That's the way the Cook, he stumbles: Apple CEO pay cut as sales tank With Apple revenues down, and the normally docile tech press finally turning on the iPhone maker, top executives at the Cupertino giant – including CEO Tim Cook – took a pay cut in 2016. In its annual filing with the SEC, Apple Inc reported that its CEO was hit with a 15 per cent pay cut last year. Steve Jobs' protege logged …
It's taken longer this time, but Cook is still the new Scully imho - we've seen FA new since the big man popped his clogs - just a load of mince like macbook bar, and bigger iphones. utterly pathetic.
He's had 5 years now to prove himself as a successor rather than a bean counter.
apple flying car ? brain implant ? hell, what about an electric bike ? electric car ?
what we've got is a scully-esk 'lets keeps making the same shit, but if the competition does summit different copy them':
jobs: there will never be a small ipad:
cook: android have one, we've made one
jobs: this is the ideal size for a phone
cook: android has big ones, we'll have big ones
jobs: the pros kept apple afloat - we keep supporting em
cook: cost cut pro shit like aperture, ports on macbooks and commmunity driven development - in with dumbed down 'osx for fuckwits/macos', FCPX*, and a macbook PRO with no ports.
*good - I use it.. but 6 years on still lacks basic stuff taht FCP7 did like motion integration and not having to tag the shit out of stuff to use it
And they say gays are more creative.....
{last bit is a joke - don't downvote me for that FFS}...
FA new since the big man popped his clogs
Apple don't have revolutionary ideas, but they're good at stealing ideas and refining them into products.
Maybe they should give augmented reality a try : the iGlass could combine a blue-tooth headset with an iOS HUD. A future iWatch could house the CPU and motion-sensor controls, ushering in the post- mobile phone era. Picture the keynote demo conversing with Siri : "You're the Apple of my eye" "iEye cap'n Cook"!
double-posting here (tut-tut)...
Then the iGlass 2 would have a self facing camera built in (on the end of an array of optical fibres with micro-size lenses shaped to counter the distortion from being so close to your face) so it can do Facetime hands-free. The software would use face recognition technology to blot out the background, combined with background-noise cancelling audio to guarantee your privacy wherever you use it.
.. now where's my $100 million share options?
"Apple don't have revolutionary ideas, but they're good at stealing ideas and refining them into products."
Yes, despite the joke icon, that is exactly what they are good at. Taking a turd and managing to polish it, generally with success.
I'm surprised they've not gone into the home automation market. It seems ideal for their target demographic. Lots of new shiny which the user can keep adding to over time and then inevitably replacing the whole shebang every few years, all controlled by Siri.
Stuff started going wrong when Jobs was still around with Final Cut and OS X Lion where you couldn't Save As... but afterwards any pretence at repairability, upgradability, or server stuff (even if it was just the Mac Mini) went out the window.
Nowadays Jony just phones home something 1mm thinner with fewer ports and with more glue in every year while Macbook Air hardware is labelled as Pro and OS X is stagnating apart from getting features from iOS ported across.
I agree, there's nothing even remotely compelling coming from Apple these days, they are just giving existing stuff a bit of an update and rolling it out. And no, the Maxi Pad is not innovating, it's copying a form factor which Jobs was dead set against.
The one thing I can think of which they could have done by now would be something like Amazon's Echo, which is essentially a Wi-Fi connected speaker with a voice controlled interface. Having used an Echo, I was very impressed with it and will be getting one later this year.
My prediction is that later this year Apple will bring their own version out but they'll be selling it at double the Echo's price (£300) just because they can, and it'll still fly off the shelves irrespective.
As to your last comment I am inclined to agree. I most species with complex behavior pasterns the female has the more complex. The biggest problem in most organizations is group think. If you are an outsider to start with then standing back and observing this behavior rather than joining in should be easier.
When Jobs died, it was much ballyhooed that his vision would go on because he'd written down a plan for Apple's future.
It was never mentioned again after the ballyhoo died.
So what happened?
A. There was no plan, just a story to keep investors happy?
B. There is a plan, but it lies untouched in the shrine they made of Job's office?
C. There was a plan, but all it essentially says is, "Good luck!"?
D. There is a plan, full of ideas and insight for the future. Cook read it, but wailed, "But this'll cost a fortune in research and development! No way!"
Personally, I lean toward D.
Say what you want about Jobs, he had vision, and the balls to follow it.
IMO, He was able to record the vision to pass it on, but Cook lacks the balls to follow it.
>You know, somehow I don't think the guy will now take a bike to work and eat home made sandwiches..
Probably not, but I heard that this year he's only going for the 13" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar rather than the usual 15" range topper. Gotta to cut your coat according to your cloth....
What exactly did they expect when they put an ops guy in charge of a technology company?
He did exactly what you'd expect, incremental change and manufacturing cost optimisation and product mix based of analysis of volumes shipped.
Actual product concept and marketing and innovation and all the things Jobs did to make it all work are beyond him. We've had a few years sustained by the momentum of the company but that doesn't work forever. They've trimmed too much of the range so are left with a narrow set of core products and none of those has innovated or really led the market for a while.
The fall will take a long time to happen though, their cash reserves are so big that they can decline to utter irrelevance and still survive for decades.
I was happy with my previous iPhones, and was planning to purchase another one. When the time came, there was nothing I could purchase. The 6 have Touch Disease and the 7 lacks a headphone socket. Sorry, no sale. Bought a nice Asus ZenFone 3 and am very happy. Transition was much easier than I feared.
I did buy a used iPhone 5S off eBay for my kid for Xmas. Very likely the last iPhone I'll ever buy, unless the headphone socket reappears.
Stupid Apple. I hope it hurts. Maybe they'll learn if they feel it. It'd be bad if they didn't.
@jeffypoooh
You bought a second hand telephone for your kid at Christmas? You tight twat. You should be ashamed. New too good for your child?
I have a 6 and have no idea about whatever the fuck is "touch disease".
And you purchased an Android telephone because of no headphone socket? Yea Gods. Well good luck with the updates then. And I hear the security is not up to Apples' standard. But I have to admit that "fact" is based on my mates who own Android telephones. So it may well be wrong.
And finally. surely no one is daft enough to expect audiophile sound quality from a telephone.... are they? Wires are microphonic for heavens sake. Not to mention they tell any would be thief which pocket your telephone is in. And don\t get me started on the bloody wire getting caught up in things and dragging said headphones off your head.
Cheers... Ishtiaq
iFixit pretty much came out and said the new wireless headphones were landfill crud. All the electronics / Li-ion batteries are sealed up, designed to head straight to landfill.
These can't be recycled (even by Apple).
The headphones got zero for fixability, 300-400 recharges, means 2 year 'usage' life.
Not a problem you might say - until you realise how many Apple headphones the World goes through. These are going to produce milllions of tonnes of toxic waste.
@A/C
Well buy some other fucking headphones.Though I have to say I would not be so stupid as to buy any AUDIO gear without HEARING it myself.
Though you did make me smile when you whinged about the headphones having a 2 year usage life producing "millions of tons of toxic waste".. pretty much the same as your telephone then
Cheers... Ishtiaq
until you realise how many Apple headphones the World goes through. These are going to produce milllions of tonnes of toxic waste.
At eight grammes per pair, the world will need to throw away 125 billion pairs of Airpods to reach a million tonnes. So about eighteen pairs for every human being on the planet.
Treating your claim as hyperbole rather than inadequate maths skills, there's still what government like to call the "counterfactual", which is what happens in the alternative case. In my experience, most wired earphones have a pretty short life anyway because the lacquer insulation on the wires isn't durable unless treated with kid gloves (or the jack breaks, or the actual drivers fail or get irretrievably gunked up, so the average service life is probably no different. Then, you need to consider that a typical pair of earphones (say Sennheiser CX100) are about 15 grammes a pop, and the vast majority won't ever be recycled. Whilst the Airpod charging dock is another piece of kit to consider, the counterfactual is the repairs of scrappage of entire phones due to a broken socket. On balance I'd guess Apple are reducing waste to landfill...
So all in all, posting that as AC was probably a wise move on your part.
I think Apple are failing to realise that their professional creative market was actually what drove their 'cool' for years. They've been undermining and frankly pissing off professional users - i.e. trend setting designers, digital artists, photographers, journalists, video producers, web developers etc etc for some years now by mucking around with dropping support for products.
1. Final Cut Pro had become an industry standard almost and it was radically changed causing major upheaval for video editors and producers who had trusted it.
2. Aperture was dropped.
3. They made the MacPro into some kind of weird looking ornament instead of the ultra-practical workhorse that many pro-users loved. Did they actually ask pro-users what they wanted? Nope! They decided that the one thing that your typical music producer or graphic designer would want is a tiny computer that you can't expand easily without a spaghetti junction of wires.
4. Then to top it off they produce a professional-oriented laptop (certainly price wise anyway) that has removed all the ports?!
Generally :
1. Removing the headphone jack?!? Why? It saved almost no space worth worrying about and pissed a lot of people off.
2. Magsafe. It was a brilliant little feature that saved many an Apple product from ending up on the floor. Why get rid of it for USB-C.
Is Apple just letting some designer who hates ports dictate technical policy?
iPads: iOS is too limited for the advanced hardware that's in the iPad pro. It needs some kind of touch-friendly version of macOS to really make any use of it.
iOS:
It's too rigid and isn't changing with the times at all. The simple grid of icons that you have to shuffle around like a 1970s tile puzzle is really very limiting.
It also needs to open the door to a few things like other web browser rendering engines. The block on that seems absolutely stupid. Also the lack of any kind of access to the file system is completely stupid.
macOS:
1. Breaking age-old logical ways of doing things.
Why the hell did they feel the need to change the File > Save / Save As approach to saving things in so many Apple developed applications? I have ended up accidentally messing up versions and screwing things up because I didn't duplicate the file before making changes and suddenly realised that because there's no longer user-control over saving, it's just making changes to a live document. It's really unintuitive and breaks a very standard concept of how to deal with files.
2. iCloud integration - It's lacking transparency and too much is automatic. I have found that I have accidentally put stuff into the iCloud that I had never intended to. This included work documents which would be subject to data protection requirements. I was really annoyed that this was so easy to do.
I've also discovered that colleagues had put their entire Desktop into the iCloud without realising exactly what they'd agreed to.
3. iCloud lack of transparent access to the file system / inconsistent access to it anyway. It needs to just be a normal drive more like dropbox.
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