I was amused this morning to see a contributor to Forbes write that Jony Ive (as if he knows him that well), should replace Tim Cook as the CEO of Apple.
My experience would suggest that putting a creative person in charge of a company without some incredible people doing all the work would be suicidal. Creative people are rarely organized and often emotional. "There is a fine line between genius and madness." and I've tripped over that line a few times, as have most creative people. :-D
Besides that, pulling your chief idea maker/director away from creative projects to run a company means that you won't have those ideas flowing because someone is managing people, products, and the company's direction in as little or as much detail as they care to handle.
It is interesting to see how much Apple's stock price and value "on paper" has fallen. They're around US$500 instead of US$700 per share. That's huge. People might compare them to Google, but Google started at US$500 per share. I saw another analyst dropped their target price from US$700 to US$650, but I don't see Apple going that high for a while, especially with the earnings disclosure almost here.
When they have their quarterly financial conference call, they won't likely satisfy analysts who have already decided that perfection isn't enough, so anything less will be considered a bargain basement stock, and they will lower expectations, regardless of records. It's just silly.
I'm looking forward to an upgraded iPad mini and iPad in the next few months. Even though I knew the specifications of the iPad mini for a while, I was disappointed. When the rumors started, prior to the second generation iPad, those specifications weren't a problem. The market changed radically since then. A "Retina" display and processor to handle the graphics capably will put things right. I know that they won't put the fastest processor in it, but they'll put something capable of displaying the graphics without a slowdown. (They made a huge mistake with the iPhone 4, as its performance was slowed, compared to the 3G S.) I spent quite a lot of time with the Google Nexus 7, having had 2 of them before I returned them, and the herky-jerky performance was faster but it wasn't pleasant.
Someone decided to give us specifications of the iPhone 5S, supposedly a much bigger phone between 4.7 and 5.0 inches in the display. I'm thinking a lot of people will believe that's going to happen, but it's unlikely. While Apple is (finally) accelerating their mobile products development, they're not about to throw physical designs out and eat the costs, instead of recovering them. They are the profit leader in the industry.
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