Steve Jobs would never have allowed Apple to reach this sad, decrepit state.
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Apple has officially become a mean spirited company
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Not sure that Steve Jobs would have done anything differently if he saw the rise in Apple's stock price.
Apple is in the business of making money and they seem to be doing quite well according to their latest financial results.
Apple is in the business of making money and they seem to be doing quite well according to their latest financial results.
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If you can’t afford it,Don’t buy anything from Apple, seems like you are really upset,
Perhaps he got over it in the 21 months since he posted that, looks like he's still around.
Nonsense. Steve Jobs is the guy who emailed a guy over iPhone 4 reception issues saying "you're holding it wrong." Mkay. The guy was all about money, he wasn't any different than what we have now in Apple leadership.
Apple's a friggin' trillion dollar corporation now. Large corporations are always greedy and soul-less, it goes without saying. That's the spirit of such a company. When the board starts having to pay attention to what stock owners want (because they're being traded on a stock exchange as opposed to a core group of a few founders who all know each other owning all of the stock), this is what happens. The callous greed takes over everything, and any noise coming out of them resembling something human is just marketing.
Apple isn't your friend. It hasn't been since, you know, the early 1980s, if even then.
That said, Apple does do a few things better than pretty much all other major corporations. They openly embrace environmentalism (even though they do make gadgets that CAN'T BE REPAIRED); they have solid recycling programs going and they use a lot of recycled paper fiber in their packagings, also having cut down on plastics in packaging. They run most of their facilities and stores on sustainably produced electricity, and so on.
One could boycot Apple and never buy another thing from them, but there isn't any better choice out there. There's no "Jesus" corporation that is all nice and has a conscience; that's a fantasy illusion again produced by marketing. So it's buy stuff from these arguably all or mostly all terrible corporations, or not buy anything. There's no other choice, if you want something new anyway. You could buy 2nd hand, although some might argue that's still feeding the vicious consumerism cycle of greed and death to this planet.
TL: DR! lol
I like those losers that think they know what Steve jobs would do, complete idiots
Yah, predicting the outcome of the past 7 years differently based on a snapshot of the present and a fond remembrance of a guy who has not been here in the meantime is... idiotic indeed. Never mind predicting what that guy would right now predict for the future and so recommend that his company do tomorrow morning.
We cannot know how Steve Jobs would have responded to successor markets for Apple products, envisioned niches for Apple to fill with unexpected products, dealt with competition in the smartphone market, etc. We can guess but those would be guesses, and looking at some of the left and right turns the guy took while he was on this planet, at least some of them would be pretty wild guesses.
I like Tim Cook. He knows he's the CEO not the dude in charge of daydreams. It takes a steady hand at the tiller not to freak out over some of the choices any CEO has to make in a global arena, considering all the ups and downs of individual markets and the rules that govern them. There's the ever unpredictable consumer at the mercy of his own economic situation and his own government. There's the shock of getting up some morning to read in the paper that someone you depend on just got poached by the competition, or someone you were trying to poach just took a job with some other denizen of Silicon Valley. There's the rogue analyst who pronounces you DOA in your next delivery of an update to some product line, the sly analyst who says oh hell no they got it made now. There's, um... a trade war... launched by a President who set out, he said, to straighten out our trade imbalance and appears to have set up the stage for a massive disinvestment by other countries in the good ol' USA.
Meanwhile Foxconn's plans to manufacture in the USA... well never mind...
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/21/taiwans-foxconn-says-biggest-challenge-is-us-china-trade-war.html
Who the heck can tell how Steve Jobs would have done with any of that. The world holds still for no one, and no one can predict what it will bring with the next sunrise really. I confess I wouldn't mind hearing what Steve Jobs had to say in public or privately about Donald Trump. I wouldn't mind hearing what Tim Cook has to say about him privately either. So far in public he has been about how I expected he would be: you know what he thinks, he's just not saying all of it. Which again, makes him a good CEO. At least Cook's a better CEO in that respect than Trump is a good President. Sometimes it pays not to drop the last veil, but Trump just can't remember that.
Some good stuff: Apple under Cook does still keep an eye out for how to serve niche customers, the ones who need tweaks to their accessibility options or actual hardware features that may be useful to them. And they do toss around ideas bounced off feedback forms that spark some kind of "hey, yeah, why not?" response and actually goes somewhere. Otherwise we would have murdered them by now over iTunes and iBooks lol instead of still just whinging over how slow they seem to be on taking our suggestions to heart.
On new things: Apple seem the equivalent of the crazy pharma company that will actually invest a hundred million bucks in some drug that maybe only 4500 people on the planet might ever need in the next 20 years. See they do know the secret of R&D: while enroute to trying to succeed with some godblasted project that they might even cancel sometime, their developers invariably bump into something --even off a failure-- that holds promise for the next great thing.
That in itself is something you don't see a lot any more in established companies. Most of them like to farm out their R&D, or just buy a company that has turned something off a drawing board into a working prototype that looks promising. Something goes south on a contracted project, you write it off and move on, and the developers aren't sitting there like so much excess baggage. Something goes south with an acquisition and you can write that off too.
Mega corporations would mostly rather not have to explain one more time to the board that while a stock buyback or another dividend hike is a plus to the shareholders,,,, in the long run it's going to be the mistakes made while innovating that will pay off. Apple knows that. Cook knows it. Sure he does stock buy backs and dividend hikes. He also plows hundreds of millions into stuff that will fail and in failing will generate the seeds of the next iPhone... or some iteration of a desktop machine that no one right now even imagines anyone would ever want to lend space to in their home again, but that when presented will have the chances of an iPhone in once again disrupting the market for what we call "personal computing".
I'll take a wild guess and predict that Steve Jobs would have been pleased by what Tim Cook has done with Apple in the past seven years. In his heart he'd know it's only a coin flip that he might have done better. What is "better" with Apple anyway? What we want right now? Hah. With Apple it usually turns out that we had no clue what we wanted until it showed up in rumors about what might pop up in the next keynote.
Do you have any spiritual connections to Steve Jobs that we don't?
Honestly nobody knows what Steve Jobs would have done, but my guess, he wouldn't have stopped Apple from reaching higher stock values. Last time I checked part of what made him so famous was how he turned around Apple and made it a profitable and highly valuable company again.
Companies are about making money, even their "loyalty" to customers and customer service is just a disguise for more returning dollars. Steve Jobs would have done the same to try and keep making the company more valuable. I'm not going to hate on Apple for that.
Heh, don't worry about what I can and cannot afford. I can afford 50 MacBook Pros if I need to. Still doesn't change the fact that Apple keeps pumping up the price of the base and high end model.
The latest 2018 i9 model is a testament of how ridiculous Apple has become. They use the same exact display from 2016 (maybe they made some minor tweaks) same chassis as 2016 and so on. The highest end MBP with 1TB SSD is $4,000.
Actually I believe the 15 inch is around the same price as it has always been factoring in inflation.
I believe there was, at some point in time, a cheaper MBP 15" that had no dedicated GPU and may have been cheaper, but that is a very good point if you compare apples to apples (i.e. 15-inch MBPs with dGPUs).
It’s plain rubbish that Apple products are more expensive today.
They are not, they have always been.
Just as @upanddown points out, the inflation pushes up the prices.
But it does that with the economy in general, so!
Of course it doesn’t feel fun to buy products that haven’t been updated for sometime.
But in return, we neither don’t have to buy new computers at all so often today.
I’ve never had a computer this long, 5 yrs, and it’s still going to least probably 2 more yrs before I need a new one
I don’t buy phones often either, I don’t need the newest and latest iPhone.
So I would say the tech evolution saves us money today if we don’t must have the absolute newest things.
But the tech evolution reaches out far wider then earlier, especially with smartphones.
That’s why Apple is a rich company today.
Nothing mean spirited with Apple because more ppl buy their stuff today.
They are not, they have always been.
Just as @upanddown points out, the inflation pushes up the prices.
But it does that with the economy in general, so!
Of course it doesn’t feel fun to buy products that haven’t been updated for sometime.
But in return, we neither don’t have to buy new computers at all so often today.
I’ve never had a computer this long, 5 yrs, and it’s still going to least probably 2 more yrs before I need a new one
I don’t buy phones often either, I don’t need the newest and latest iPhone.
So I would say the tech evolution saves us money today if we don’t must have the absolute newest things.
But the tech evolution reaches out far wider then earlier, especially with smartphones.
That’s why Apple is a rich company today.
Nothing mean spirited with Apple because more ppl buy their stuff today.
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Strictly speaking, there was a jump in pricing with the introduction of retina screens, and again with discrete graphics. Though arguably the buyer is getting "more" than they did in prior models.
Inflation (CPI) from October 2013 to June 2018 for example was just under 8%. So today's $2399 was Oct 2013's $2223. https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=2,399.00&year1=201806&year2=201310
Base Macbook Pro 15" prices in the US, data from https://everymac.com/global-mac-prices/mac-prices-us-usa-united-states-america.html
Early 2011 -- $1,799
Late 2011 -- $1,799
Mid 2012 -- $1,799
Retina 2012 -- $2,199
Early 2013 -- $2,199
Late 2013 -- $1999 IG / $2599 DG (Integrated / Discrete Graphics)
Mid 2014 -- $1999 IG / $2499 DG
Early 2015 -- $1999 IG / $2499 DG
Late 2016 -- $2,399
Mid 2017 -- $2,399
Mid 2018 -- $2,399
Trouble is, when it comes to computers and other personal/consumer electronics, we've had 30 years of exponential deflation in which the cost of a half-decent computer system hovered around $1000-$2000 in figures while the specifications doubled every year or two. The use of computers was still growing and the progress of technology meant that a 3 year old computer was a museum piece, obsolescence would take care of itself - no need to plan.
That's run its course over the last 5-10 years. Now everybody who wants a computer already has one, technology growth has slowed and your 5-year old computer can probably do everything you need, with new models offering incremental, but not game-changing, improvements. Demand is - at best - levelling off, but the stock markets do so like to see endless exponential growth, so we're starting to see "real terms" price rises, more planned obsolescence and nickel-and-diming on margins to ensure those ever-rising revenues.
You'll notice that the "premium" PC laptops are now edging firmly into "Apple tax" territory (although budget options are available) or (in the case of Microsoft Surface Book/Surface Studio) the "Mac Macs look cheap" category.
Unfortunately, planned obsolescence and nickel-and-diming doesn't sound too sustainable in the long term: you can only make more money on fewer sales up to the point where there aren't enough sales to maintain "economy of scale" on your production costs and/or the third parties essential to your software/hardware ecosystem lose interest.
If you are into Apple because they make computers, you are barking up the wrong tree. They have been a cell phone and services company for some time now. The computers are just a vestige. They won't stop making them because they facilitate the phones and services. But I don't expect an emphasis on them.
If I remember right, after Jobs passed, Apple took the position that they are the "Mercedes Benz" of electronics. They are selling to the monied, taking lower units sales but also taking high margins.
If I remember right, after Jobs passed, Apple took the position that they are the "Mercedes Benz" of electronics. They are selling to the monied, taking lower units sales but also taking high margins.
You're quite right that Apple positions themselves as a premium product/service provider. They don't compete on price, and they don't chase the low-value customers. You won't find $100 new iphones on the prepaid rack at Walmart.
Seems to me that position existed long before Jobs passed away though, it's not something new. None of the laptops or desktops were ever priced at the lower tiers of the competition, not even back in the Macintosh days -- nor were the ipods cheap when they came out -- even the relatively lower cost Shuffle's were still higher than comparable devices. That's carried through into the phone and tablet business as well.