Apple shows its ‘massive battleship’ is getting tougher to move::Apple’s $89.5 billion in quarterly revenue is nothing to sneeze at, but it also illustrates some of the challenges of being a mature company.
I think this could have been smelled in the water for a long while. Tim Cook was trusted to steer the rudder but his specialty is supply chain management, and I don’t think anyone can say he’s done a bad job.
But. On the R&D side I don’t think people could say he’s done a great job.
The ideas have dried up. When you go “safe” at CEO you make money, but you limit your ceiling, which, once again, with Apple is already breaking the mold.
Consumer electronics is saturated. There is little to no breakthrough there anymore.
Evolution is outside that, but outside that might not be in Tim Cook or Apple’s executive suite’s realm anymore.
Tim Cook is the perfect captain to keep the ship on a steady course and not rock the boat, but I’m not convinced he is an innovator. I sometimes wonder if Jobs selected Cook as his successor, because Jobs expected to overcome his health problems and return, and wanted Apple in safe pair of hands during his cancer battle.
That said, Apple only appears to be “failing” from the angle of the stock markets obsession with infinite growth. They are still an enormous company with high brand strength and large cash reserves.
Apple needs a more daring lead for product design. Tim should stay where he is and, like you said, keep the ship on a steady course. However, I’m pretty bored of their hardware. I want them to release things that are awesome from top to bottom. MacBook Air? “Omg, how did they squeeze every fucking port into the side of this thin-ass machine”
Cook also leaned on Jony Ives for innovation, and he’s more creative with aesthetics than he is with functionality. The Apple Watch would have been even more innovative if Jobs were alive to shepherd it.
Tim Cook will announce his retirement within 5 years. He kicked out the Vision Pro before it was ready so that he would leave a legacy device people would associate with him. He’ll wait for 3 or 4 iterations then walk.
Laying it safe on the tried and true products for sure, but there has been a lot of innovation in the Immersive Computing space which really is the next computing platform. We will see when the Vision Pro really comes out as it is far from perfect, but it does seem to innovate in a bunch of ways that are surely to become the industry standard.
Not a fan at all of apple, but isn’t the shift to arm not a “safe” movement at all? Like, they are breaking basically all the ecosystem of apps, legacy, etc… Also, from the outside, it looks like it went well? Sincerely asking, as I don’t know.
They were already making their own ARM processors in their phones/tablets/watches and even implemented in some of their pro line of laptops as a security processor. The evolution to make their own computer processors seemed inevitable, especially considering Intel’s products were failing to meet battery and thermal wants from Apple.
It felt exciting for people who pay attention to tech, but it was no more exciting than their prior switch from PowerPC procs to Intel, or from third party ARM in iPhones to their own procs.
It’s still very on brand for Tim Cook as well it allows the company to control even more of the design and manufacturing, which stabilizes their supply flow.
The company also had prior experience with the aforementioned PPC to x86 move and their Rosetta translation layer, which they implemented this time around with Rosetta 2 to great success as well, making most things run near native during the devs switch for their binaries.
But, without disruptive new products, sales seem to be stuck in a muted place. And the next swing at big disruption, Vision Pro, starting next year, feels a like a slow build, initially.
Fuck stock market analysts. In one sentence it’s “they don’t innovate.” In the next sentence it’s, “they innovate, but I want them to do it faster.”
How often can you expect a single company to disrupt entire markets? These expectations are not sustainable.
What a weird headline
For sure. Apple should have been like Pepsi and invested in fighter jets
Makes sense to me. The battleships Apple is building are larger than what is needed by modern navies, so they’re selling fewer of them now than they did in previous years.
This article is written like Apple is fresh out of startup stage and isn’t a nearly 50 year old company.
Apple’s strongest force is marketing. It’s their absolutely greatest ability. This video says it best: “Apple is a recipe company, not an innovator”.
And second best: “It’s not invented until Apple does it”
So, Apple doesn’t have to innovate. They just have to copy a good idea and market the shit out of it claiming they were the first, and Apple lickers will gobble it up at whatever ridiculous price is dictated to be “premium”.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
It’s not invented until Apple does it
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Apple prints money.
