Apple Will Do Great Stuff…
Tim Cook tells the world to keep the faith. “Great things are coming”.
Apple Inc., one of the best-known hardware product developers and manufacturers, is also the world’s second largest information technology company by revenue, after Samsung Electronics.
Apple was always big on hardware and software, to them this mandatory marriage was a prerequisite to be a happy one, for them to showcase innovation and to surpass user experience, consistently. There was a time (around 1997) when Steve Jobs reduced the large and confusing product line so as to focus singularly on the iMac. No one understood it then. He was laying the foundations of innovation, quality and service yet steering the company away from the norm of “mass” and “be everywhere” philosophy — and Apple have been basing their lives on the same tenet ever since.
However, with the drop in the fourth quarterly earnings, Apple’s stock took a big dip and that led many market pundits to speculate about its future and that of the mobile hardware market in totality.
In an interview Tim Cook (CEO, Apple) revealed that they are repurchasing Apple stock and the total cost is somewhere in the region of USD 40 billion. Cook said with poise that they were betting on Apple and were really confident about their future plans.
The essence of what Tim Cook has promised in his interviews — Apple is poised to enrich lives with new products and services in 2014, thus his confidence in the performance of Apple stock in the coming year. Even hedge fund billionaire Carl Icahn has also been on a buying spree, and has bought half a billion dollars worth of Apple stock, which signals his confidence in the Apple plans for 2014.
Apple has long led the way in innovation and have often created a need where it had never existed — cases in point being the iPod and iPad. What most people do not realize is that iTunes (such a fly-on-the-wall offering that it escapes most people’s notice) is actually a very, very profitable business model for Apple.
Building on the trust they already enjoy (as exhibited by billions of dollars of purchases worldwide, month after month), Apple could be looking at launching yet another new service model to augment their superior customer experience by tapping into the mobile payment market.
Another area where they may be working could be the medical apps and associated add-on devices. In the second half of 2013, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in America released guidelines for app developers to adhere to, which opens yet another untapped segment. Apple could lead development of apps and add-ons here, and will earn a substantial licensing fee from the third party manufacturers.
Another area where the Apple team could be focusing is the wearable technology — there are rumors of an ‘iWatch’ coming this year.
With the mobile market maturing and the number of players increasing exponentially, Apple will definitely be aiming to retain their superiority in the hardware side of business with the launch of even more new-product lines around computing and mobile devices and may even introduce a TV (not the AppleTV — thats a different product altogether) into their product range.
Apple says that they are looking at the bigger picture; they want to make their products great and if they can’t do that, they will refrain from producing an inferior product. Thats nothing new… Apple has long been one of the few manufacturers that prefers not to lead the way into unproven product lines (contrary to what we said about the iPod and iPad earlier). We could be seeing apps, add-ons and devices from Apple or secondary manufacturers supporting Apple’s own apps and devices releasing a plethora of products in the coming year.
In one interview Cook said that he wanted to keep the faith of investors in the company with a new line of product categories. The company is focusing on growth and it seems that 2014 will have people expecting and looking forward to a lot. The wait seems long though, interminably so.
Originally published at Chip-Monks.
