“Since Tim Cook took the helm, Apple has stumbled. Its stock peaked at over $700 in September 2012 and has spent much of 2013 down around $400, only recently moving to $500 territory,” Scott Finnie writes for Computerworld. “There’s been a lot of criticism of the company by media, analysts and the financial community some of it warranted. Over the last two years, Apple’s biggest new products have been the iPhone 5, the iPad Mini and the Retina MacBook Pro. The Retina display aside, they’re all derivative and either play catch-up or, in the case of the iPhone 5, lag behind in both worldwide market share and leap-forward product innovation.”
“What’s more, 2013 has been mighty thin in terms of Apple product launches,” Finnie writes. “You have to go back to 2005 to find a year with fewer new hardware releases. (Beginning in January 2006 and throughout that year, the company released new Intel-based versions of all of its Macs.)”
Finnie writes, “So, has Apple lost its mojo? Has it run out of innovative ideas? I believe that what we’re witnessing this year is the end of the pipeline of in-the-works projects from the Jobs era. To be sure, there are plenty of other test-tube ideas Apple is developing that Jobs had a hand in. There has been a delay in 2013, but it’s understandable. The first six months under a new CEO must have been a time of uncertainty for Apple employees. It gave them pause. Cook is nothing like Jobs, and that had to affect Apple’s corporate culture. It’s this adjustment period that resulted in a slow 2013. All the same, while it’s clear that Apple can iterate existing products very well, can the company still hit home runs with new ideas as it did with the iMac, OS X and the iPod, iPhone and iPad?”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: By not having anything of note to release beyond the extraordinary MacBook Air – and that’s mainly due to Intel’s Haswell – and a bunch of “coming soon” previews this year (so far), Tim Cook has left Apple wide open for this type of criticism , not to mention stock manipulation.
We’ll all know soon enough if Apple’s OK or not. We’re betting strongly on the former.