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kdarling

macrumors P6
Steve Jobs made plenty of mistakes while at Apple in the 80s, outside of Apple and with Apple from 1997 onwards.

The most egregious was allowing Eric Schmidt to sit on the board of Apple…

On the contrary, Jobs asking Schmidt onto the board was a brilliant move! Jobs did make mistakes, but that certainly was not one.

Jobs knew that Google had bought Android in 2005. He also knew that Schmidt idolized him. Jobs used this to his advantage in several ways:

- First, because of his new position, Schmidt isolated himself from the Android project. This prevented him from providing much needed resources, and Rubin has said this was a major reason Android was delayed.

- Secondly, Jobs used Schmidt's help to get incredibly useful Google services on the iPhone. Just imagine if the first iPhone had been missing Search, Maps, YouTube and WiFi location. The iPhone wouldn't have been anywhere as impressive or useful.

- Finally, Jobs relied on Schmidt's adoration and influence to withhold features such as multi-touch deployment on Android for THREE years after the iPhone was demoed. In fact, Google only turned it on after Palm came out with it on their phone. (This is what led to his infamous "thermonuclear war" and "stolen ideas" rants. Jobs tried to also threaten Palm but the Palm CEO told him to bugger off ... just as he had when Jobs tried to get Palm to join in Jobs' secret and illegal anti-poaching scheme... as Palm had a very strong smartphone patent portfolio. So Jobs apparently turned his anger towards Samsung instead.)

Btw, there were several other members and advisers shared between Apple and Google at the time. That ignorant fan meme that Schmidt stole secret info makes utterly no sense. Jobs himself never claimed any such nonsense, and even gave him praise when he left. Moreover, neither historical timelines nor technical facts support such a claim.

- I've always thought that one of his worst mistakes was signing that iPhone exclusivity deal with AT&T. That gave Android years to freely grow on all the other US carriers. Dumb move.
 
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biscuit0819

macrumors member
Nov 24, 2016
47
18
Things change, and they always will. Rather than speculate what would happen if Jobs was here, vote with your purchasing power. If you don't like the direction Apple is going, don't buy their products.

Why isn't anyone screaming at another manufacturer for not building something they specifically desire?

I'm with you, Apple have always been held to a different standard for some reason. If there isn't constant innovation there's this perception they're going backwards. There's a reason Samsung were known for blatantly ripping them off for years.
 

Galacticos

macrumors 6502a
Apr 5, 2016
692
379
Feel better now?
Bravo, well said.
the only real prerequisite for a forum like this as I see it is somebody who cares about apple. That doesn't mean only praise.

Why do you have an issue with somebody voicing their opinion?
[doublepost=1487742354][/doublepost]
Ahhh the weekly Steve jobs thread.

Apple making mistakes hmm it does not look like they are.

Op you need to learn what forums are about and what click bait is ;)
Op is saying he thinks the company would be in better shape now. It's a relative comparison not an absolute one
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Space was not the reasons Schiller gave for its removal.

I'm not arguing that they shouldn't have removed it. I think Apple could have handled it better but I do see the market moving away from that legacy port. Apple wasn't the first to remove it, and they'll not be the last.

The fact is that Schiller made a case on why its not needed, whether you agree with that use case is immaterial because Apple was standing behind it. Fine, Its not needed for xyz reasons, but then we see the new MBP with it. I'm not worked up by it, so don't get me wrong, but its these inconsistencies that is very un-apple like.
It's possible (but imho not probable) that they heard the criticism and thought 'we're going to disappoint enough people with this as it is.. let's leave it in'
 

nnoble

macrumors 6502
Jun 19, 2011
462
562
Princess Diana, President Kennedy and Steve Jobs, amongst others, died prematurely and they are often irrationally romanticised. All the glory and adulation is vastly overdone. For real fairy stories, try Hans Christian Andersen or a book of Nordic Myths and Legends.
 

i1280

macrumors 6502
Oct 23, 2012
283
61
Lol @ this thread. Apple pretty much fell off the face of the earth until they became the "iPod Company". If not for the iPod, the company may not even be close to what they are today or it would've been delayed until they came up with the iPhone.

As for Jobs, he was great and all but there's no telling what would've happened and let's not act like Apple was "all his" and ONLY "his ideas". lol...
 

kdarling

macrumors P6
Some would say a Steve Ballmer move. Great for the bottom line of the company, but not good for the company over the long run.

Yeah, if they'd also had Verizon and Sprint and others, Apple could've sold more than double the number of iPhones for all those years. Not to mention very likely crippling Android's quick rise in the US... and continue selling many more even today. All if only they hadn't agreed to AT&T's demand for exclusivity.

Although, to be fair, Apple didn't have a lot of choice without Verizon in the bidding mix (*). Either Apple made a deal with AT&T, or they'd have had to go with Sprint (meaning the first iPhone would've had to be 3G CDMA, and I don't think Apple was prepared for that).

(*) Most people know that Apple approached Cingular in early 2005, and Verizon in mid 2005. Unfortunately, Apple not only had no design yet to show Verizon, they had unusual marketing demands like not allowing sales via Verizon partners such as Best Buy or Walmart (how ironic that years later iPhones sold in those places anyway), and not allowing phone insurance (again, something which changed later).

Most people don't know that Apple continued to keep in occasional touch with Verizon for almost another year until mid 2006, which is when, after a short and intense negotiation, Cingular (AT&T) finally signed a contract with Apple.
 
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Bart Kela

Suspended
Oct 12, 2016
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Most people know that Apple approached Cingular in early 2005, and Verizon in mid 2005. Unfortunately, Apple not only had no design yet to show Verizon, they had unusual marketing demands like not allowing sales via Verizon partners such as Best Buy or Walmart (how ironic that years later iPhones sold in those places anyway), and not allowing phone insurance (again, something which changed later).

Most people don't know that Apple continued to keep in occasional touch with Verizon for almost another year until mid 2006, which is when, after a short and intense negotiation, Cingular (AT&T) finally signed a contract with Apple.
Heck, Apple adamantly refused to let carriers brand Apple iPhones or preload carrier crapware on the devices.

That exists to this day. You won't find a big Verizon logo etched into the back of your iPhone and you won't find AT&T Navigator preloaded on your iPhone either.

Initially, this restricted the iPhone to AT&T in the USA, but eventually the other carriers caved into the Apple's stipulations.

An iPhone user who purchases an app or media file from the App Store or iTunes Store on an iPhone? The carrier doesn't get a dime. Apple still controls the release of software updates, firmware releases, etc. on its devices, unlike other handset manufacturers.

There is very little value add from mobile operators, they just try to compete by offering different plans and service pricing configurations. Sometimes they offer "premium" services to certain customers, but often their competitors offer the same features to a lower paying tier. The carrier war is about scrounging for a buck, not about improving service or offering something that no one else can offer.

Apple leveled the cellular carrier field more than any other handset manufacturer. Even users of other smartphones (Android, etc.) benefit from Apple's early maneuverings.

Brilliantly played by Apple and all because Steve thought cellular carriers were dumb pipes. He was right
 
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kdarling

macrumors P6
Heck, Apple adamantly refused to let carriers brand Apple iPhones or preload carrier crapware on the devices.
...
Initially, this restricted the iPhone to AT&T in the USA, but eventually the other carriers caved into the Apple's stipulations.

Well, that's the fan myth. The carriers themselves don't think they caved into anything significant. In fact, AT&T has said that it was Apple who bent over a lot for them:

"The comments from Jobs triggered a surprisingly sharp rebuttal from Cingular national distribution president Glenn Lurie, who flatly denied that any concessions were made and implied that Jobs' assertions were little more than posturing. "I'm not sure we gave anything," Lurie stated. "I think they bent a lot." - Cingular rebutting the idea that they did anything special for Apple, Jan 2007

Certainly the exclusive was worth far more to Cingular than to Apple.

As for Verizon, they had good reasons to not go with Apple. Unlike any other phone maker, Apple wanted: full price plus the customer's monthly subsidy, have total control over warranty decisions, to choose who would be resellers, and even wanted to get the name and credit info on every single customer at activation. If Microsoft had done the same, people would've screamed bloody murder.

Plus all Verizon smartphones at the time had 3G and GPS (the latter albeit locked to Vz apps). Apple ended up going cheap with EDGE and no GPS at first. Not to mention that Apple had no plans for third party apps!

All in all, it must have sounded like a very non-consumer friendly, fairly crippled, feature phone, from a company with no phone experience. (And then in later 2005, Jobs displayed the awful ROKR "iTunes Phone", which didn't help Apple's case one bit.)

An iPhone user who purchases an app or media file from the App Store or iTunes Store on an iPhone? The carrier doesn't get a dime.

Major carriers negotiated a percentage of App Store sales. They're not dumb.

Apple leveled the cellular carrier field more than any other handset manufacturer. Even users of other smartphones (Android, etc.) benefit from Apple's early maneuverings.

Some things became better. The major one being unlocked GPS for Verizon customers after the iPhone 3G came out. But some things became more locked down. For instance, before the iPhone:

- Carriers didn't stop anyone from downloading apps from other app stores.
- Carriers did not require a data plan for smartphones. Many people used a cheap voice plan and relied on WiFi at home/work for data.
- Carriers offered cheap unlimited data, because there were not so many kids online viewing videos :)

The 2G initial iPhone also delayed the rollout of 3G for AT&T users, while AT&T spent wasted effort boosting 2G data speeds for Apple.

Brilliantly played by Apple and all because Steve thought cellular carriers were dumb pipes. He was right

Jobs was a superb hypocrite. He mocked carriers for having walled gardens, and then turned right around and created a even more tightly controlled garden, using the exact same arguments about quality and security.
 

Tozovac

macrumors 68040
Jun 12, 2014
3,034
3,233
Brutal truth? Steve Jobs was a great salesman who got lucky.
And died young.

You're so incomplete here. Regardless of the occasional failure and luck, he also knew what would work great for customers and didn't selfishly force onto customers what he thought they should consider to be great (Jony Ive).
 

Vorkeyjones

macrumors member
Aug 20, 2016
82
341
Steve Jobs made plenty of mistakes while at Apple in the 80s, outside of Apple and with Apple from 1997 onwards.

The most egregious was allowing Eric Schmidt to sit on the board of Apple…

Brutal truth? Steve Jobs was a great salesman who got lucky.
And died young.

From going bankrupt to most valuable company in the world.

All luck.

OK.
 

TheTruth101

Suspended
Mar 15, 2017
248
806
Steve Jobs made plenty of mistakes while at Apple in the 80s, outside of Apple and with Apple from 1997 onwards.

The most egregious was allowing Eric Schmidt to sit on the board of Apple…

Brutal truth? Steve Jobs was a great salesman who got lucky.
And died young.


Jobs committed mistakes and did amazing things. Tim have been committing mistakes and haven't done the first amazing thing. Probably transforming the Mac Pro into a trash can, transform Final Cut Pro into garbage, so on and so forth... they have been just playing with stocks and working very hard in making people to be addicted to useless apps. Since the iPhone came out the world started to change... for worse. That was the latests mistake from Jobs era, creating a device that will render useless the mind of people.
 

hawkeye_a

macrumors 68000
Jun 27, 2016
1,637
4,384
Steve Jobs made plenty of mistakes while at Apple in the 80s, outside of Apple and with Apple from 1997 onwards.

The most egregious was allowing Eric Schmidt to sit on the board of Apple…

Brutal truth? Steve Jobs was a great salesman who got lucky.
And died young.

I think the facts might contradict your final assessment.

Steve Jobs' was human... he was not perfect; capable of making mistakes like anyone. That is not what is in dispute here. However, to say he was just a salesman who got lucky is incorrect. If we were in the early 90s discussing Jobs' tenure at Apple, you could have made a convincing argument that his only traits were being a salesman who got lucky... But not today.

Since he was ousted from Apple in the 80s, Apple went through its fair share of CEOs, the result of which led to Apple's near-demise. After he got back to Apple, he effectively steered Apple from the brink of bankruptcy to being the most valuable corporation(by market cap) with over a $100bn in the bank.

During his second stint at Apple, he successfully lead two major transitions for the Mac platform, the first to OSX and then to Intel. (Not even a company like Microsoft has been able to accomplish that). And effectively transformed(for better or worse) the music industry and the phone industry. Trans formative products include... iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBookAir.

His time outside of Apple produced NexTStepOS, the foundations of macOS, iOS, etc.... and his other company was Pixar. nuff said.

While there is an element of "luck" in everything, i think a track record such as the above needs a lot more than salesmanship and luck.

We have been able to witness two distinct time periods of Apple with and without Steve Jobs, and the results are consistent. When he was with the company it was good, and when he wasn't it was generally going downhill. What we have been witnessing for the past 5 odd years in terms of products, direction and innovation, is the direct result of NOT having Steve Jobs as CEO. IMHO

It is my opinion that as time goes on, Steve's influence in the products and the "culture" of innovation/development at Apple diminishes. So while he set Apple on a trajectory, it might have peaked and now be waning.

I still go back and watch some of his keynotes every-now-and-then, and it's not his salesmanship that impresses me, it's his passion(or illusion of passion) for the products. He would geek out about the most minuscule of things, which kindof showed that he cared about the products the company was selling. That's a lot more that can be said of any CEOs today, including Apple's.

Cheers
 

Samuli S

Suspended
Aug 29, 2017
1
0
This has been on my mind for a while. No headphone port, latest macbook pro disaster countless mistakes apple has made ever since the great Steve Jobs passed. If he were still alive Apple would make way better decisions and not make crucial mistakes.



Some people suffer from buyer's dilemma in the short term and others make it their lifetime goal, that is not wanting to accept their purchase or favourite brand is no longer what it was. This point is very clear from some of the responses and is a standard condition of those suffering from a closed mind.

In my view Apple is still the only option in terms of what features are important to me but as soon as a computer becomes a better proposal to me than a MacBook Pro or a phone better than an iPhone, I will switch.

In short, I have no more brand loyalty to Apple. Apple is no longer a trailblazer and others will catch up.

The major failure of Apple is putting in a nice way i"If it's not broken, don't fix it", and a more direct way "All the people that Steve Jobs used but kept away from the core values are now getting their dirty little fingers on them". Another way to put it is these people who were held at bay are now willing to kill the business for short term profit.

Some core values that have changed:

1) An Apple phone or computer was built to last and be useable as long as it lasts. From iPhone to MacBook to iMac, updates clearly are designed now to slow down older machines encouraging users to upgrade, gambling on the user not having an alternative.

Why is this important? The system that Bill Gates created of requiring hardware upgrades to continue using the Windows system at the same speed made him a lot of money. However, it has wasted a tremendous amount of resources on our planet. Majority of people use the internet, word processor, spreadsheet and email. Consider the advances in these applications for day-to-day use and then consider the number of iterations of computers the average person has gone through and think whether we as a whole received a reasonable benefit from the tremendous resources that were used. Steve Jobs took a different approach and those greedy execs took the easiest approach to fill their pockets when he could no longer have his thumb on them.

This was a reason why I admired Steve Jobs and supported the brand.

2) Everything has changed. Email searches don't work efficiently anymore, Basic playback of music is different, half of public wifi and several private wifi either do not connect or take a long time varying also by the Apple unit in question. These and other basic features form the core operability of an Apple machine and would have been developed upon by anybody that understood and appreciated the core values of Apple as opposed to being fundamentally redeveloped.
 

Tozovac

macrumors 68040
Jun 12, 2014
3,034
3,233
Is that why the iPhone 6 was a "failure "?
I was speaking more about software than hardware. Ive excelled at hardware with his less-is-more approach, letting the focus be on the software, but his less-is-more approach to software is killing the experience. His elimination of so much UI details that used to make the user experience great and "Apple-like" is very much a "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" situation. Jobs knew users loved a cute interactive baby, not a grey lifeless blob.
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And anyone would know anything like that how exactly?

It's of course impossible to assume what somebody else would think, but it's not too far a stretch to a guess at what someone would think of today's products when compared to the products they produced. I personally found the products produced under Steve in the mid to late 90s to be extremely intuitive and engaging, the majority of that being from the software that just worked even on simplistic hardware. Now that the software/user experience is overly simplistic/minimalized and more of a gray sky than a rainbow, I don't think it's that much of a stretch to guess whether Steve would have felt good about it or not.
 

Phil in ocala

Suspended
Jul 14, 2016
728
328
This has been on my mind for a while. No headphone port, latest macbook pro disaster countless mistakes apple has made ever since the great Steve Jobs passed. If he were still alive Apple would make way better decisions and not make crucial mistakes.
_________________________________________
Today 8.29.17 Apple stock price reached an all time high.....no firm that is failing has a great stock price.
[doublepost=1504018407][/doublepost]
This has been on my mind for a while. No headphone port, latest macbook pro disaster countless mistakes apple has made ever since the great Steve Jobs passed. If he were still alive Apple would make way better decisions and not make crucial mistakes.
***************************************************************
Apple CEO rewarded for company's strong performance

Tim Cook had a better Thursday than you did last week.

That's because the Apple Inc. chief executive on Thursday was awarded 560,000 vested Apple shares worth $89.2 million at the time, half of them for meeting company performance goals, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing (https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/...00021/xslF345X03/wf-form4_150396481887759.xml) Monday.

Cook received 280,000 time-based restricted stock units and another 280,000 performance-based RSUs, in accordance with an incentive plan approved by Apple's board in 2013. To meet his performance goal, shareholders' return on Apple stock had to outperform two-thirds of S&P 500 companies over the past three years, which it did, handily. Over that time, Apple shares returned 70.6%, ranking 80th of the 420 companies in the index.

On Monday, Cook sold $43 million worth of his stock -- 268,623 shares -- as part of a pre-arranged plan, according to another SEC filing.

Cook's earnings are held in a trust. In 2015, Cook said he intends to donate (http://fortune.com/2015/03/26/tim-cook/)nearly all of his fortune to charity.

Earlier this month, Apple posted stronger-than-expected quarterly earnings (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ap...quarter-earnings-beat-expectations-2017-08-01), and the tech giant is expected to unveil its highly anticipated new iPhone at an event Sept. 12 (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/apples-iphone-announcement-expected-in-sept-12-event-2017-08-28). Apple shares (AAPL) have been trading near record highs, and are up 39% year to date, compared to the S&P 500's 9% gain.

-Mike Murphy; 415-439-6400; AskNewswires@dowjones.com
 
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Tozovac

macrumors 68040
Jun 12, 2014
3,034
3,233
Today 8.29.17 Apple stock price reached an all time high.....no firm that is failing has a great stock price.

Only time will tell, we're still only a few years past Apple's prime. I anticipate more and more customers will accrue who grow tired of Apple's decreasing the flexibility & feature sets of their hardware (magsafe, headphone jack, overall durability & battery life for the sake of thin-is-in fashion, etc) as well as Apple's constant bleaching out/reduction of their prior uniqueness, attractiveness, intuitiveness and the it-just-works-ness of the software/UI since 2013. Working with an Apple iphone, tablet, and computer is no longer the uniquely & almost magical experience it used to be as Apple keeps taking away the good things that made them special, opening the door for the competition to catch up and offer those missing things.
 

akash.nu

macrumors G4
May 26, 2016
10,870
16,998
Only time will tell, we're still only a few years past Apple's prime. I anticipate more and more customers will accrue who grow tired of Apple's decreasing the flexibility & feature sets of their hardware (magsafe, headphone jack, overall durability & battery life for the sake of thin-is-in fashion, etc) as well as Apple's constant bleaching out/reduction of their prior uniqueness, attractiveness, intuitiveness and the it-just-works-ness of the software/UI since 2013. Working with an Apple iphone, tablet, and computer is no longer the uniquely & almost magical experience it used to be as Apple keeps taking away the good things that made them special, opening the door for the competition to catch up and offer those missing things.

As much as you put a valid argument forward about the "competition catching up", there's actually no other ecosystem available to compete with Apple at present.
 
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