Rocco Pendola writes for TheStreet, “I wrote something as a bit of an aside in a recent TheStreet article about Amazon.com and Pandora: ‘He’s seems like a nice guy so I hate to say it, but Apple’s downfall will come courtesy of Tim Cook. With Jobs gone, Cook has already made a mockery of his legacy. First, a dividend and a buyback. And now rumors of something Jobs detested — a mini iPad. Next, Cook will travel off to China and smile for the cameras like a politician. Wait. He already did that. In many ways, he is the anti-Steve Jobs. And, while it might look like that’s good for business, it’s not. It’s very bad for business.'”
“AAPL bulls have made a profound error: After rightly heaping praise on Steve Jobs for Apple’s enormous success, many of them now discount his contribution, claiming that mere mortals can run the show without missing a beat. That’s wishful thinking at best, a good way to crush your retirement fund at worst,” Pendola writes. “The likes of Steve Jobs are not a dime a dozen. All it takes is a mere skim of two excellent books: Adam Lashinsky’s Inside Apple and Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography to figure that out.”
Pendola writes, “As each piece of writing gets spray-painted on the wall, it becomes all the more clear that Tim Cook will run this company, maybe not into the ground, but into the sort of average status that will render Apple no longer distinct from pack… Jobs made the people around him better. He willed them to accomplish the impossible. This is not to say that Forstall, Ives [sic] and Cook, for that matter, are not talented men. Of course, they are. But, without Jobs, their impact cannot be quite the same. For this, Cook deserves a lion’s share of the blame.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We shall see.
As we’ve written frequently:
AAPL is like a buoy. Quick, it’s back on the surface! You there, analyst, and you, too, swim down and tug on the chain! Drag it under.. lower, lower… good! Now, quick, everybody jump on, and we’ll take a ride back up to the top again!
Rinse, lather, repeat.
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Apple Inc. without Steve Jobs will survive and probably thrive and be a giant of the Tech. Industries but it wil NEVER achieve the mystique, the majesty and aurora the great man brought to this great company. I can already feel the difference!
Tim Cook IS “thinking different.” Onward and upward!
There are a number of flaws in this guys arguments.
“Steve hated the idea of an iPad mini.”
He also dismissed:
1) the idea of switching to intel;
2) introducing an iPod with video;
3) making a mobile phone;
4) making a tablet computer;
And then did all of these things. And these are just the things that I can recall. I know there’s many more “never, evers” from Steve.
The other flaw is the bleeding obvious – Steve was a mere mortal otherwise he’d still be with us leading Apple.
Re Mini iPad – yes please, say I and a whole bunch of creatives.
No probs with the present one, but a smaller form factor would be soooo useful.
And no different to the iPod ecosystem.
I think he brings up some good points. Only time will tell if he is correct though.
I wish somebody would pay me to make wildly inaccurate claims based on nothing but speculation and hatred for Apple. I wouldn’t even limit myself to lies about Apple, RIM, HP, Microsoft, Dell… All would get equal lies. Example: RIM will elect a new CEO and rise from near failure to perform a turnaround more miraculous than Apples! RIM share price at $1000 in 6 months! Now, where’s my check?!
There is one fatal flaw in ole Rocco’s lament… Steve Jobs would have had a pretty big impact on the decision as to who would follow him as CEO. It was in Apples “plan” all along, after all.
If Tim is all wrong and will ruin Apple then by fiat, shouldn’t that be taken as Steve was all wrong and by default ruined Apple with his De facto decree as to who would follow him and run Apple after him.
What say you ole Rocco?!
What downfall? Apple is the only one of these companies that seems to know how to stay focused and make money. Rocco is an AMZN sheep, and for those types, revenues rule. But Amazon will continue to face real competition from the other retailers (i.e. Walmart) in the online realm while producing products that have zero or negative margins.
Counterpoints… Apple doing good things to get MobileMe users to iCloud, Mountain Lion looks great, iPhone 5, and if there is a device between the touch and iPad – market conditions will drive that. Even Jobs knew markets are not static.
On Pendola’s side… The “new” Apple TV UI. Blech.
An iPad Mini would be a huge hit as would a MaxiPad
I don’t know if the rumors of a mini iPad are true or not. I’ve used mini iPad “killers” that all sucked. And it’s true that Jobs talked down that form factor. But that also could have been because Jobs always talked down things Apple isn’t doing… yet. And then once Apple did them, they were the best thing ever. I do think there will be an mini iPad. But I’m assuming they will alter the GUI for that form factor. Already some buttons on the iPad can be too small for fingers. If Apple had an iPad mini for $200, it would be a good thing for Apple.
It’s funny how quiet these bozos were during the run-up and now they come of their holes as soon as there is a pull-back. Pathetic….
as others have pointed out, Steve Jobs often changed his mind . Besideds those great examples given by the other commentators here, other things Jobs changed his mind on were:
– Pixar. At first he wanted to use Pixar to sell hardware and software (Mac Renderman) and was convinced by Lasseter and others to do movies.
– the Apple stores he first conceived was designed to cater to creative pros and Johnson had to argue for it to be built for general consumers with a big educational component.
etc.
the thing about Jobs was that he could change as circumstances and new ideas occur.
Jobs never saw 100 billion in the bank so we would never know what he would have done if he did. Cook has explained that even with the dividend the cash pile will continue to expand as cash coming in is larger than the dividend outflow.
(so according to the writer Apple should NEVER give a divendend? so let it climb to 200 billion, 300 billion ???).
Apple FROZEN in TIME at the hour Jobs passed is crazy and the idea would have driven Jobs up the wall.
(by the way I admire Bezos of amazon but lets get real , writer calling bezos a genius and Jobs equal? Last quarter Amazon made 177 million profit , Apple made 13 billion (i.e 13,000 million) . Jobs made all that with Cook, Forstall, Ive, Shiller, Cue etc )
What a douchbag. We have listened these idiots for decades and they still can’t get their heads from their asses.
“When the competition has successfully copied 80% of the functionality at 50% of the cost and got a decent amount of market share at the bottom … “
Uh, “when”? This already happened. Years go. Spoiler: it didn’t go well for the competition. They can copy the functionality and they can undercut Apple on price, but what they’ve proven themselves unable to do is copy the usability and the engineering quality. Which is why they’re relegated to thin-to-no-margin bottom-feeder status while Apple owns everything above the bottom of the market and sucks up 80%~ of the profit.
Seriously, if pumping the low end of the market full of cheap facsimiles of Apple products is supposed to enable to competition to erode Apple’s marketshare on the mid to high end, then how come it hasn’t been working like that?
“Remember, Toyota didn’t start challenging BMW with its Lexus line. First it made cheap econoboxes …”
Apple’s competitors have been repeatedly trying(for years, might I add) to break into the mid and high ends of the market, and failing at it because it turns out that people are only really interested in buying cheap econoboxes from them. Toyota vs. BMW? Not so much.
Whoops, this was supposed to be a reply to Mike. DERP.
An ass hole, Steve Jobs, actually gets job done without worrying about making the staff to like him. He dosen’t take No for an answer! Great leader! Under Time Cook, how many bad software updates have issued by apple? Many! Started off withe the apple Tv update! Really wish him luck! And please don’t ruin Apple! Apple came a long way to get to this point!
lease don’t think in one dimension… what if there is a smaller iPad, Apple want to move into the education market by publishing text book ebooks on the iPad for kids. If they are going to do that, then they will need to make a smaller iPad that kids can hold and use for longer periods of time, as well as it being more affordable for families to buy, that have more then one child.
Also there is a rumor floating around the the iMac might be getting a none glossy screen again, I suppose that the writer of this article would see that as a bad idea, because SJ only wanted them to have glossy screens, well their is a big ground swell of people that wish Apple would sell them again. Because Apple are missing out on making more sales of the iMac. I for one cannot afford a Power Mac, but I wish to continue using an Apple with a bigger screen, so I will compromise and buy the next Mac Mini. Because SJ said it, it doesn’t make it right…
It’s so easy to say anything Apple does now wasn’t what Steve would do.
But Steve did say Apple had plans in place for five years ahead, so how do we really know what decisions are Apple-without-Steve, and what are simply part of the plan he set?
Oh the short memories of these analysts! When Steve was in charge, you could almost bet your house on Apple releasing products that Steve bagged. e.g. iPods with flash memory.
when Steve bagged a products, it was just his way of saying “We are working on it, but we just haven’t worked out how to do it best yet.”
Steve says he thought 7inch tablets were dumb because of the small keyboard… um… why did no one ever point out to him the iPhone keyboard is even smaller??
Nope, that was just a throwaway excuse to put the dogs – like this stupid analyst, Pendola – off.
I can’t see any value in a 7inch iPad, but I do know that if Apple do do it, it will live up to Steve’s standards because “ol’ grumpy face” (Ives) is still in charge of design.