Since Steve Jobs passed away and the position of Apple CEO was officially taken over by Tim Cook (indication from Jobs himself, always good to remember), many people basically question everything that happens in the company. It is not easy to replace someone like Jobs, in the same way that it must be quite complicated to lead the largest company in the world, which has millions of fans alive for news / innovations and who did not expect anything different to be surprised at each launch, be it Macs, iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, etc.
A lot in this subjective analysis, such as the recent discussion about whether Apple lost or not its way with design (some may think so, others may not). Now, against facts there are no arguments. And a fact raised by Wall Street Journal called attention: under Cook's command, the delays in Apple's launches more than doubled compared to Jobs' time.
Briefly and directly, of the more than 70 new products / upgrades launched during the “Cook period”, 5 had delays of three or more months between the announcement and the beginning of sales; 9 had delays of one to three months (which, exactly, were not specified by the WSJ). In the “Jobs era”, approximately the same number of products / upgrades were launched, but only one was postponed for more than three months.
Taking the past six years, because of these delays, the average launch of a product after its announcement in the "Cook era" jumped to 23 days compared to the 11 days of the "Jobs era" (six years before Cook took over the command) which is not a very relevant data, since you can very well advertise a product, say that it will arrive in stores six-nine months later and still be on schedule.
The most interesting part of this analysis is that at least two of the three main products launched under Cook's tutelage (Apple Watch, AirPods and HomePod) had good delays. And, as we know, this is not positive due to several factors that involve money loss in the case of AirPods and HomePod, they lost a lot when they were unavailable for Christmas sales, more time for the competition to react, among other things.
Obviously, comparing only a metric in which the performance of the new CEO is not good may not be fair, after all Cook has his many merits as more than doubling Apple's revenues, more than tripling the value of the company's shares, among many others . Still, as much as the life of the company today may be more difficult than before (faster pace of launches, a larger and more global customer base, manufacturing progress is much more complex as Apple increasingly seeks a greater customization of its products, etc.), these delays are not justified since the company may well stipulate a public deadline taking all this into account.
So we are left with the iPhone X in mind. Last year's big Apple rollout went much better than expected, with inventories stabilizing very quickly. Let's hope, then, that the next ones will be like this (without delays and with sufficient stocks). 😉
via 9to5Mac
