Steve Jobs gets all the adulation, but Tim Cook deserves his own chapter in the history of American business. Steve Jobs rescued Apple from insolvency and transformed it into the world's most innovative consumer company; Tim Cook was handed the keys in 2011 and oversaw its growth into an international colossus that is worth ten times as much as it was when he took over. Perhaps we should focus less on what Apple products are in the pipeline than the man himself. The WSJ ran a profile over the weekend: [bold added]
There is one idea that encapsulates the approach to innovation that makes all of it possible—and it’s maybe the closest thing to a grand unified theory of Apple. It’s a philosophy of just four words that describe Apple’s past, present and definitely its future. Four words that help explain why this was the year the company plowed into spatial computing and artificial intelligence. During one of those epochal years when it feels like everything is about to change again, I heard them over and over, in conversation with Apple executives and Cook himself: Not first, but best.
...“We weren’t the first to do intelligence,” he says. “But we’ve done it in a way that we think is the best for the customer.”...He puts Apple Intelligence in the same pantheon of innovative breakthroughs as the iPod’s click wheel and the iPhone’s touch interface. “I think we’ll look back and it will be one of these air pockets that happened to get you on a different technology curve,” he says.
Tim Cook, 64, may not be as inventive as Steve Jobs, but he has arrived at the point where he trusts his ability to select that one "great" idea from the merely good ones that Apple considers every day. As a shareholder, I hope his tenure continues for a long, long time.
Nvidia has bought several office and research buildings in Santa Clara in a deal that tops $350 million and greatly broadens the fast-expanding tech company’s holdings in Silicon Valley...
The sites Nvidia bought are adjacent to and near the tech company’s modern and futuristic-looking headquarters complex at 2788 San Tomas Expressway. The just-bought properties could be redeveloped with new office and research buildings, potentially totaling up to 2 million square feet, according to Santa Clara city planning records.
Unlike big-name companies (Tesla, Oracle, HP) that have moved their headquarters from California, Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook) have indicated that they are staying put by continuing to add people and real estate in the Bay Area, recent layoffs notwithstanding.
But Apple and Nvidia are special cases. When Apple built its $5 billion spaceship headquarters in Cupertino, it was an announcement to the world that it would always be based in Cupertino. Similarly, Nvidia bought, not rented, additional real estate, a signal that it, too, would not only be staying but expanding in Silicon Valley.
Cost-benefit analysis always produces the same result: expand anywhere outside of California because of California's high-cost housing, high taxes, and onerous regulation. Sometimes, after succeeding with a far-flung workforce, these companies move their headquarters away.
But Nvidia and Apple won't be moving away for the foreseeable future. Nvidia and Apple's founders got their start in the Bay Area, have a great deal of affection for their home towns, and most importantly controlled their companies. And who knows...the heart sometimes sees the future better than the head.
The check is made out on an Apple Computer Company account opened at a Wells Fargo branch in Los Altos.
Listed is Apple’s first official address at 770 Welch Rd., Ste. 154, Palo Alto — “the location of an answering service and mail drop that they used while still operating out of the famous Jobs family garage,” the webpage says.
RR Auction, a Boston-based specialist in Jobs and Apple memorabilia, calls Radio Shack an “unsung hero” of the personal computing revolution and notes that co-founder Steve Wozniak would spend hours roaming the aisles of the store.
Comments:
1) Steve Jobs must have been a careful business manager to write a check, thereby documenting a $4.01 expense.
2) Palo Alto, in fact the entire Peninsula, used to have area code 415, the same as San Francisco and Marin County. It was reassigned to 650 in 1997.
3) Can you tell from his writing that Steve Jobs is left-handed?
4) Radio Shack, which employed several of my relatives in Hawaii and California, was indeed historically important to the history of Silicon Valley, as hardware geeks like Steve Wozniak prowled its aisles for parts hoping to build the next big thing.
I never expected to see another businessman as important or as lionized as Steve Jobs, but ten years after Steve's death Elon Musk has filled that role.
The richest man in the world does not own a house and has recently been selling off his fortune. He tosses satellites into orbit and harnesses the sun; he drives a car he created that uses no gas and barely needs a driver. With a flick of his finger, the stock market soars or swoons. An army of devotees hangs on his every utterance. He dreams of Mars as he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and indomitable. Lately, Elon Musk also likes to live-tweet his poops.
Like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk nearly bankrupted his companies in pursuit of a vision that very few could see, much less believe in. Like Steve Jobs, he achieved extraordinary success, disrupting major industries, making himself a multi-billionaire and enriching many thousands of employees, investors, and suppliers. Both men also pushed people out of the way, thereby earning criticism for their acerbic ways and personal eccentricities.
“Elon’s more of a hands-on engineer. Steve was a genius at design and picking people and marketing,” Gates said. “You wouldn’t walk into a room and confuse them with each other.”
Indeed, Musk often talks about his demanding schedule and his hands on approach. For example, on a Tesla earnings call in November 2017, Musk said he was spending all hours in the Tesla battery production factory, even sleeping on the floor and skipping showers to catch up on Tesla 3 production in 2018.
“I am personally on that line, in that machine, trying to solve problems personally where I can,” Musk said on the call. “We are working seven days a week to do it. And I have personally been here on zone 2 module line at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning, helping diagnose robot calibration issues. So I’m doing everything I can.”
As for Jobs, he “was such a wizard at over-motivating people ... I could see him casting the spells, and then I would look at people and see them mesmerized,” Gates told podcast host Dax Shepard Aug. 20.
As of this writing Steve Jobs has touched many more lives than Elon Musk. Over one billion people have an Apple device, while less than 1% that number have owned or will own a Tesla.
But with his single-handed revival of the space program, Elon Musk may very well have changed the course of human history. Ten years ago many asked, somewhat plaintively, "Without Steve Jobs, Where's the Excitement Going to Come From?" Time's Person of the Year has the answer to that question.
DC and Marvel comics and MAD magazine were my preference, but relatives kept giving me these.
On a cool, foggy Saturday we made our first visit to the Walt Disney Family Museum. It was also our first "fun" outing in 15 months.
The museum is in the Presidio, the former military base. Families were picnicking on the great lawn. Kids were throwing frisbees, and couples were walking their dogs.
We spent three hours looking at the displays. Ample space was devoted to the well-known chapters of Walt Disney's life--the animated shorts, the feature-length movies and Disneyland--but what I found most interesting were the building blocks that led up to the creation of Mickey Mouse, his family life, and Walt's vision for the "Florida Project." Walt died in 1966 at the age of 65 and didn't live to see the opening of Walt Disney World in 1971.
Like the late Steve Jobs who died too soon at the age of 56, Walt Disney never stopped working and dreaming of the next big thing. He kept pushing cartoon art until it became the basis for feature-length Oscar-winning movies; he cajoled recalcitrant bankers to fund an amusement park despite the industry's seedy history, and he laid plans for the City of Tomorrow in Florida's swamplands.
Both men's roadmaps were so powerfully drawn that their companies continue to prosper years after they died, not so much by embarking on new ventures but by expanding upon their original creations. (The only person alive today who could compare with them, IMHO, is Elon Musk.)
Like other mere mortals, we could only gawk at the talismans from Walt Disney's life.
The Golden Gate is visible from an upstairs window in the museum.
It's not the must-see event that it was when Steve was alive, but the company, which is six times as valuable as when he passed in 2011, isn't the same either.
I'm watching the livestream at 10 a.m. PDT though Tim Cook reportedly won't be talking about the iPhone.
My 2014 iPad Air has a cracked screen that kinda works, and I have a version 3 Apple Watch that doesn't have all the health bells and whistles. I'll be buying something Apple makes soon.
10:03 a.m. Tim Cook speaks from the Apple spaceship HQ. Camera angle shows vast expanse of the interior garden of the space ship.
10:05 Tim says they'll be covering only Apple Watch and iPad. Wonder if they'll be doing one more thing that Steve used to do?
10:08 Testimonies from Watch customers. I suppose they have to do marketing. Not everyone is an Apple technophile.
10:09 COO Jeff Williams introduces the Series 6 Watch. Blood Oxygen app measures blood oxygen in 15 seconds.
10:15 Touts Apple Silicon, display always on, continuous altimeter for hikers.
10:17 New Apple design faces. OK, but not world-beating.
10:19 New watch bands - solo loop with no clasps. It stretches! My Timex did that back in the 1970's.
10:20 Family Setup allows multiple watches to be paired with one iPhone. Many individualized programming options for each watch wearer; obviously valuable for young and old people who don't have iPhones.
10:23 Apple Watch SE is cheaper option ($279+) with most important features, except for blood oxygen measurement. Uses slower S5 chip. Apple Watch series 6 starts at $399.
10:28 New watches are available this Friday, September 18th.
10:39 Apple Fitness+ ($9.99 per month per family) has workout videos for many activities.
10:37 Apple One combines iCloud, Music, TV+, Arcade, News+, Fitness+. For $29.95 per month you get all services for the family, or you can get fewer apps at a lower price.
10:40 Tim's back to talk about the iPad.
10:42 Product Manager Ted Merendino on 8th generation iPad: begins with A12 chip. "2x faster than Windows laptop" Neural engine: 5 trillion operations per second. Keyboard options, Apple Pencil. iPad OS14 allows handwritten text into input boxes. iPad 8th Generation starts at $329.
10:48 Tim Cook introduces new iPad Air. Laura Legros, VP Engineering, starts with design and colors. 10.9" liquid retina display. Touch ID not on screen but on top button. Tim Millet on A14 Bionic chip: 5 nanometer technology--efficiency, speed. 40% performance improvement than previous iPad Air. 2x graphics improvement over comparable laptop.
10:56 Game, music, photo developers extol the new iPad Air.
10:57 Laura - USB-C performance improvement; 7 MP camera front, 12 MP camera back. Stereo audio speaker system.
11:00 iPad Air starts at $599, available "beginning next month" -- October [ ]?
11:02 Tim announces New OS for iPhone, iPad, Watch, and TV available tomorrow. That's it, no one more thing.
I'm guessing the announcements disappointed most people, but I'll be buying the iPad Air and the Watch. I'll also be a subscriber to Apple One. I probably won't be buying the new iPhone, whenever it is announced, because the 2018 iPhone XS Max is doing just fine.
Contra Isaac Newton, Apple defied the laws of gravity and floated above a Two Trillion Dollar ($2,000,000,000,000) valuation today.
When Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011, everyone agreed that Apple's glory days were in the past. Tim Cook appeared to be a competent manager, but after a couple of years came the realization that there were no world-beating, industry-destroying products in the pipeline, nothing like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
There were no revolutionary devices---unless one counts the Apple Watch's niche in personal health---but it turns out they weren't necessary to power Apple in the coming decade. Selling services to over one billion Apple devices provided plenty of growth.
Apple's market capitalization when Tim Cook officially took over in October, 2011, was $344 billion. The company is valued six times as much today. As we've observed, naming Tim Cook as his successor was Steve Job's wisest decision.
Unlike other Silicon Valley tycoons opposed to Donald Trump--a redundant description now that the President's only major SV supporter moved to LA--Tim Cook has kept the lines of communications open:
(WSJ photo)
Mr. Cook is one of the few executives in a hyperpolarized political era who has managed to both support and challenge the president’s agenda in a way that has kept him in Mr. Trump’s good graces while avoiding any public backlash from either employees or customers.
The laudatory Journal article, IMHO, understates the business and political skill of Tim Cook. He can express disagreement with the President and his own virulently anti-Trump work force without being vilified by either. And he is able to maintain cordial relations with China though Apple is one of the most prominent symbols of America and a visible target for China's displeasure.
This month the Apple CEO was named the chairman of the advisory board for Tsinghua University's economics and management school, aka the "Harvard Business School" of China. The appointment was lambasted by some American hard-liners, but declining the position would not only have hurt Apple but also the U.S.-China trade negotiations. The result is that Tim Cook has the ear of everyone and is respected by everyone.
Most of us didn't see it clearly in 2011, but naming Tim Cook his successor was Steve Jobs' wisest decision.
AAPL has outperformed the FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Neflix, Google) stocks in 2019.
While Apple stock has nearly quadrupled since Steve Jobs' death in 2011, its rise has been choppy, to say the least. Periodically the bears drown out the bulls re the company's purported lack of innovation, legal and regulatory troubles, priciness versus the competition, and lately the vulnerability to a trade war with China.
None of these bother me as much as C. Northcote Parkinson's warning, published over 60 years ago, as applied to Apple's new headquarters: [bold added]
"During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters," he wrote. "The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done. Perfection, we know, is finality; and finality is death."
The cost of Apple's "spaceship" HQ is approximately $5 billion, including contents. While the company had more than enough cash to pay for it, the diversion of management time had to be significant yet was available because, as Parkinson said, "all the important work has been done."
New figures released this week show the tech giant’s circular headquarters in Cupertino was assessed at $3.6 billion by Santa Clara County for property tax purposes. The valuation doesn’t perfectly coincide with its market value — how much it would sell for — but is based off a detailed appraisal of the building, which opened in 2017.
If you include computers, furniture and even farm equipment to take care of the property’s trees, the figure rises to $4.17 billion for the fiscal year that ended in June, the assessor’s office said.
The paint has barely dried, and the property is worth 18-28% less than what Apple paid for it. You or I might see a similar drop when we drive a new car off the lot, but, frankly, I expect better from a trillion-dollar tech leader.
When Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011, the sense of loss was coupled with foreboding about Apple's long-term future. Without Steve, Apple's world-changing days appeared to be over.
The pessimists were proven right in the short-run; it turned out there was no Apple TV or other disruptive product in the pipeline. The Apple Watch, introduced in 2014, was indeed a new and different product, but even today is a trivial item--not even worthy of separate mention like the iPad, iPhone, Mac, or iTunes---in the income statement.
And yet, despite the lack of excitement, Apple's market capitalization has nearly tripled since Steve Jobs' death to the once-unimaginable value of $1 Trillion.
Apple has achieved this milestone by sticking to its knitting, i.e., being the quality leader in its markets. Adhering to this principle means that Apple won't add product lines--where's the TV that's been hinted at since 2011?--just to avoid being typecast as an iPhone company. Finally, in 2018, with its services (iTunes, iCloud) having ramped to $40 billion per year in revenue, the slow transition away from the iPhone is being recognized by the stock market through a gradually rising price-earnings ratio.
Meanwhile, because of the company's demonstrated un-willingness to place profit over principle, Apple's customers are staunchly loyal. The first trillion is always the hardest.
This year I didn't feel up to the two-day prep for brining the turkey, especially the part where I had to reconfigure the outside refrigerator to accommodate the ice water bucket.
Dry brining--rubbing down the turkey with spices the day before--sounded like just the ticket. To safeguard against dryness I began roasting the turkey under low heat (225 degrees F) after midnight; 12 hours later the bird was pronounced excellent by the small group of guinea pigs diners.
Though its texture was good, I thought the turkey was lacking the flavor that a one- or two-day soaking will impart, but I'm not a perfectionist.
Speaking of perfectionism, Bradley Cooper plays a celebrity chef who is on a relentless pursuit for his third Michelin star in 2015's Burnt. Head chef Adam Jones yells at his staff, hurls crockery filled with food, and rushes madly from station to station putting the finishing touches on each dish---in other words, he's Steve Jobs in the kitchen.
The haute cuisine cinematography is beautiful, and the non-stop frenzy behind the scene of a top-notch restaurant is captured realistically according to those in the know. Well worth a look.
AAPL: a spike at 10 a.m. Pacific/1 p.m. Eastern, then excitement lapsed.
Next month will mark the 4th anniversary of Steve Jobs' death. A sign that he's missed: Apple continues to dominate its markets, but the buzz at the product announcement show has faded.
(2014's Apple Watch was the first new hardware since Steve's death, and sales failed to catch fire.)
In fact expectations had been ratcheted so low that many tech journalists fell over themselves praising this year's announcements. Example - the Mercury News (bold added):
In a two-hour extravaganza, Apple on Wednesday unveiled a veritable bounty of new and at times mind-boggling products, including two new iPhones and a new larger iPad Pro, that should keep every fanboy busy for months.
As a long-time Apple shareholder, I do think that the changes to the iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV will deliver solid profits, but there's no shiny new bauble to excite the casual Apple fan.
It’s a $99 stylus for the tablet that allows users to draw pictures and interact with apps. When it was announced on stage the audience, who had applauded everything up to that point, laughed.
Forbes columnist Rich Karlgaard cautions against emulating the "jerky behavior" of superstar-CEO's Steve Jobs and Elon Musk:
If you decide you want to behave this way, make sure you’re the company founder, you’re the smartest person in the room, you outwork everyone and that people love your products.....The number of individuals who check all those boxes is minuscule. Thomas Edison. Henry Ford. Steve Jobs. Elon Musk [Tesla, SolarCity, SpaceX]. Jeff Bezos [Amazon]. Travis Kalanick [Uber].
For the vast majority of us I would say: Don’t go there. Being a jerk isn’t worth it. It will damage your heart and soul. It will hurt, not help, your teams. It will lead more often to poverty than to riches. Instead, follow B.C. Forbes’ advice: Produce happiness.
Even the "nicest" leaders have to make decisions that hurt people's feelings---think hiring and firing, raises and promotions, pursuing and defending lawsuits, etc. But why aggravate a tough decision by being obnoxious about it?
The most popular variation is drunk bingo, in which players down a shot of a favorite alcoholic beverage if a square's words are uttered. Think of it as an early start to the post-commencement celebration.
Even the late Steve Jobs, in the most famous commencement speech of the past ten years, could not be wholly original. From his 2005 address to Stanford graduates:
So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
Happy listening, graduates. Good luck, and never stop learning.
There is much to like about Tim Cook. As the WSJ essay points out, he has admirable personal characteristics. He's frugal, hard-working, smart, an excellent manager, and doesn't hesitate to dig deep:
Apple under Jobs was a roller coaster, but Cook's operations fief was orderly and disciplined. Cook knew every detail in every step of the operations processes. Weekly operations meetings could last five to six hours as he ground through every single item. [snip]
Cook's quarterly reviews were especially torturous because Cook would grind through the minutiae as he categorized what worked and what didn't, using yellow Post-its. His managers crossed their fingers in the hopes of emerging unscathed.
Though Apple is still the most valuable company in the world, it's no longer considered to be among the top innovators like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tesla, Netflix, and Yelp (and those are just the Bay Area companies on the list). Since Steve Job's death on October 5, 2011, Apple's stock has underperformed the NASDAQ and been soundly outpaced by Google, Apple's largest rival.
After Steve Jobs: Apple +39%, NASDAQ +75%, Google +141%
Apple has remained a leader in its markets, and today's Macs, iPads, and iPhones are thinner, lighter, and faster than they were in Steve's time, but incremental improvements to existing products are not enough to keep Apple on top.
“Most people have a regulator between their mind and mouth that modulates their brutish sentiments and spikiest impulses. Not Jobs. He made a point of being brutally honest. “My job is to say when something sucks rather than sugarcoat it,” he said. This made him charismatic and inspiring, yet also, to use the technical term, an asshole at times.”
Google, Amazon, and most NASDAQ stocks have risen
over the past 12 months while AAPL has sunk.
Over the past year long-term Apple investors have had to endure a sinking feeling while the rest of the stock market has been partying on. Oceans of pixels have been devoted to explaining Apple's decline: innovation is a shadow of its former self, Samsung and Google are seizing the market for smartphones and tablets, margins are declining, and, of course, the visionary founder is gone. Those who aren't following the stock closely, however, may have missed the bottom.
Apple shares dipped below $400 in April and June but rose in July when earnings fell less than expected. On Tuesday, when legendary billionaire investor Carl Icahn tweeted that he had bought Apple, others piled in. [update - 8/16: Apple rose this week while the market declined--see graph below]
We still think that re-attaining the all-time high of $705 won't happen any time soon, but the entry of Carl Icahn has reversed the atmosphere of negativity. Mr. Icahn, besides being smart, has a reputation for being ruthless and greedy. His evaluation is devoid of sentiment, and, at the age of 77 his investment horizon isn't overly long-term. Right now his presence is good for the stock, but when he tweets that he's gotten out, look out below. (I'm now a subscriber to his Twitter feed.)
Even if the subject is mundane as ketchup. Most restaurants now dispense ketchup from plastic bottles, where a slight squeeze dispenses the thick red paste quickly with little fuss. Not so with glass, which has caused your humble observer to stain more than a few shirts and ties after a bout of vigorous shaking and pounding. (And I hope, dear reader, that your mother taught you never to insert your knife or other utensil into the condiment container.)
Over the past year Apple has fallen 27.51% while market averages have risen 10% or more.
There's no question that the past year has dissipated the aura of coolness that surrounded the ownership of Apple products or Apple stock. Last year's "new" product releases represented incremental improvements--some features were impressive, to be sure---but, alas, the revolutionary, industry-changing devices that were supposedly in the pipeline when Steve Jobs died appear to be a figment of the biographer's imagination.
Your humble observer is a long-time holder of AAPL and, like other investors, has been disturbed by the stock's 28% drop in price over the past year and 42%(!) fall from the $705 all-time high of last September. There are thousands of articles that have been written---and dozens since the 3/31/2013 quarterly earnings were released a few hours ago---about Apple's fall from grace, and I won't waste your time, dear reader, by rehashing points that have been made comprehensively and more eloquently elsewhere.
As for yours truly, it only took a few seconds to decide to hold on to my shares.
1) This quarter's dividend hike to $3.05 means that the stock is yielding 3% ($12.20 per year / $406 price per share), much higher than savings, money-market, or U.S. Treasury rates.
2) Of course the dividend is riskier than the aforementioned debt securities, but with a $145 billion cash balance (true, most of it is offshore, but it's still under Apple's control) the dividend is secure for years.
3) The dividend should appeal to the so-called "value" investors and/or "yield" investors, meaning the stock price has hit a bottom.
We arrived for the 9 AM Apple shareholders' meeting at 8:45, but already we were too late to get into the main auditorium. The young guides with Apple badges herded us over to Building 4, where two large videofeeds had been set up. Before entering, we had to check in all iPhones, iPads, Macs, and any other electronic equipment. (It took 20 minutes to retrieve our items after the meeting, so for future reference it's recommended that attendees leave their gear in the car.)
Now that Steve Jobs is gone, there's little point in attending Apple shareholders' meetings. Today there were no product, dividend, strategy, or personnel announcements. The business session went smoothly--the controversy over Proposal 2, regarding shareholder approval of new preferred stock issues--had dissipated because Apple withdrew the proposal. The rest of the Board's recommendations passed overwhelmingly (for more detail see Barron's live blog). CEO Tim Cook fielded questions for half an hour and several times repeated that Apple wants to make the best products, not necessarily the most or the biggest.
Other comments:
1) the breakfast spread was generous and well laid out; shareholders could bring food and drink into the meeting area, unlike in previous years.
2) at the beginning it was announced that the meeting would be over by 10 AM, so it was obvious that there weren't going to be any big revelations today. At least with Steve Jobs there wasn't the feeling that he couldn't wait for the meeting to end; he would field questions until the audience was reasonably satisfied.
"During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters," he wrote. "The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done. Perfection, we know, is finality; and finality is death."
