“Since former Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts joined Apple as senior vice president of retail, many have wondered what she’s been doing.,” Ian Mohr writes for Page Six.
“A piece by a New York Times fashion writer in October was headlined: ‘The Mysterious Case of Apple and the Elusive Angela Ahrendts,’ adding that she’d ‘largely disappeared from public view’ after joining the company in 2013 for a reported $82.6 million pay package,” Mohr writes. “A retail consultant told Fortune last fall, ‘My struggle with understanding what she does is I don’t know where her imprint is, other than the obvious.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Wow, who paid for this jealous hit piece of crap or was it just unbidden ignorant nastiness?
Ahrendts has focused on everything to do with Apple’s brick and mortar and online stores. Just because she’s not out trumpeting it and because all some hack at Page Six can see are t-shirts (ignoring the entire Apple Store revamps – both online being integrated into Apple.com and new/existing retail store designs/redesigns) doesn’t mean important work hasn’t been accomplished and continues to be done.
SEE ALSO:
Angela Ahrendts brings luxury to Apple’s flagship stores – May 19, 2016
Tim Cook took home $10.3 million, Angela Ahrendts earned $25.7 million in 2015 – January 6, 2016
Apple’s Angelea Ahrendts makes her mark on Apple Stores by going ‘ultraluxe’ – December 8, 2015
Disappearing act: What happened to Apple’s Angela Ahrendts? – October 26, 2015
What the heck is Angela Ahrendts doing at Apple? – September 10, 2015
Apple.com gets redesign; standalone store integrated into main site – August 6, 2015
Apple’s Angela Ahrendts emerges as highest-paid U.S. woman with $83 million – May 5, 2015
Jony Ive and Angela Ahrendts working on Apple Retail Store redesign for Apple Watch – February 16, 2015
Angela Ahrendts recruiting U.S. employees for China; new stores and retail initiatives revealed – January 26, 2015
Apple’s Ahrendts to oversee slew of new retail stores as organizational restructuring planned – June 16, 2014
MDN, I enjoy your wit and view on most things. However, you were vehemently protective of Tim at one time. Now even you are seeing some of his mistakes. Apologizing for Maps, not enough inventory on iMac’s and iPhones, going full monty on his personal beliefs at the risk of tarnishing Steve’s Apple, firing some key players that Steve himself tagged as critical, not extricating Apple from dependence of Samdung, and on and on. This woman is looking a lot like Scully than Ive.
You know what about Angela Ahrendts because how?
The Maps thing was a blunder but it was not the big deal you are making it out to be and Maps has improved since then. I use it every single day. Google Maps before that was never perfect either, something that seems to be overlooked. People have literally died, and people’s houses have been torn down due to mistakes in Google Maps.
Mapping is hard and we expect perfection which does not seem reasonable.
I agree on Tim Cook turning Apple into full metal social justice warrior mode and I wish he’d keep the company out of politics.
Samsung is a supplier and not trivially replaced, they supply parts to many other companies as well. Unless Apple literally wants to make every single nut, bolt, screw, and chip in their machines they have to buy from others.
Is English your second language? Where did I say I don’t like Apple Maps. In fact exactly the opposite. I love Apple maps…..YET Tim still apologized for them!
And YES, Samdung is not easily replaced……but Tim has had too many years to do so.
Re replacing Samsung. The problem is that Tim cannot waive a magic wand and make sure that for every component that Samsung produces, that there is an equal quality competitor somewhere out there, who can also scale up to meet the volume demanded by Apple.
And really, Apple has vanquished Samsung anyway…Apple totally dominates the profits of the cell phone industry, and can just let Samsung have the crumbs…the business from customers who want only a free product.
People need to grow up and realize that running a company like Apple is difficult, and that even with their resources Apple can’t just magically make everything happen.
I don’t think Samsung is doing as badly in phone sales and profit these days as you think they are…..
Um, Apple takes between 91-95% of ALL mobile phone profits… That means even if Samsung is very successful? The most they can get is 9% of the profits in the industry…. That’s not a good position. Market share is not the arbiter of success all the time. Otherwise Apple wouldn’t be able to buy Samsung with their cash on hand… Which they can. They could also buy htc, lg, and pretty much every other android phone manufacturer and have money left over….
You math is not quite right, VoR… Your assumption that Apple + Samsung profits add up to 100% has not been true to date. Instead, Apple + Samsung profits total greater than 100% and some other players take losses. So Samsung could get a bit more than 9% under that scenario.
Nonetheless, your point is well taken. Apple dominates the cell phone profit picture.
Scott Forstall is definitely missed.
Only by those outside the company
You mean customers?
Sneezzze. It seemed that you are vehemently against anything Apple does cause it’s not good enough, cheap enough, fast enough???
Maybe the right place is where most of us are at. We appreciate Apple for its advances and quality and expect them to keep moving forward and fix the things that are not as good as they should be.
Bitching just to hear yourself make noise wears thin very quickly.
I don’t think this is actually entirely her call, but I really miss the days when you could bring in a broken screen device and just get it swapped for a refurbished unit on the spot. At least they could make it a non-profit driving part of their operation. Now, i break the screen on a $350 apple watch that is now on sale for $299 or sometimes less, and the apple store charges $199 for the fix and we have to turn it in for a week-long repair process. I don’t mind spending a lot for beautifully designed high quality products, but to keep gouging me just because they can is destructive of customer satisfaction.
Ashan,
I just bought a new Ford and as I was leaving the lot, focused on a hot babe walking by and crashed into a fire hydrant.
Think Ford will gladly fix my car for me… cause you know it was expensive… right??
Your Ford dealer would have parts and technicians on hand to fix the car. Apple lately doesn’t seem to be able to repair anything. And the only software debugging that most of them know how to do is to restore iOS from the iCloud.
But Ahrendts doesn’t know or care what superior technical customer service looks like because Cook has decided that Apple doesn’t make durable uypgradeable user-configurable computers. As any fanboy will tell you, Apple provides exactly what you need. Just accept the sealed box and buy insurance because repairability and technical service is now zero.
This guy is running Apple Inc., he may not be the super star we all wanted but it would be both foolish and ignorant to call the man lazy, greedy and incompetent.
I think Steve left him a set of values and ideals and I think Tim tries to uphold those. There will never be another Steve and we should all get over that as depressing as it is.
Your opinion, not mine.
And mine. You don’t have a clue or a brain.
There was and will always be music, long before Djs
It’s hard to tell what anyone at the top of Apple is doing. It probably can’t be measured in terms of Apple’s monetary value because then they’d be doing less than nothing. These top people get such huge pay packages it’s hard to understand why whatever happens at Apple goes for naught. No one seems to appreciate anything that goes on at Apple and apparently the increase or expansion of retail stores doesn’t matter to anyone on Wall Street.
I keep comparing Apple to the N.Y. Yankees where all that highly-paid talent and high-priced organization has the makings of a fourth place team than can barely win 50% of the games they play. With as much money as Apple is expending, one would think they’d get much better results but I guess businesses don’t work that way.
If Apple can’t build advanced consumer hardware anymore then why don’t they use the money for medical research or space programs or something that could help make a difference to mankind. Buying back stock is just throwing away money as it’s not doing anyone any good.
I figured Apple got Angela Ahrendts just as a figurehead of being some high-profile woman in the organization. I suppose smoothly running an operation is just as important as making a bunch of big changes, so I’m not going to say she’s not doing anything at all. I likely couldn’t do her job as well as she does it, so it’s not my place to judge her.
Change for the sake of change isn’t worth much and change for the sake of demonstrating your importance is worth less than nothing. Her immediate predecessor proved that by cutting staff and demoralizing Apple Store staff.
She came into the worlds most successful retail operation, which sells more dollar volume per square foot than any other, by a large margin. Seems to me that Job One for her was “Don’t screw this up.” That seems to be the story so far. Anything more she brings to the company is added value.
macnif….. I am so sorry to hear that Apple is not including you in their top level planning each week. I mean, they really should you know. /s
The great stuff from Apple comes from years of work behind the locked door. It comes out as totally new and it takes the industry years…. if ever to catch up.
PS, where is the standard finger print reader that everyone said they would include… guess that will not happen.
How about local Google and Samsung pay…. well maybe and maybe not…. These are big things taking years of prep to make them work well.
That is what Apple does so well.
Should she have been radically revamping every element of the stores every week? Sure there is an element of keeping things fresh, but a large portion of her job will be the day to day running of the retail arm of apple, not every element of everyone’s jobs is glamorous and fit for shouting about from the roof tops.
You know you’ll feel better when you let yourself out of the closet. Just do it.
Yes, because everyone that doesn’t agree with Apple’s foray into politics is gay. I really cannot stand people like you. :/
I was responding to the virulent anger in the post. There’s more there than disagreement with a political position. Repressed gay guys wind up shooting people like that guy in Orlando. Better to just be yourself.
I’m as disappointed as everyone else that Tim Cook would even be in the same room with Paul Ryan, but I won’t call him names or get my blood pressure up over it.
On contrary, Cook belongs in the same room as Paul Ryan, the RINO.
The thing that gets me, in this era of Bernie Sanders and Trump, is the question of compensation: is this person, who earns $83 million a year, worth more than *1600* other Apple employees who make, say, $50,000 a year? Is she 1600 times more valuable to Apple than these other 1600 employees?
What’s wrong with this picture? Is she really 1600 times more valuable than me? For this question of elites and mega salaries is nothing more than a lottery, there are a *lot* of people who could do her job but she happened to be in the right place at the right time and, bingo, she hit the jackpot. The problem is, a lot of other people suffer because of this “5%” super-wealthy society we’ve created.
What? You deny the overly-wealthy from hoarding their wealth in the Ceymans or in Panama where it freezes there so that it does no good for the commons? Shame on you.
Renaldo,
Sorry you make so little money.
“who earns $83 million a year,”… look around and see how many CEOs make more than that and their companies are going down the shitter.
And while I agree they are making too much, in todays world, Apple people at the top are not making all that much compared to others…. Angela had to be bought from her very successful job at Burberry which she had only joined a year or two earlier.
Even Tim Cook said that he could not believe how much she fit Apple, even before he actually made her the offer. Great fit is hard to find.
Gee, maybe we pay Sir Jony Ive too much money. After all he is only one of the recognized best designers in the world. Maybe he will work for 12.50 per hour. Wouldn’t you.??
She does not earn anything remotely resembling $83million a year. The value of her stock package and options could reach that amount over the life of her contract if the stock prices rises to certain levels that make exercise of the options and stock awards have value.
Last year she received a cash salary of $1 million and with stock and incentives awards her compensation was valued a bit i excess of $25 million pre-tax. Both the salary and the total package are quite generous, but more to the point the actual numbers aren’t even close to what you are saying. That kind of false information/lack of truth is typical on these comment pages. You are a great and loyal believer (or have been) of Apple and you understandably are unhappy at what you see over the recent past, but in so much of this, you and others like you, haven’t got the slightest idea what you are talking about and are prone to exaggeration and bullshit. Your comment is just a lot of ranting and raving by a bruised fanboy who has little grasp of the facts. Stockholders own the company. If you are not a stockholder, this part and most parts of Apple are none of your business.
And … yes, she probably is worth 1600 times more than you.
That $83 million figure is from the article itself, it would help if you had read it first. You can quibble over numbers, but it’s clear she makes many millions of dollars a year. In fact, she makes more than Tim Cook, she’s the highest paid employee at Apple right now.
And no, I’m not unhappy about what Apple has done recently, I don’t know what you are talking about.
I’ve actually had dinner with a number of these multi-million dollar salaried managers, and I can assure you they are not worth 1600 times more than me, or that really good Apple Genius working at your local Apple Store. They are pretty normal people who because of their responsibility should earn more than that Apple Genius, but not 1600 times more.
In civilized countries like Germany and Sweden such managers earn less than a million a year, which is much more reasonable. A million dollars a year is still a lot of money, they can still afford to buy their Mercedes or whatever.
I’m still trying to get a job as a “Stupid” fake journalist and get paid big bucks. Apparently I’m not stupid enough. I need to work harder on this.
MDN, you’re a fool. She’s the biggest waste of money that’s ever existed and it’s just further confirmation of apples incompetence anymore. The new retail website stings. Forget pretty and make the website work properly. It’s apparent the heyday of Apple is coming to an end.
When people prognosticate on the failure of businesses sometimes it is legitimate but more often not. These companies eventually KNOW when something is not working and change course. It’s not as though they put blinders on and steer off a cliff without turning before that happens. Sometimes you must try things to achieve greater heights than simply playing it safe. If it doesn’t then people are asked to leave. Not every decision Steve Jobs made was gold either. People conveniently forget that fact.
I recommend ‘Wasp_ease’ for your problem….and it will cheer you up no end.
Rob, your just bitching cause you want Apple stuff for super cheap and you think these Apple guys at the top should work cheap so you can get your toys cheaper.
Sorry, aint going to happen.
Rob, you might be the one who is a fool.
I’ve used the Apple website recently and found it to be a great experience. Same with my recent visits to the Apple Store.
Some people just like to complain. Always easier to complain, but no one ever built a statue for a critic.
He might be the one who is a fool? You are too kind to him.
What do you know about the day to day behind the scenes elements of Apple’s retail operations. Maybe Apple are delighted by hows smooth things are, perhaps Tim Cook is now perfectly happy and confident that things don’t need to be overseen to quite the extent they were before. Maybe there have been big efficiency improvements that we might not see but that Apple do. It’s very hard to justify any of these super large salaries, but at the same time I’m not going to judge her based on my limited exposure of having been in a store.
Clueless Closeted Joe from Doofus, MO you definitely need to drop the vitriol and just come out… as the clown you are no one here takes seriously.
Equally, excoriating Tim Cook is a 24-hour, 7-day a week, full-time job… without benefits and with ZERO pay for complete imbeciles like you. But then you’re used to being rejected for real paying jobs.
peter! peter! What makes you think it is One Note Doofus Joe!!!? 🙂
Go to your room and play with your android, troll.
Gull…
I can agree with you cause you run a very successful company that makes even more money than Apple. /s
I say that Troll Jr. is the best description for you. Bitch with out facts, make large personal feeling comments like its our fault if we don’t agree with you… Gee, just such great comments coming from you.
PS, don’t you really love your new samdung products cause they are cheap or not and have so many new thingies on them. ????
The article by Page 6 is a case of I’m-proper-ganda. 🖖😀⌚️
Apparently they are authorities on a wide range of topics. Here are some of their current must reads…
Johnny Depp scrubs his body of Amber Heard
Look out! Lady Gaga has a driver’s license
Rita Ora rocks some bizarre underwear and more star snaps
I lost a couple of IQ points looking at their web-site (and I don’t have a lot of extras points to give up).
… Our pet Anonymous Coward Cook Hater bores us again.
(I think it’s homophobia. And you know what that means…)
1) ahrendts first year pay was outsized due to the extra she got for compensation for the loss in Burberry stock she would have gotten if she stayed on at that company.
In 2015 she got less:
Recode:
“The former Burberry chief’s pay package includes a $1 million base salary, a $20 million stock grant, a $4 million bonus and relocation expenses of $474,981.”
2) Please note many executives pay are in tied to conditions. Not all stock grants vest immediately (some are paid years later) , some of it is dependent on performance.
3) Tim Cook
Recode :
“Apple CEO Tim Cook collected a package totaling $10.3 million in 2015, which included a $2 million base salary and an $8 million bonus. ”
(T.C helps apple make something like 10,000 million in profit from revenues of 50,000 million every three months).
if you own a company would you pay a leader 10 million who can earn you 40,000+ million profit a year ?
4) perhaps the pay of many high executives are too much especially for companies that are not succeeding.
but you got to ask HOW MUCH IS A STEVE JOBS WORTH?
Business Insider : “From the time he was named interim CEO to the day he retired, Apple’s stock was up 6,754%.”
Likewise how much is Jony Ive worth ? (with others ) he made iMac, iPhone, iPod, iPad… etc.
iPhone ALONE is more profitable than Microsoft or Google or Ford etc.
IF I WAS TO HIRE A WHOLE BUNCH OF WORKERS AT $20 AN HOUR (say several hundred or whatever) equal to Ive’s salary COULD THEY HAVE INVENTED THE IPHONE? (that is the question for investors who are the main ones concerned or hurt by executive pay).
IPhone takes 90+ % if ALL CELL PHONE PROFITS — LG, Xioami, Samsung , Motorola , BB etc make up the remaining less than 10%.
(what I’m getting at is that Apple’s DIFFERENCE was the leadership of Jobs, Ive, Forstal, Cook etc).
5) the KEY take from all the above is not an ‘artificial limit ‘ on exec pay but WHAT IS THE RATE OF RETURN for the expense. i.e is that exec PROVIDING sales, stockholder value etc. A bad exec is worth little.
btw: interesting though Jobs did NOT take SHARE options from 2003 on and had a $1 a year salary, i.e he worked for near nothing. Apple paid for stuff like his security, his expenses for his jet etc.
Tim cook a few years back REFUSED more shares from the BOD saying his pay was enough.
(note : I;m a frequent T.C critic especially over the dormant Mac Pro but I have to say for chief execs he’s not that greedy).
Oh come on! Don’t confuse the trolls with the facts >:(
Business Insider : “From the time he was named interim CEO to the day he retired, Apple’s stock was up 6,754%.” And Tim Cook was the COO of the Company. Tim Cook was and is the Wizard behind the money making machine called Apple.
Tim Cook has done everything to make Apple bigger. Tim Cook has made a huge mount of money for the owners of the company first being the genius COO and now as a CEO. Calling Worlds Best ever CEO a failure is insane.
Well, way to go Angela. Tim Cook needs to give you a raise.
Do any of you consider this “article” was on Page Six? Do you know what Page Six is? It’s the gossip rag pages of the NY Post. The NY Post and especially Page Six wouldn’t know what truth was even if it took a dump on the paper’s front steps. You are reacting to something written by a media source that frequently produces content inferior to the National Enquirer.
So is it’s Cook’s involvement in politics that irks some people here or is it just that they don’t like his particular flavor of politics? Or is it they are annoyed he is smartly seeing past the division created by which party someone belongs to in order to play to the Washington system as a whole?
Last I looked, regardless of who you preferred in the upcoming election, the Republicans were in control of both houses of Congress and Paul Ryan was third in line to be President.
What Cook is doing politically actually seems pretty smart and crafty, but I guess so many of you can’t see past the tips of your nose to grasp a much bigger picture and how the environment Apple operates in has changed.
Well said, a small instance of sanity at last.
I will second that, and refrain from further comment as I am already recovering from one bullet and don’t crave another.
This is what happens when you have a fashion writer try to write a business story.
And you know the solution, pathetic loser One Note Joe… there are plenty of other products to buy. Off you go…
But people need execs to be highly visible its against their inalienable right to be trolls and as such how else are they going to have an easy target available to be able to accuse of being self seeking media whores, seeking self publicity instead of concentrating on their jobs in a professional manner. Oh right… like they were accusing her of being before she took the job I seem to remember. A lot of frustrated professional critics out there.
Angela who? Who cares, though. The most innovative, exciting thing the company is building is its new campus. Other than that their products are so stale I actually, for the first time ever, feel trapped in the ecosystem. Removing the headphone port would be the laziest “innovation” ever. Hope they start focusing on the quality of the user experience again before it’s too late for them. Hey, at least they updated their T-shirts. Why don’t they put HER in charge. 🙂
This is a really stupid article. First it only faults Ahrendts because the author doesn’t know what she does. Well, how many executives at any company publicly report their day to day responsibilities or achievements? What is she supposed to do…fire off a press release every week with her list of activities?
Second the author quotes the one Apple employee about the shirt change. But even assuming the Apple employee is correct about Ahrendts being behind the shirt changes, which is not a given, that doesn’t mean that she has done nothing else. It only means the Apple Store employee was asked about the shirts, and told they had been changed.
Not a fan of the overpaid haberdasher that has continued the slide of Apple retail into a waste of real estate.
She would be overpaid if she made a Dollar a year. At least Steve Jobs earned his Dollar.