“Apple has enjoyed one of the most spectacular and innovative runs in U.S. business history,” Michael S. Malone writes in an opinion piece for ABC News.
“The question now is whether the company can keep going, pulling still more rabbits out of Steve Jobs’ hat. The answer, I think, is probably not,” Malone writes.
“That’s not to say that aren’t a few terrific products waiting out there that seem logical extensions of Apple’s current trajectory. For example, everybody expects the company to come out with a 3G iPhone sometime soon, which would be a welcome improvement. Even better would be an Internet phone — which is what I think the iPhone should have been in the first place. And coming up with a real keyboard for the iPhone, a la the new LG Voyager, or at least a pulsing touch screen keyboard, would overcome the iPhone’s one big flaw,” Malone writes.
MacDailyNews Take: There already is an Internet iPhone from Cisco. Word is, it’s selling like snotcakes. As for LG’s Voyager and iPhone’s keyboard, please see these related articles:
Chicago Tribune: Verizon’s fake Apple iPhone, the LG Voyager, is clunky and second-rate – December 18, 2007
Verizon’s ‘fake iPhone’ LG Voyager is no Apple iPhone killer – November 21, 2007
Dopey ‘study’ conjures up Apple iPhone typing ‘errors’ – November 14, 2007
Malone continues, “But then what? The iMac, the iPod (and iTunes) and the iPhone challenged major consumer electronics industries that had either grown complacent (PCs, the music industry) or missed a key innovation (the cell phone industry and feature integration). But now what?”
MacDailyNews Take: “But now what?” There’s a reason why Jobs is a multi-billionaire running one of the world’s most valuable companies and Michael S. Malone is scribbling junk articles about him for such high-technology mavens as ABC News.
Malone continues, “The quick price discounting of the iPhone underscored that the mobile phone world was a far more aggressive and competitive one than the aging personal computer world. And already, Nokia, LG, Samsung and every other cell phone maker is rushing to introduce iPhone killers, and the first wave looks pretty damn good. Can Apple really stay ahead of these guys?”
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, Apple can stay ahead. The first wave of fake iPhones looks pretty good to whom? Not to anyone who’s used an iPhone, that’s for sure. Anyone can make an iPhone lookalike, weld on a touch screen and pretend it’s an iPhone (see recent Verizon ads), but they don’t have multi-touch and they don’t work at all like an iPhone. Just like with fake iMacs and MacBooks, the external looks can be approximated, but the user experience inside obviously can’t.
Malone continues, “And that isn’t the only market in which Apple is coming under assault. The company picked up some market share in computers, thanks to the stupidity of the competition, but that isn’t going to last… Will the results be superior to Apple’s computers? Likely not. But these giant competitors need only be nearly as good at half the price.”
MacDailyNews Take: Half the price? Come on. Spec out comparable machines and Apple fares very well indeed, often beating the likes of Dell. Apple refuses to compete in the bargain basement junk PC market. Apple wants to satisfy customers; they won’t make junk for the sake of low sticker prices. Apple has a reputation for quality that they will not, should not, sacrifice to pad their market share numbers like HP, Dell, Gateway, etc. Basically, you get what you pay for with Macintosh. Especially since Macs are OS-unlimited while the PC box assemblers are OS-limited, stuck riding Microsoft’s bloated Vista (or installing Microsoft’s over 6-year-old XP), forever unable to run Mac OS X, iLife, etc. Consumers grow more tech savvy every day, hence the recent dramatic uptick in Mac market share. HP, Dell, Lenovo, and the rest can try to make the best looking machines they can muster, but they can’t match Jonathan Ives’ design chops, and even if they somehow get anywhere in the ballpark, they’re still stuck booting up into Windows.
Malone continues, “That leaves music and video, where the iPod owns the market (by the way, when Microsoft, IBM and Intel had this kind of market monopoly, the SEC came knocking; where was it with MP3?). No one’s going to take this business away from Apple anytime soon. But once again, short of a quantum leap in innovation, this is now an incremental market — something that Apple has never been that good at. And the competitors are swarming: seen the new Zune? While the world laughed it off and dismissed it, Microsoft, relentless as ever, went back to the drawing board and came up with a nice little machine. It ain’t the iPod, but it, and all of its other friends, just may keep Apple from making Apple-like profits. And when that happens, Apple’s stock falls … and then how will the company continue to afford fighting this three front war it’s now put itself in — all against bigger and richer competitors?”
Full article, Think Before You Click™, here.
Malone uses the old trick of peppering his articles with faint praise, so that he can get in his weak shots at Steve Jobs, who most likely repeatedly pants’ed him in front of the entire playground back in grade school (see Malone quote below).
With their latest Zunes, Microsoft has partially succeeded in ripping off old Apple iPods, but without the rich accessory market, without iTunes, without the iTunes Store. They, like everyone else, have no answer for iPod touch and iPhone. iPod nano, all by itself, blows the competition away. SanDisk, the actual distant #2 to iPod, Microsoft, with their Zune fiasco, and the ever-dwindling cadre of other also-rans have nothing to offer that will “keep Apple from making Apple-like profits.” They just don’t, and to say that what they have on the market today might “keep Apple from making Apple-like profits” is simply folly. They’ve been trying for over half a decade and the best they’ve come up with are incomplete, derivative fakes of discontinued iPods with extraneous “features” thrown on for the sake of compiling bullet points for their dusty retail placards.
And now for some Michael S. Malone quotes, so you can see the baggage he brings to his articles that mention Apple:
“The biggest reason I try to avoid covering the company is the community of rabid Apple fanatics. When you are in the mood for it, they can be fun — in a nasty sort of way. It’s sort of like bear-baiting: A dirty, little secret in the computer media is that if you want to goose your readership or spike the traffic to your Web site, just say something negative about Apple Computer.” – Michael S. Malone, January 18, 2007
“Mr. Jobs is the most paradoxical of creatures. On the one hand, though time and mortality have mellowed him, he remains something of a monster. If, like me, you grew up in the same neighborhood, went to the same school, interviewed him in the early days of Apple, and even wrote a book about him and his company, there will always be things about him that are unforgivable — cruelties and manipulations (especially to Steve Wozniak), early crimes (illegal telephones, ironically), megalomania, and an unquenchable need to take credit from others (Do you know who led the original Mac team? Invented the iPod? Devised the new iPhone? I didn’t think so) — and that no achievement will ever erase.” – Michael S. Malone, January 11, 2007
Michael S. Malone from “Apple R.I.P,” Forbes, October 5, 2000:
• “Steve Jobs can’t run companies… Why is he a poor CEO? Because he’s mercurial, insufficiently engaged by the more boring (but crucial) operations like distribution and, ultimately, because he’s a pretty nasty piece of work.”
• “Steve Jobs has put Apple again in a precarious position. When the end does come, the big companies will have the necessary capital to transition into the multitude of new industries that will evolve out of the PC.”
• “Apple is a small fish, and the pond is going dry… Now that Apple has upgraded its customer base it has no place to go.”
You get the idea.
Cry me a river, MAC lemmings. Malone always tells the truth. The only thing I disagree with is that Apple had rabbits pulled out of Steve Jobs’ hat in the first place. The real questions are how long can Apple blatantly copy Microsoft and much longer will the sheep continue to buy these expensive knock-offs?
Your potential. Our passion.™
all against bigger and richer competitors
which one? name one competitor beside microsoft which has a higher market-value and 17 billion dollars in cash.
Who doesn’t like rabbits?
Leopard is full of non-business non-productive goodness, that makes me love my mac more and more.
Photo booth with those weird photo effects, comic life for maybe the future I may wanna use it…
Like I mean, without a doubt, one of the best programs from the windows computer was solitare. That Sir Malone, is one of the greatest non-productive and yet most used software in the business world. It has the largest userbase compared with Office.
And yes, this is one of those programs, that were once non-serious.
So to answer the question… we all love rabbits!
You know what they say about rabbits …
When you got more than one, you end up with a LOT MORE
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”smile” style=”border:0;” />
MDN MW: “saying” : just like the old …
“Yes, but apart from ALL THAT – what have the Romans ever done for us?”
This guy really is an idiot and obviously a Windows PC user. If he ever used the Mac, iPhone, iPod or iTunes software perhaps he would understand the clear advantages of using the Mac OS. Apple is on a run that began 7 years ago when Jobs returned to Apple. The naysayers condemned Apple for opening a retail operation. That retail operation is the most successful retail business in operation today. Who was right ? I know where I
ll place my bets and it’s not with this moron.
Well, my concern is not that Apple has no rabbits left, but that they are pulling them out before they are ready to leave their mom. Leopard is still messing up my intel iMac (making my iDisk grow to over a 100G on my hard disk), not rebooting (forever updating the boot caches) and several other quirks that are keeping me from doing the stuff I want to do. Leopard is great but does anybody believe that Apple didn’t push it out the door too soon?
Maybe they had to in order to not look be compared to Vista like delays but I would rather have quality.
Another product that is cool and full of wonderful potential but is just not ready is appleTV. Love the concept but the implementation just isn’t there yet.
Trolls are out early this morning. Nothing better to do?
“This work is the opinion of the columnist, and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.”
Thank gawd ABC had the good sense to cover themselves and maintain some of their credibility. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go look up what “mercurial” means.
wings2Sky: If you post on MDN and genuinely have all those problems then I am highly suspicious of you.
I suppose I should be pissed at Malone. His ongoing diatribe against Apple and SJ, along with other anal-ists and idiot pundits depresses the growth predictions and thus increase the PEG ratio — price to earnings to growth — which depresses the current price. As a retired guy who bet the farm on AAPL, I have no more significant funds to invest in Apple — they are already there.
But for most of you young working guys, Malone and his ilk are helping you get fresh AAPL shares at spectacularly low prices — way below what it is worth. Take advantage of it. I did at a time when just keeping my home was a challenge — I know all about McDonald’s dollar menu. But I refused to cash in my mid five figure investment in AAPL. It is now in the seven figures, thanks in part to Mr. Malone and his fellow bozos. I also, just before the iPhone went on sale in the US, transfered all of my existing IRAs and 401ks into a self managed roll over IRA. All of that money is in AAPL now.
Thanks Michael, for helping me get AAPL so cheaply.
“And coming up with a real keyboard for the iPhone, a la the new LG Voyager, or at least a pulsing touch screen keyboard, would overcome the iPhone’s one big flaw,” Malone writes.”
I stopped reading at this point. Any writer that still believe the virtual keyboard is a problem is a Luddite.
“I’ll tell you the truth, Apple has lost a lot of it’s momenum when they introduced glossy only screens.
They just offended the majority (85%) of all computer users who prefer matte.”
yet the market share and browser share continue to go up…..
oh wait! i see your trouble! you put a “%” in there. i think that is a typo, perhaps you meant the 85 computer users who prefer matte.
“And coming up with a real keyboard for the iPhone, a la the new LG Voyager, or at least a pulsing touch screen keyboard, would overcome the iPhone’s one big flaw,” Malone writes.”
I stopped reading at this point. Any writer that still believes the virtual keyboard is a problem is a Luddite.
There’s that faint suggestion of stridency one hears before decline. Malone senses something on the wind….his own irrelevancy.
He forgot to wish for Steve Jobs to add not just an old fashioned plastic keyboard, but also a ‘rotary dialer’ to the iPhone.
Say, doesn’t Disney own ABC ? And isn’t Steve the largest shareholder of Disney now ? Good move, Mikey.
Ignore that bear. He wants you to sell so he can buy.
Here’s a different kind of writer:
http://www.atpm.com/13.12/apple-talk.shtml
Maybe some of these guys should have a double “Think before . . .” warning. One just doesn’t seem to be enough. I mean; . . . why would want to feed a hit whore? (There’s that phrase again.)
I think the only real consolation we can take from this is that these guys are doomed to a life in Microsoft’s world.
That’s it! There should be a higher level warning!
“Hit Whore!”
There’s nothing worse than a Dvorak wannabe.
Reminds me of Alan Deutschman’s book The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, published back in 2000, which ends basically the same way: “Jobs saved Apple with the [original] iMac, but what other products can Apple possible invent?”
I think he’s just splitting hares.
Why suspicious? I have been a Mac enthusiast since 1984. There for Apple in the dark days. I love Macs because they let me work on my work (be it A/V or DTP), not my computer. The problems about the iDisk growing huge are well documented on MacFixit and other sites. As are problems with the boot cache.
So why are you suspicious?
You said, “It’s hilarious how these pundiots speak from a position of authority they clearly do not occupy. “
Excellent comment. You hit the nail right on the head. These people spend, maybe 45 minutes on an article, they never research anything, just goggle a few quotes, so that they have some “support” for their comments.
Not journelists, just “hack” writers. 🙁
en