Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller’s “segment of Apple’s WWDC keynote on Monday took on an interesting, more aggressive tone as he introduced the Mac Pro. ‘Can’t innovate anymore, my ass,’ he said — a line directed not at his audience of sympathetic Apple developers, but at the nattering nabobs of negativism that have accumulated at the base of Apple’s sliding stock price,” Nilay Patel writes for The Verge. “…If the chief criticism of Apple was that it no longer produces stunning, industry-leading computers, the Mac Pro would be the ultimate rebuttal. Schiller should have brought out a mic just to drop it.”
“But that’s not the criticism Apple’s actually facing — the company already makes the best laptop and the best all-in-one PC, and many would argue that it also makes the best phone and tablet as well,” Patel writes. “Apple’s stock hasn’t slid because it’s been putting out uninspired hardware — it’s slid because the company hasn’t been able to enter any major new product categories in years, and major software efforts like Siri and iCloud have faltered in extremely public ways.”
Patel writes, “Under Jobs, Apple did an extraordinary job of changing how entire markets worked: music, movies, smartphones, tablets, laptops, all of it. But it’s been a long time since Apple offered any change on that scale, and a visually refreshed iOS 7 and the new Mac Pro aren’t proof that it still can…”
MacDailyNews Take: iOS 7 is much more than just “visually refreshed.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Winding up for a looong sentence… Okay:
The latter argument about Siri and iCloud is partially true (although the general public’s perception of either isn’t nearly as bad as Patel seems to think), but the major stock-value-cratering fsckups under Cook were allowing Forstall’s wild overselling of Maps at WWDC 2012 combined with the bush league failure to simply tag it as a “beta” upon release and, as Cook has admitted, the stupid launch of the new iMac without having any units to sell for months (shedding some 750,000-1,000,000 holiday Mac sales which affected quarterly results and gave the AAPL shorts a solid toehold to stand on and foment like rabid dogs), but Patel’s former criticism, that “the company hasn’t been able to enter any major new product categories in years,” is just premature: iPhone was released 5 years, 7 months, and 19 days after iPod; iPad was released 2 years, 9 months, and 5 days after iPhone; Tim Cook has been Apple CEO for 1 year, 9 months, and 22 days.
(Phew! Have at it grammarians!)
In case Nilay has forgotten already:
Designing something requires focus. It takes time.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “TheloniousMac” for the heads up.]
Related articles:
Schiller’s ‘can’t innovate anymore, my ass’ one-liner: Apple’s rallying cry – June 11, 2013
What kind of innovative does Apple have to be? – June 11, 2013
Jony Ive is the new Steve Jobs: Positively mind-blowing iOS 7 stirs Apple-envy yet again – June 11, 2013
