Tim Cook - page 53

Tim Cook is a well-liked CEO, at least according to employee ratings on Glassdoor, a website that allows employees of any company to post reviews, ratings, and other such metadata about the companies they work for.

The current rating of Apple CEO Tim Cook on the service is a high 94 percent, gathered from all the employees who have rated him on the service, a total of 724 as of this writing. While Glassdoor is an opt-in survey system, it is anonymous. If they hated the guy, they’d probably say so. Anonymity plus the internet is anything but overly polite.

Apple just released its Q2 2013 Financial results, and even though Apple beat its own estimates, Tim Cook started the Quarterly Financial Call on the defensive.

Cook started the call by explaining how exceptional Apple’s 2012 financial results were for Apple, so it’s hard for the company to improve sales this quarter. Then Cook commented on Apple’s struggling stock price by saying he’s “very frustrated” with the stock’s declining value the last few quarters, but they’re staying focused on the future.

Hoping to appease investors, Apple announced today that it will payback $100 billion to investors by 2015. Apple has yet to release a major product in 2013, but Cook reassured investors that Apple can’t wait to release new hardware and software this Fall and throughout 2014.

I’ve been writing for Cult of Mac for almost three years now, and in that time I’ve covered some pretty farfetched Apple rumors. But the latest from Forbes comes with a whole new level of crazy.

“Some Wall Street sources close to some Apple executives” say the Cupertino company could be searching for a replacement for Tim Cook, it claims, before suggesting Cook could turn Apple into another Hewlett-Packard or JC Penney and insisting “Apple’s shine has faded” since the passing of Steve Jobs.

We get ca-rayyy-zee on this week’s CultCast, takin’ ’bout iPhone 5S’ rumored new camera; why megapixels don’t matter; Facebook Home coming to iOS; why teens really love Snapchat; and we review the new iSteve mockumentary—it’s either way better or way worse than you heard. Plus more!

Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing now on iTunes, or hit play below and let the good times roll.

Be excellent to each other, and party on through for the show notes.

Four out of the five highest-paid executives in the United States work for Apple, Bloomberg Businessweek reports, but not one of them is CEO Tim Cook.

According to fiscal 2012 compensation figures for top earners filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Apple’s Bob Mansfield, Bruce Sewell, Jeffrey Williams, and Peter Oppenheimer join Oracle CEO Larry Ellison to make up the top five corporate earners last year.

Steam! That’s what Steve Jobs would have had rocket from his ears when he heard about Facebook Home. We’ll explain why on our newest CultCast, but also covet aloud the one feature we hope Apple borrows for iOS. Plus, inside Leander Kahney’s Jony Ive book; Ron Johnson father of the Apple Store takes a boot to the rear; and we wrap with an all new Faves ‘N Raves, the segment where we pitch our favorite tech and apps then vote on which one’s best!

Stream or download new and past episodes of The CultCast on your Mac or iDevice by subscribing now on iTunes, or hit play below and let the good times roll.

Click on through for the show notes.

Apple’s U.S. Mac sales changed around 7.5% during the first quarter of 2013, according to research firms IDC and Gartner, but neither agree on whether they were up or down. While IDC reports that shipments were down 7.5% during January to April, Gartner sales that sales were up 7.4%. So who’s right?

The budget for Apple’s “spaceship” campus has ballooned from $3 billion to “nearly $5 billion” since 2011, according to a new report from Bloomberg Businessweek. Five people close to the project say its cost will now eclipse the $3.9 billion being spent on the new World Trade Center complex in New York City.

iPhone theft has become a huge problem in places like New York City and San Francisco.  District Attorney George Gascón is on a mission to curb smartphone theft by having manufacturers implement a kill switch once a phone has been reported stolen, but that’s proven more difficult than Gascón imagined.

During his crusade to get answers from manufacturers, Gascón talked with Apple’s government liaison about getting a kill switch added to the iPhone, but was told that might not be possible because the next two iPhones were developed while Steve Jobs was still CEO at Apple.

Apple has been getting pounded by the Chinese press lately for its warranty policies service and not talking to the press whenever they want a statement (welcome to Apple news my friends). Hoping to end the onslaught from the government-supported press, Apple issued an apology letter to Chinese customers signed by Tim Cook.

The letter, which was written in Chinese and posted to Apple’s website, said that Tim Cook and the rest of the company have been reflecting on the feedback regarding its warranty policies and apologizes the poor communication that has made customers so angry.

Tim Cook may be leading one of the most influential and valuable companies on earth now, but he used to be in high school just like the rest of us. Some yearbook photos of Cook’s early years at Robertsdale High School in Robertsdale, Alabama have surfaced. How adorable!

Cook was unsurprisingly voted “most studious” freshman year, and it was an obvious mistake to exclude him from the “most likely to succeed” list.

Apple’s stock hasn’t been doing too well lately. While many analysts think the problem is that Apple hasn’t released any new products in months, Microsoft’s former COO thinks it’s more of a leadership problem.

In a recent article, former Microsoft COO, Bob Herbold claimed the problem with Apple is that it doesn’t have a visionary leader who is paranoid with details, so Apple’s totally going to start sucking like Microsoft pretty soon.

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch is leaving the company to become Vice President of Technology at Apple, but Tim Cook may have to keep a close eye on him around the iPhones. Back in 2009, Lynch smashed up a whole bunch of them in a bid to get them to run Flash Player. See his destructive side for yourself in the video below.

John Browett, who spent nine months as Apple’s senior vice president of retail before being ousted alongside Scott Forstall last October, has admitted that he “just didn’t fit” in with the way Apple ran its business. Browett still feels Apple is a fantastic company and says he loved working there, but he told The Independent that he was “rejected for fit rather than competency.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has replaced Tim Cook as the highest-rated CEO in tech, according to employee approval ratings on Glassdoor. Cook’s 97% approval rating from 2012 has dropped down to 93%, which takes him from first position all the way down to 18th. Zuckerberg now has an impressive 99% approval rating.

Last year, Apple was hit with an antitrust case from the U.S. Department of Justice over the pricing scheme of e-books in Apple’s iBookstore. Since that time, 11 executives at Apple have already been deposed over the issue, but the Department of Justice is demanding Tim Cook be involved, and they just got their way.

U.S. District Judge Denise Cote granted the Justice Department’s request to get Cook to testify on the ebook antitrust case for four hours.

When Apple launched its new Maps app with iOS 6 last September, one of its headline features, Flyover, only supported a handful of big cities. But the Cupertino company has been hard at work in the background to extend its reach, adding support for additional locations all over the world.

In the past few months, Apple has brought Flyover to an additional 16 cities, plus extended its coverage in 14 of the cities already supported.

Last month we heard that even though Apple just posted a record breaking quarter,  sales of the iPad were lower than internal expectations.

Backing up claims that Apple is having a down month, Topeka Capital says that they’ve been monitoring Apple’s suppliers and February was a very bad month for companies that help make Apple products.

This week on The CultCast—finally—it’s time to talk iPhone 5S and iPad 5! We’ll tell you why April and August might be bringing you the tasty new iDevices, and if they’ll be drastically different than the models we’ve already got.

Then, is Apple is a innovation lull? Ex-Apple CEO John Scully thinks so. We’ll tell you what we think is really going on.

Subscribe to The CultCast now on iTunes to download our newest episode, or easily stream new and previous episodes via Apple’s free Podcasts App.

Show notes up next!

Over the last couple of weeks a ‘silly sideshow’ has been playing out between Greenlight Capital and Apple Inc. Greenlight Capital’s CEO, David Einhorn, has been trying to force Apple to offer preferred stock plans by suing Apple in court, while Tim Cook and Apple disagree with his proposals.

Even though Einhorn has won at least one small victory over Apple in court, it’s been reported that Greenlight Capital just dropped their lawsuit against Apple.

At today’s Apple Shareholders Meeting, CEO Tim Cook admitted that Apple was “looking at new product categories” but that the company had no interest in just “pressing a button or two” to have Apple make the most products.

Steve Jobs pitched the idea of an Apple spaceship-like campus in the summer of 2011. He said that the project would be completed by 2015, but there have been a couple delays that have pushed the project back a little farther.

During today’s annual shareholders meeting, Tim Cook addressed the reports that the new campus won’t be ready in 2015, and said that they should break ground soon and be ready to move in by 2016.

Apple hosted its annual shareholder meeting today at Apple HQ in Cupertino. There were some big rumors yesterday that Tim Cook would announce a stock split during the meeting, but that never actually happened.

At this years shareholder’s meeting, all the board members were re-elected, and Tim Cook got 99.1% of investor approval. There were two proposals put to vote that Apple did not support, but both of those were struck down too.

If you’ve been up on your Apple news the past few months, then you’ve probably heard about a “silly sideshow” that been going on about Apple’s stock. Basically, Greenlight Capital isn’t happy with the amount of cash their getting back on their investment in Apple, while Apple has been hoarding all their cash.

Hoping to convince Apple to give shareholders some of their cash, Greenlight Capitals found, David Einhorn, has a concocted a plan that would have Apple selling “iPref” stock to investors who want to eat Apple’s cake.

It’s been over 16 months since Steve Jobs passed away, leaving Apple without its inspirational leader. Even though the company has released a number of new products and reported record-breaking sales, some of Steve’s closest friends at the company still miss him.

Apple’s chairman, Art Levinson, was a close friend and colleague of Steve Jobs, and he’s been on Apple’s Board of Directors since 2000. So when he was recently asked what it’s like running the company’s Board now that Steve’s gone, Levinson only had one word to describe it: “weird.”