing smartphones of the period.
Some of them are still that stupid to this day.
LOL, Tim is that you?? :)
Every once in a while, I'll follow Apple Maps directions just for the adventure and a laugh.
Microsoft integrated the PC and tablet into their Surface line. Fantastic product.
I already switched to the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 last year, and my next tablet will be the 12.2” Galaxy Note Pro. I still like my iPad, but the lack of a readable/writable file system and SD Card support has become a deal-breaker for me.
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