“Apple was known as a technology-engineering powerhouse under Steve Jobs,” Jonathon M. Trugman writes for The New York Post. “Now it’s a financial-engineering prop house.”
Trugman writes, “Since August 2011, when Tim Cook took over the reins of the company, Apple has not released a new product line.”
MacDailyNews Take:
• iPhone was released 5 years, 7 months, and 19 days after iPod.
• iPad was released 2 years, 9 months, and 5 days after iPhone.
• Tim Cook has been Apple CEO for 2 years, 8 months, and 4 days.
“Cook is the financial engineer who gets on the earnings call to announce enhanced stock buybacks and 7-for-1 stock splits,” Trugman writes. “Talking to Wall Street was something Jobs always avoided.”
MacDailyNews Take: Steve Jobs from Apple’s Q410 Conference call with Wall Street analysts on October 18, 2010:
Trugman continues, “Pretty much nobody imagined the current state of affairs at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., campus. The company was always run by engineers and geeks, and financial types had very little sway. Fast forward: Although Apple has succumbed to pressure and bought back gobs of stock (it had to), it still has tons of cash. Yet, for some reason, the company refuses to make any large-scale acquisitions to compensate for the fact that it’s clearly lagging in product development.”
MacDailyNews Take: Apple makes strategic acquisitions after much consideration. Apple doesn’t buy things like Motorola Mobility for US$12.5 billion and then, having utterly failed, sell it 20 months later for $2.91 billion. Apple refrains from this because Tim Cook has something Jonathon M. Trugman clearly doesn’t: Intelligence.
Trugman continues, “Apple’s technological creativity has ground to a halt.”
MacDailyNews Take: You know, that’s why – still, as the months tick by – only Apple has the world’s only 64-bit smartphone and the only 64-bit tablets for sale while the shellshocked also-rans of the world struggle and fumble to catch up as usual.
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Trugman’s blatantly unoriginal, painfully lazy, and utterly facile pap has been iCal’ed for use in the very near future.
Related articles:
Apple CEO Cook: I feel really great about what we’ve got coming and it’s closer than it’s ever been – April 24, 2014
After a decade of innovation, Apple’s well has run dry or something – April 24, 2014
2014 will be Apple’s tipping point where decline will follow or something – February 9, 2014
Looks like Jonathon M. Trugman forgot to take his ADHD, ADD, disingenuous and boldly ignorant meds.
I invented the Trug,
from observing a trough.
I was then named the Trug man as people from far and wide sought my trugs.
Other trug men have tried to create a competing product in vain.
They have now resulted in attempting to analyze technological companies instead.
All in my dreamszzzzzzzzz, snorrrrrr, Zzzzzzzz!!!!
MDN and the rest of the fanboys:
Where are we at with products? Apple has been incredibly quiet since Jobs’ departure, both from a marketing perspective and from a new product perspective. We’re now down to effectively 1 keynote per year. Jobs had at least two: iPads in March/April, and iPhone/iPods in September.
Even by your own figures what was happening at Apple was a massive shift in momentum with Jobs where they were moving faster and faster. When Walt quoted Jobs in his bio years ago saying he cracked the TV code, here we are years later with no Apple Unicorn TV.
It’s shit like this that makes people question what’s happening. Does Tim Cook have the chops to get deals done, like content deals for an Apple TV? Does he have the design and product management chops with a vision to audit what the company is doing with existing and new products? Where is he taking Apple with the vision he has? I read that the UI update to the hobby Apple TV was a design Jobs threw out years ago. And it is ugly.
None of these questions are completely answered but we have some answers. iOS 7 is itself is an illustration that Steve Jobs has officially left the building. Look at all the UI CHANGES that keep happening with incremental updates to iOS 7! It’s insane! These aren’t minor UI updates either: they are major and quite frankly bizarre. Like nobody being in charge anymore. They can’t make up their minds.
iOS 7 is in some respects quite ugly and has poor usability (e.g., thin fonts).
Here’s where we’re at: We’ve got small screens. Non-Retina products still like the MacBook Air. No Apple TV (e.g., 4 K set with Apps a la carte as channels, gaming, etc.). We’ve got bloated iTunes. Myopic iPads that really just haven’t evolved from being iPod Touches at all. And iPods themselves are totally stagnant. Crap iPod sales? Then innovate them Cook! They don’t receive updates anymore.
I could go on but I won’t. I’m excited about the future but for me it’s not clear that Cook is the guy to lead Apple.
So much blathering.
Shut up.
unregistered coward: go away!
Funny thing about dolts like you, you run around telling us all how wonderful SJ was etc. and yet you second guess the actions of the person SJ chose to succeed him. Huh?
This guy is one of Trugman’s interns.
Is that another term for dingleberry?
Hey Trugman, you are a lazy, no nothing writer of pure bull excrement!
“not clear that Cook is the guy to lead Apple.”
lol.
Just announced quarter results:
Google profit : 3.5b
Amazon profit: 108 m (with a ‘m’)
Facebook profit: 886 m (with a ‘m’)
Netflix: 53 m (with a ‘m’ )
HTC:: Loss of 62 m (third loss in a row)
Tim Cook just made: 10.2 BILLION.
i.e Apple made more money, a lot more than all those combined!
eh… What’s that about firing tim Cook again? You want to fire a guy who makes 10 billion for you every three months….
🙂 LOL.
Ah, I see our little alphabet soup slime ball has decided to mouth off again. I wonder what the pathetic thing does when it’s not sullying this site with its’ cacophony of crapola.
As for the statement “I could go on but I won’t”, for some reason I doubt that. I doubt that a lot.
TV is selling like hotcakes.
iPads are surpassing all other Tablet usage by 77% iPads to 23% crappy tablets.
There are iPods in every iPhone and iPad ever made. We runith over in iPods.
Macs are being sold to Enterprise with surprising gains.
I could go on but his head is stuck solidly up his ass.
Very well said. Tim Cook is incompetent.
MDN is in denial.
And Apple is just updating instead of improving or innovating, while Tim Cook gets rich with a pot of gold at the end of his “rainbow”.
Tim Cook is incompetent and Tim Cook gets rich with a pot of gold.
This does not compute.
sure it does.
surely you remember Steve Ballmer.
Indeed! Amazing how incompetent execs can walk away with a lot of $$$ for mediocre at best results. Speaks to the stupidity of the markets, and the overt greed and destructive behavior of market manipulators. Meanwhile Google/Samsung fed trolls blog from their cesspools about how one of the most successful company in the world fails to innovate Such a bizarre world we live in.
Computes if one is a troll.
yes, I am obviously a troll.
Not you, orandy.
FOAD!
Hey, y’ know, that’s way cool it’s not clear to you,
my sincere congrats and have another few good years.
Cool you took the time to speak out and share. 🙂
Go to Apple.com
Look for Mac Pro
This is a new product.
Good things take time.
They repeatedly say that they will release products when they are the best, not to get them out the door. The staggering financial success of this company affords them this.
We are about to see an explosion of new products in new categories.
Shut up.
There’s a never ending supply of these so-called writers / analysts.
The Macalope has nothing to worry about.
Apple doesn’t do “gadgets”, they do revolutionary extensions of your digital self. If you want a company to invest in junk, then buy someone else’s stock.
Yup, exactly. If you ignore all of the software advances over the past few years, it’s easy to say that hardly any products have been released. But Apple’s products were already far ahead of most other competitor products in terms of user experience and build quality, the competitors are *still* trying to catch up. Apple doesn’t need to release new products for the same of release new products. They will be released when they are ready, not before.
for the *sake* of… grrr, wish we could edit!
What a bunch of crap.
All the smart watches, activity trackers etc. that are currently flooding the market and deliver a “so so” experience will go into the recycle bin and be replaced by Apple products.
Apple will deliver when the product is right, vs. right now.
We’ll live.
Exactly. There’s a ton of these other devices, but no clear “category” that is visible across the consumer’s mind. It’s just sort of lost int the noise. Apple will release their watch and truly define the category. Then everything will change.
Another street analyst hungry for a buck, paid by Samsung!?
It’s barely worth typing out what garbage this is.
It’s easy to pick apart this article and the anonymous coward adfdf’s comment is just right for bashing.
But… let’s try taking an objective look at where perhaps Apple has misread the market or lagged.
I do think it’s fair criticism to say that Apple missed an opportunity to have brought out a larger screen iPhone (in addition to a smaller screen model). This pretty much came out in the Samsung trial evidence where Apple had a chart showing demand for larger screens. That may have been a 1 year mistake (or more), and I think we’ll see the impact of a larger screen iPhone later this year. Now, looking at this mistake, given the development cycle, the error goes back to Steve Jobs. And hey, nobody is going to get everything right 100% of the time, Jobs got many things wrong too. The important thing, is that a course correction is made and well executed, which we’ll be in a position to judge this year.
The Apple TV is another product that Apple has seemingly lagged on. I don’t buy that when Jobs said that he cracked the code, that he meant that he had a playbook that was all ready to go. I think he just envisioned what was necessary and that execution may have been a very long play. Otherwise we would’ve seen what he had shortly after he made those comments. However, we’ve seen other players gain traction in the market, and while 20 million units (est.) is quite sizable, it’s far from where Apple could be, and the product itself is far from what is easy to envision what it could be. Again, this year, I think we’ll be in a position to see how well Apple course corrects on this.
There are a bunch of other things we could look at in context of where they are now, versus where we saw a course correction was needed… Mac Pro anyone? Again though, this goes back to the beginning of Apple itself.
It’s also worth noting about the “financial gimmicks” that Apple seems to be doing in the post-Jobs era… those were all initiated by Jobs. He’s the one who, as Apple’s cash horde started growing, started hiring high-level executives to figure out how to manage the cash, look for acquisition, and how to improve the investment of their cash. We’ve been seeing the execution of what his people came up with for the past couple of years. Apple is a company with brilliant engineers, designers and developers, they also need brilliant financial people to deal with the cash that’s generated.
What we haven’t seen is that this is now a financially driven company. In fact, it’s been just the opposite with Apple shifting revenue sources (free OS, free iOS, free iWork, etc…) with increases in hiring, and (relative to Apple’s history) increases in acquisitions that enhance their business. What we haven’t seen is blind acquisitions, acquisitions of competitors, or Ballmeresque acquisitions that would be the result of a financial driven company that’s lost focus of their core competencies.
TL;DR: the more Apple does, the more chances there will be to see a couple of little things it may need to course correct on or mistakes it may make. It’s always had these issues (even with Jobs), and real competency is measured on how it course corrects. We’re likely to see that more this year with the Apple TV and larger iPhones.
Another small time hedge fund guy who contributes to the NYP. Clueless click baiter. He knows exactly what keywords to use to disturb the ones that do understand what MDN delineates above.
Apple took the INNOVATION CROWN for the two major categories it competes in: PCs with the Mac Pro
and Mobile with the 64 bit Chip and Fingerprint sensor for the iPhone in 2013.
This year it’s rivals haven’t even matched that: no 64 bit mobile, Samsung’s S5 fingerprint sensor doesn’t even work (according to all reviewers) etc.
Innovation for a consumer company isn’t ‘pie in the sky fantasies expounded by companies’ research labs press releases’ like the NY Post writer blathers about (remember all the PR including demo videos of the famous Microsoft Courier tablet ? The Non existent tablet… ) –what counts is actually SHIPPING groundbreaking products like a 64 bit iPhone …
The NY Post writer spews stuff about ‘drones’ etc..
BUT HOW THE F*** DOES HE KNOW WHAT APPLE HAS IT IT’S LABS SINCE THEY ARE SECRET? (Did he know about apple’s 64 bit chip before it was released? Did he know about the iPhone in 2005???) even most apple workers don’t know what are in the locked rooms…
what we CAN see is the shipping products like i said above (64 bit, fingerprint sensor, Mac Pro) and with those apple is Killing Them.
There have been two complaints. First not being shareholder friendly. The second lack of product. So we had a quarterly meeting on earnings. The proper place to address issue 1. NOT issue 2. Seems we addressed issue 1. So you dumb analysts can you say good job lets check that off oh by the way would not have happened with Jobs
Now as for number 2. Most you thought the iPhone would be a flop. Most thought the iPad was just an oversized iPhone and no big deal. So you will not know a hit when you see it anyway. But let’s wait and see what happens. Oh and by the way when was the last time Samsung introduced something really new. Hmmm never. But no problem there.
The writer is absolutely clueless.
Does this guy “write” for Seeking Alpha, too, by any chance?
Write, is such a big task! Perhaps he prints, with the extra big pencil you get when u are a kid!
On that lined paper which has chunks of wood embedded. Perhaps he got a splinter and became peeved.
“The company was always run by engineers and geeks, and financial types had very little sway.”
CEO #1: Steve Jobs – marketeer (Engineer: Wozniak)
CEO #2: John Sculley – marketeer
CEO #3: Michael Spindler – Engineer
CEO #4: Gil Amelia – Engineer
CEO #5: Steve Jobs – marketeer
CEO #6: Tim Cook – Operations
Having been there during all but the first CEO era, I can say with confidence that when the company was being run by engineers it didn’t do very well. It also didn’t do very well when being run by a marketeer (Sculley) it didn’t do very well.
What has caused the company to do very well was Steve’s later insight and adherence to the philosophy that “to focus means to say no.”
This author should have adhered to that philosophy too, and just said “no” to writing this article.
CEO #1: Steve Jobs – marketeer
I know you’re gonna kill me, but that’s NOT what I saw.
What’s remarkable about Steve Jobs is that he was also himself an engineer, programmer, designer AND leader. It took experience to hone his leadership skills, but he mastered them.
Labeling Steve Jobs as ONLY a ‘marketeer’ is entirely ridiculous. Sorry. Sculley was the marketeer, thus Apple declined. Spindler had worthless marketing skills and allowed the sad marketing morons at Apple to wreck the company’s balance sheet and product selection. Gil Amelio (not Amelia) wrongly did indeed listen to the idiots on Wall Nut Street and further wrecked the company doing so. At least he had the insight to buy NeXT and engage Jobs, who eventually returned as CEO when it was clear that Amelio was clueless and was removed.
Leadership at its best in business means skill as both ‘Producer’ (engineer, inventor, creator) AND Marketeer. If you can find a master a both, you’ve likely found a leader.
Now lop off my head…
I’m not going to kill you nor lop off your head! Your opinion is as valid as mine is. Sorry for the typo on Gil’s last name.
I sort of had to create the category of “marketeer” because forum posts here are only so wide. Yes, I simplified. That gave you room to post your opinion 😉
I have never heard of Steve Jobs doing programming. Citations would be helpful there. I didn’t work with Steve, but I worked with engineering teams and many of the NeXT employees who came to Apple — no one ever mentioned Steve working on code.
The purpose of my post was to counter the author’s assertion which I quoted.
Jobs coded and hardware engineered for Atari. Read any book about Apple or Jobs. Wikipedia touches on these aspects of his background, as well as his study of calligraphy. He had a remarkably boundless brain.
Otherwise, a very useful post jt016. Thanks! I’d be interested in your other experiences at Apple!
I wonder how long those NDAs remain in effect
Asinine FUD FUD FUD:
Although Apple has succumbed to pressure and bought back gobs of stock (it had to), it still has tons of cash. Yet, for some reason, the company refuses to make any large-scale acquisitions to compensate for the fact that it’s clearly lagging in product development.
Do STFU, Jonathon M. Trugman who writes for The New York Post. You’re wasting page space with misery mongering manure.
Or something
the bottom line is product and that remains to be seen.
Jon Trugman
Managing Member at Pendulum Capital Management, LP
Greater New York City Area Investment Management
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Citysearch.com says Pendulum Capital Management, LP is closed. I guess Trugman must be hard up work work if he writes for the Post.
Hard up “for” work….
The dumb is strong with this one.
Actually, we often just say these guys are dumb but after all this time it’s much more likely they they decide to rake in some hits by jerking the Apple chain. It’s not so much dumb as weak. They should be embarrassed.
FUD! The new products are coming. But you can’t wave a magic wand and make that appear. It takes lots of hard work and time to make great new products appear. And being first to market doesn’t mean that you have a better product. A good example of that is Samsung’s so called smart watch. That is a piece of crap that you must attach to there other piece of crap tablet that they tried to copy from Apple with there own Android malware infested, DNS attack open software. Apple does it right, not first. They did it with the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad and they will do it again.