“Like all companies, mighty Apple is not immune to bungling a new product, though its apologies haven’t always seemed heartfelt,” Brad Stone, Adam Satariano, and Peter Burrows report for BusinessWeek. “After slashing the price of the first iPhone by $200 only a few months after its debut in 2007, Apple tried to placate enraged early adopters with a $100 rebate that they could spend only on Apple products. When the iPhone 4 was introduced with a flawed antenna design in 2010, it took 39 days of complaints for Steve Jobs to hold a press conference—and offer dissatisfied users a free rubber case.”
“Considering that history, Tim Cook’s reaction to the outcry over the balky Maps application on the new iPhone 5 seemed positively penitent,” Stone, Satariano, and Burrows report. “Since Jobs’s death one year ago, many Apple observers have predicted the company would suffer from the loss of his internal authority and intuition about product design and features. Apple is undoubtedly a different company under Cook. It misses Jobs’s conspicuous creativity and entrepreneurial fervor, but it’s gaining in maturity, rationality, and, yes, value.”
“Much about the company’s direction and even its products still reflects Jobs’s decisions and design preferences—the iPhone 5 was the last model to receive detailed input from Jobs, say two people familiar with the phone’s development. The company has yet to release any products Jobs didn’t personally bless. But Cook has executed Jobs’s plan even better than expected,” Stone, Satariano, and Burrows report. “Apple has also deliberated over moving away from Intel chips in the Macintosh, say two people familiar with these discussions. Such a shift would be difficult and isn’t imminent, though it would allow Apple to further distinguish its laptops and desktops from competitors that run Intel’s (INTC) chips and Microsoft’s Windows software.”
Much more in the full article here.