Jim Cramer goes one-on-one with Apple CEO Tim Cook to find out more about what the company is seeing in China, where he sees growth in the coming year and more.
Stockholders, take note: Apple customers have many reasons to be unhappy with Apple products, a stark contrast to CEO Tim Cook’s charade of claims of happy, loyal customers and braggadocio about Apple’s innovation. Where’s a touch screen for any of Apple’s computer products? HP has a notebook line that uses facial recognition for accessing the computer. Apple doesn’t. Also, keep a skeptical eye on Tim Cook when he blames their stock drop on the trade war with China. Unhappy customers, attractive competitor options, overpriced products, and slowing smartphone demand compounded with neglected innovation in Apple’s computer lines are a big part of Apple’s stock problem.
Apple may have also had over-ambitious dreams for the capture of the Chinese market when Communist China never wanted their people to by Apple products in the first place.
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook displayed incredibly deceitful messages, including how the product pipeline has never been stronger — a day after numerous sources are reporting that Apple is cutting first quarter 2019 iPhone production by 10 percent. And after Apple decided not to reveal production statistics in November 2018.
Cook talked about customer loyalty and customer happiness, but customers are increasingly dissatisfied with Apple products.
How many unhappy customers were created when Apple soldered RAM to their logic boards on their Mac minis. Customers could no longer plan to purchase a less expensive 4GB RAM Mac mini and upgrade later when personal funds were available to create a computer with higher RAM — as high as 16 GB RAM. To add insult to injury, the Mac OS X on a Mac mini barely works with only 4GB of RAM. If a customer wanted to have more than one or two apps open at a time, they were out of luck with only 4GB of RAM. It was criminal for Apple to offer such a hampered computer with only 4GB of RAM. They didn’t care about customers when they decided to solder 2 GB of RAM in each slot so that customers could not upgrade their products to 8GB or 16GB of RAM. When you hear how Cook cares about customer happiness, the truth is that Apple cares about fooling its customers with slick marketing and miniscule upgrades to products, while taking more money and offering less to customers.
The Mac Mini was updated in 2018 at a cost of $300 more than the previous Mac mini ($499 increased to $799). Apple claims 5x greater speed performance, but the new models are only available with Solid State Drives that are one-fourth the storage size that was commonly purchased with the older model. Instead of 1 TB (1,000 GB) of storage for $599 to $799, customers only get 128GB of storage for $799. If they want a 1 TB Solid State Drive in their new 2018-2019 Mac mini, they have to pay an extra $600.
What happened to giving customers better product specifications at the same price point? … and lowering the prices of the older units?
Recently — with the release of macOS 10.14 “Mojave” — Apple suspended the development of drivers for NVIDIA GPUs graphic cards, leaving creative professionals without the use of Mac systems to accelerate their workloads. In November 2018, a petition opened on Change.Org urging Apple and Tim Cook to work with NVIDIA. On January 9, 2019 there are over 7,700 signatures demanding that Apple permit Nvidia products to work with all Mac OS versions going forward. Jason Diamond, an Emmy award-winning producer and editor, also posted about the NVIDIA scandal on social media, asking creative professionals to sign the petition.
DEMAND: Apple publicly commit to work with Nvidia on drivers for Mac OS 10.14
The community of people who have chosen to use Nvidia products with their Apple hardware demands that Apple permit Nvidia to make web drivers that work with all Mac OS versions going forward.
Being able to utilize the hardware acceleration provided by Nvidia is vital to many of us, as are the bug fixes and features introduced with the application and OS updates.
These drivers have always been available, but Apple now blocks Nvidia from supporting OS 10.14 Mojave
We demand that Apple publicly commit to a support plan to work with Nvidia to provide continuous support for their customers.
Also, the Mojave Mac OS can no longer be installed on external drives as secondary startup drives for Mac computers. It just doesn’t work. It used to be a simple procedure. It’s very useful for power users to install a newer OS on an external drive to make sure everything works. Or perhaps to operate with either operating system when needed older software apps don’t function on the newer operating system, but some other newer apps only function on the newer operating system.
Some Mac apps, such as iMovie have gone down in quality, with titling options taken away from customers. The app just doesn’t work as well as earlier versions.
The sales of the Apple iPhone Xr are dismal, perhaps because the resolution technology in the 2018 iPhone Xr was available way back in 2010.
Stories of product fails like these could go on and on.
While talking to CNBC’s Jim Cramer, Cook also spun the iPhone battery fiasco as if Apple did a great favor to customers by discounting new batteries. Apple only did so because the tech company was exposed for using the iPhone operating system to throttle down the performance of iPhones without notifying customers. Remember a big part of Apple’s marketing pushes “the blazing speed” of their products. Apple should have installed new batteries for customers free of charge.
Perhaps the most obscene treatment of customers is Apple’s controversial business practices including allegations of overpriced repair charges and the battery/slowdown scandal. In the Canadian documentary video below, watch CBC News: The National’s exposé of a slimy Apple Store employee trying to convince a reporter with a hidden camera that he needs a brand new MacBook because of a high repair estimate, when the old notebook only needs a minor repair. The video also explains the battery fiasco.
Battery/Slowdown Scandal Just Tip of Iceberg: Apple Under Fire for Allegations of Controversial Business Practices. The National goes undercover to investigate some of Apple’s controversial business practices including allegations of overpriced repair charges and the battery/slowdown scandal.
France is moving to make planned obsolescence by companies illegal.
Tim Cook may still have the loyalty of customers that like to take pictures of themselves in their bathrooms and post the same familiar inane pose on Instagram, but a growing number of customers that want value in computers and smartphones for work and enjoyment aren’t happy or loyal at all. And if they are loyal, it’s because they are locked into Apple’s ecosystem because of previous investments in Apple products and information storage.
Apple stockholders: You want to make a good investment? Investigate the impact of the international army of anti-Apple customers.
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Apple remains one of the biggest and most powerful companies in the world, and iPhone sales are its most important metric. So when iPhone sales slump in China, it means billions of dollars lost. And it rattles markets across the world. These are the three big factors dragging down Apple in China.