Ten things Apple has changed in the last year

As CEO, Jobs would not have issued an apology regarding poor quality Maps. He would have either not allowed a half-baked product or would have quietly fixed it.

ACCEPTING AWARDS

Apple had a strict, no awards policy under Jobs. After his death, Jony Ive and his senior design team at Apple went specifically to accept awards at London's Design & Art Direction (D&AD) event.

SUPPORTING CHARITY

Apple is now contributing to charities like (Project) Red & Stanford University Hospitals. Jony Ive recently agreed to design a Leica camera for charity. Jobs had made it clear that he was totally against charity.
LARGER iPHONES

When the iPhone was first launched, Jobs made it clear that a 3.5-inch screen was the ideal size — it allowed for seamless one-hand operation. However, the iPhone 5 has a 4-inch screen now & we may see even larger screens soon.



SMALLER iPADS

Jobs believed that the 'sweet spot' for a tablet was 10inches. He felt that 7-inch tablets were too big to compete with smartphones & too small to compete with tablets. Now Apple is expected to launch a 7-inch iPad soon.

LEAKED INFORMATION

Jobs was adamant about keeping his products hidden till the actual launch. People working on a project 


weren't even allowed to discuss it with their families. There was limited communication between people working on the same device — they only knew their bit.

Finished prototypes were transported in locked, covered cases — even within Apple headquarters. There were hardly any leaks during his reign at Apple. However, this time around, accurate iPhone 5 images were leaked months before the actual launch.

FATTER iPAD

A design perfectionist, Jobs would have never allowed the new iPad to have a fatter design.

WEIRD iPOD DESIGNS

The new iPod Nano has already received criticism considering its weird design and colour combination. Plus it has a design that resembles Nokia's Lumia 800 phone. Jobs would have never approved of such a design.

PAYING DIVIDENDS

Jobs used all funds for R&D — so Apple had not paid any dividend out since 1995. This year, Tim Cook has announced that Apple will be paying dividend to shareholders.

APPLE TV INTERFACE

Jobs has rejected the current Apple TV user interface almost five years ago (according to an Apple designer). Now that Jobs is gone, the user interface has been released to the users.

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after Steve Jobs, is Apple losing some ‘cool’?

tags: apple,steve jobs ,apple stock,timcook,after apple

One year after Steve Jobs died, the Apple stock has risen 78%. If that was the only yardstick, the question in the headline is meaningless. For its cultish followers, Apple is not just a dollar value flickering on a ticker. A mesmerising 'desirability quotient' and breakthrough technology, design, and intuitiveness of all products are as much a part of the Apple aura as the $620 billion marketcap of the world's most valuable company. 

So, last week, when Apple CEO Tim Cook told customers he was 'extremely sorry' for the frustration its new Maps application had caused them, the stock lost $12 billion, a 2.1% decline. The Apple legend had taken another hit, the fourth such blow in 2012. That's how many missteps Cook has publicly acknowledged this year. Apple has made such admissions only 16 times in 36 years. 

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Apple remains the fastest-growing global brand in the world

apple ,fastest growing brand ,steve jobs,market value of apple ,google vs apple
by vamsi pandranki
Apple remains the fastest-growing global brand a year after its founder Steve Jobs' death. The maker of iPhone and iPadimproved its ranking in the annual Best Global Brands report of Interbrand to No. 2 in 2012 from No. 8 last year and its brand value increased 129 per cent to $76.57 billion (approx Rs 4 lakh crore). 

While Coca-Cola retained the top slot, technology brands occupied half of the top 10 slots. This despite Interbrand considering No. 3 IBM a business service brand rather than a technology brand. Here is a look at some findings of the study: 

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China's Steve Jobs?

tags:len jun ,steve jobs,apple,iphone ,smartphone,china,enterprenuer

There aren’t many American entrepreneurs who would have the nerve to compare themselves to Steve Jobs and Apple. To find a guy crazy enough to do that, you have to go to China.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Lei Jun, the jeans-and-black-shirt-wearing billionaire founder of Xiaomi, China’s hottest smartphone company. And, if you believe Lei, the next Steve Jobs.

Beijing-based Xiaomi sells an An- droid smartphone called the MI-One. It’s a high-powered phone based on a dual-core processor from Qualcomm but with a price far lower than many comparably equipped phones sold in China. That combination of raw power and a reasonable price tag has attracted huge attention from Chinese consumers: When the phone went on sale last fall, Xiaomi received 300,000 preorders in the first 34 hours.

Less than a year after launch the company has sold more than 3 million MI-Ones and counting. The phone is hot. Red hot. Apple hot.

Lei, a 43-year-old investor and serial entrepreneur, is the public face of Xiaomi. Like Jobs, he has intensely loyal fans—mostly young, male gadget hounds. The company launched an annual convention for fans and holds regular user meet-ups that have the feel of religious revivals, where diehard fans sing, cheer and play games. Lei has more than 4 million microblog followers in China and spends hours on MiTalk, the Xiaomi chat site, to solicit feedback from users.

In his first big score, Lei sold the online retailer Joyo.com to Amazon in 2004 for $75 million. Three years later he listed Kingsoft, an antivirus software firm, on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. He’s an investor in both UC Web, which sells a popular mobile browser, and YY.com, which offers a real-time video app.

Lei founded Xiaomi in 2010 with his friend Lin Bin, a former Microsoft and Google engineer who is now Xiaomi’s president. The two men, both 43, both married with daughters (Lin has three, Lei two), had spent the previous months dreaming of a high-spec, low-price phone.

Their big idea is to subsidise the cost of the handset by getting buyers to pay more for various services—not unlike the way that Apple iPhone users pay for software from the App Store.

It’s just one more way the com- pany keeps inviting comparisons with Apple. Lei has a love-hate relationship when it comes to the comparison. He says Jobs is an inspiration but specifically denies, for instance, copying his dress code, asserting that his casual attire for product launches is simply a plug for his Vancl fashion e-commerce site.

“I was annoyed in the beginning, very annoyed. But I don’t mind any- more,” he says of the comparisons.

Rather remarkably, Lei risks the wrath of Apple fans everywhere by asserting that he can succeed in China in ways Jobs couldn’t have matched.

“If Jobs had lived in China, I think he could not have succeeded,” Lei said in an interview with Forbes. “Jobs was a scrupulous perfectionist, while Chinese culture emphasises the middle path.” In China, he says, “you also need to make compro- mises.” That’s a lesson that American companies have had trouble learning: Witness Google’s departure from mainland China in the face of persist- ent censorship of search results.

One thing is for sure: In  China the guy produces Jobs-like buzz. The rapid early sales of the phone came largely through word of mouth, with no spending on print or TV ads. And the buzz continues: After selling 3 million phones to date, Xiaomi is on track to hit 5 million to 6 million units by year-end.

Part of the mythology around Lei involves a highly public spat he’s having with Zhou Hongyi, the CEO of Nasdaq-listed Qihoo 360 Technology, a $1.9 billion market cap security software firm. For one thing, Zhou claims that Xiaomi makes a profit of nearly $100 per phone, disputing Lei’s assertion that it sells the phone cheaply and will make up the difference with services. Zhou thinks Xiaomi’s customers are suckers if they believe Lei.

Another source of friction: Zhou leaked the news that Xiaomi’s latest round gave the company a $4 billion valuation. While the number was accurate, Lei says, the leak made it harder to close the deal with privacy-sensitive investors.

Tied into the feud is the fact that Qihoo competes with Lei’s Kingsoft in the antivirus PC software market. Qihoo has been giving away a free version of its antivirus software for users who download the company’s browser, a move that creates issues for Kingsoft.

Iphone: Simon Edwards / Future Publishing Via Getty Images

Even Lei’s detractors would concede that the opportunity here is enormous.

China Mobile is the largest mobile carrier in the world, with 677 million users as of the end of May; compare that with AT&T with a little over 100 million as of the end of March. The number two and three carriers in China—China Telecom and China Unicom—also are bigger than any US carrier.

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