“Five years after the death of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, the Silicon Valley tech giant is bigger and stronger, despite lingering doubts over its future without the visionary leader,” Rob Lever writes for Agence France-Presse.
“In financial terms, Apple has been an unstoppable juggernaut: Its profit for the 2015 fiscal year was a whopping $53 billion on revenues of $234 billion — both figures doubled since the final year of Jobs’s reign before he died of pancreatic cancer on October 5, 2011,” Lever writes. “Apple’s market value is more than $600 billion, below its 2015 highs but more than twice its level of 2011 and holding above Google parent Alphabet as the world’s most valuable corporation.”
“Jobs’s successor Tim Cook has won plaudits for his performance keeping Apple on a steady path, even though no one sees him as the same kind of leader. ‘Tim Cook is an operations guy, he is great in getting the supply chain to churn out things,’ said Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research. ‘He knows his limitations. He knows he is not the most charismatic presenter. He knows he is not Steve Jobs,'” Lever writes. “Still, Dawson sees Cook as broadly successful in keeping Apple on track. He noted that Apple has doubled its spending on research and development since Cook took over.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Steve Jobs chose very well.
When are we going to see the fruits of this expenditure on R&D. Nothing new other than Apple Watch has really been introduced with incremental upgrades to other products.
You see the fruits of the R&D expenditure in every product: the innovative way Apple made the watch water resistant; fingerprint technology that actually works and the new fingerprint reader through the screen; the taptic engine and 3D touch; dual camera systems with four color flash; Apple’s own faster and faster, smaller and smaller chip designs; iPad Pro’s pencil; thunderbolt and lightning connectors; etc. etc. And while Apple may not invent all this stuff, they put it together in products in a way that it actually works – unlike some manufacturers, as Samsung constantly reminds us.
Apple is not near the same without Steve Jobs. A monkey could have taken the keys to the castle he built and ridden Jobs’s coattails like Cook has done.
Why do tou fanboys and MDN continue to defend him? Apple now no longer discloses launch weekend iPhone sales. Doesn’t disclose Watch sales.
They’re doing this to cover themselves off and hide retracted sales. Yet you believe everything they tell you. You are all sick.
I have no interest in buying any new Apple product currently. I’m waiting to see what the new MacBook Pros will be like.
But “waiting” is a word that seems status quo in a post-Jobs era.
Your argument would be much more potent if it actually held water.
You say Apple no longer discloses launch weekend sales numbers for iPhone (or at all for watch) because they want to hide poor numbers. Meanwhile, independent third-party observers have been consistently reporting that the launch weekend for iPhone 7 has blown past iPhone 6 (the highest watermark to date), and the watch has been by far the highest selling wearable out there. We aren’t listening to Apple is telling us; the numbers are coming from independent third parties. One could argue that it would be beneficial for a company to brag about record numbers, wouldn’t be?
Good old Pedrag. Apple iPhone sales have declined.
Once they release quarterly earnings, and only then, will we know how well sales went. And by the way, some analysts project flat or declined Watch 2 sales.
Your argument would be much more potent if it actually held water.
You say Apple no longer discloses launch weekend sales numbers for iPhone (or at all for watch) because they want to hide poor numbers. Meanwhile, independent third-party observers have been consistently reporting that the launch weekend for iPhone 7 has blown past iPhone 6 (the highest watermark to date), and the watch has been by far the highest selling wearable out there. We aren’t listening to Apple is telling us; the numbers are coming from independent third parties. One could argue that it would be beneficial for a company to brag about record numbers, wouldn’t it?
Are you familiar with the concept of ‘instant gratification’? You want Apple to reveal every industrial secret and every plan they have to you and the rest of the world because you personally don’t have the patience to wait? I believe that you are one of the many ‘marshmallow eaters’.
“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.” Steve Jobs
Whoa! While that may be true, IBM also carried the weight of fundamental research. Nobel prizes came out of those budgets.
Some even allowed Apple to even exist.
Apple Under Tim Cook:
Unbuyable, expensive, pointless products and services
Lazy, iterative product updates
Upgrade nagware
Visionless leadership
The killing off of perfectly working tech in order to gouge consumers
Using Apple as a personal platform to promote gay rights
Caving in to greedy investor demands to issue pointless buybacks
Shoddy software updates
Complete and total absence of quality control
Ignoring product line updates to make more money by hawking overpriced, outdated hardware.
Yeah, Apple’s still a star. 😳
Remember, under Steve we had the big MobileMe issues.
Apple’s demise has been making the rounds almost for as long as it has been around. Long live Apple.
Tim needs to license macOS or give us new computers on a much better time frame.
Apple died with Steve Jobs. Cook is merely living off the vapors of Jobs.
Cook is clueless. Look at his apple watch. What a joke that product is. Innovation died with Jobs. Apple is going to turn into another Compaq in less than 8 years.