Is Apple Losing Its Shine After Steve Jobs?

So tedious.<p>Apple is extremely well positioned in front of almost every mass trend happening in consumer electronics. They are sitting on a tenth of a trillion dollars in cash. They have content deals with more companies in more places than almost anyone else on Earth. They are ending investment in unfruitful markets. They have a rapidly converging consumer platform that has essentially no identifiable competitive weaknesses. Investor confidence is thunderingly high. They're headquartered in an extremely pro-business nation and feted as the last great American wonder business with all that implies politically. They have a global retail arm that defies everything known about retail. Their manufacturing pipeline shames former industry leaders. Their litigation is top-notch. Their customer goodwill is limitless and serves to smooth over many failures in execution and experience.<p>They are, even if all goes dark tomorrow, one of the greatest successes in our industry that we will see in our lives. So as someone put above: if Apple can survive iPod Socks and the G4 Cube, they can probably survive whatever some stringer for Time is reading in the tea leaves.<p>Does anyone have any actual concerns about actual Apple as it pertains to the actual real world? I'll start:<p>- Their push for a tax holiday is going to go over extremely poorly in an election year<p>- Their extremely slow iPhone hardware update cycle leaves them vulnerable to fast-evolving competitors and a single bad product will poison the well for years<p>- The colossal amount of value stored nowadays in a single Apple ID means the damage from a security breach or intrusion is astronomical<p>- Apple has nothing interesting or heartening to say about their law enforcement policies vis a vis the data they collect<p>- Stitched leatherette Contacts

Can Apple do anything other than lose its shine? Is it possible for it to get shinier? I mean, it already has the world's highest market cap and is revered in a way the subsequent next highest market cap companies aren't (Exxon, MS, Wal-mart).<p>It's like a basketball player who makes 100 free throws in a row, misses a couple, and people wonder what the hell happened to him/her.

Apple has done some things that I don't think are wise since the death of Steve Jobs - the "new iPad" branding, the new Apple ads, the potential new form factors developer have to design for.<p>However, they also made some decisions that I thought were stupid when Steve Jobs <i>was</i> there, such as releasing the iPad (which I thought would fail for sure). I'm just waiting to see how everything shakes out before I pass judgment. I've been dead wrong about Apple before, and I don't really see any reason I'll be correct with my opinions now.

"After all, during his too-brief, once-in-a-century career, he radically disrupted at least seven industries: personal computing, desktop software, music, mobile phones, publishing, tablet computers, and Hollywood animation"<p>Completely OT, but I thought it was interesting to note that the time difference between the first mobile phone and the first commercially successful smartphone (1973-2007) and the time difference between the invention of the telegraph and telephone (1832-1876) were approximately the same. Apparently awesomeness takes 40 years to bloom.

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines</a>

Apple is propping up the NASDAQ and S&#38;P500. Apple's iPhone revenue alone generates more than all of Microsoft's various business units combined. I'd say that's a pretty good way of losing its shine.

I haven't bought any non-Apple computers or phones in ages, but I just succumbed to the lure of the Nexus 7.<p>It's fantastic, and a great all-around device. It surfs the web, does Gmail, and hooks up to bluetooth, with a great battery life.<p>As far as I'm concerned, that's near enough iPad functionality for half the cost.

They haven't had a product that people lust after in a long time. In fact, with other tablets now viable competitors, I'd say their laptops are their most lust-inducing product out there.<p>I just don't know how they can regain that level of desirability without disrupting another vertical. Or if they make some truly radical hardware innovations, such that it is visible and will make it obvious that you are using an Apple product and not a Samsung. The touchscreen iPhone with gestures and a full browser was a device like that, but that gap has long since been closed by other manufacturers. Siri was, I think, an attempt to do that again, but it wasn't quite ready--something that almost makes me think that Jobs knew he had to pull something out of his hat immediately, even at the cost of shelving his famous perfectionism.

Two words: iPod Socks.

Ask this question in two years time once the projects Jobs was apart of have run there course.<p>But personaly I see no shine lost, sure they lost a great man but there again he had more than enough time to leave his legacy inplace and that is exactly what he did. If jobs was still about I'd expect the share price to be exactly the same and with that the public have already answeared this question that need not be asked.

I decided not to read the article when I saw that Time was accusing the 22nd largest company in the world [1] of being in decline. Time lost its shine with the decline of print media.<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/global2000/#p_3_s_a0_All%20industries_All%20countries_All%20states_" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/global2000/#p_3_s_a0_All%20industries_...</a>

Apple adding HDMI and reverting the Apple TV UI, to me, are already signs of that. What's next? Blu-ray?

Maybe.<p>We should also consider that maybe the smart phone trend thing is starting to slow down. Since most of the possibles innovations are already done it's harder to think of new features except maybe more power.

People have been saying that Apple was going down, in my experience, since 1981 with the introduction of the IBM PC.<p>Seriously, in the 1980s it was IBM, Commodore, Tandy, et al. In the 1990s it was Windows. In the past decade every two-bit media player was called an iPod killer. Every phone ripping off the iPhone is called an iPhone killer. Every tablet is called an iPad killer.<p>And of course the myth has been spread that anything Apple does well is just the result of Steve Jobs.<p>Just as everyone who buys Apple products does so because they come under Steve Jobs "reality distortion field".<p>And how everything Apple has been doing in the past 5 years was poor because Steve Jobs health was bad.<p>How about that the iPod sucked becuase it didn't have an FM tuner?<p>Or the iPhone is never going to fly without a physical keyboard.<p>Or the iPad sounds like a woman's product and nobody will buy it, and of course nobody will carry it around.<p>Etc. Etc. Etc.<p>Apple is failing, always has been, and always will be.<p>Every time the stock goes down $30 (equivalent to a $60 stock going down $3) the stock is crashing.<p>When Apple misses wall street expectations by a few cents (but beats their projections) its a sign that the stock is in decline - before Steve Jobs died it was just proof that Apple sucked. When he was sick, it was because he lost control. Now that he's dead, Apple will never be able to accomplish anything good.<p>It has been 30 years of this crap.

Whatever. Apple makes 35 billion instead of the expected 37 billion in a non-holiday quarter - sooo disappointing! They must really be losing their way.<p>All things of course come to an end, but does 35 billion worth of revenue in a quarter signal Cupertino's imminent demise? I mean come on, how many consumer companies can say they've sold 35 billion dollars worth of anything?<p>IMHO, Apple's downfall will come from growing and expanding too much, not too little.