Tripp Mickle, Wall Street Journal:

Of the three major new products since Mr. Cook became chief executive in 2011, both AirPods earbuds in 2016 and last year’s HomePod speaker missed Apple’s publicly projected shipping dates. The Apple Watch, promised for early 2015, arrived late that April with lengthy wait times for delivery. Apple also was delayed in supplying the Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard, two critical accessories for its iPad Pro.

The delays have contributed to much longer waits between Apple announcing a product and shipping it: an average of 23 days for new and updated products over the past six years, compared with the 11-day average over the six years prior, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Apple public statements.

Apple has shown enormous, unparalleled growth during Tim Cook’s reign as CEO. The demands on the supply chain and the complexity of production have increased dramatically during that same period. And while there have been cracks in the armor, they are far less than I would have expected given the sheer scale of this growth.

Of the 70-plus new and updated products launched during Mr. Cook’s tenure, five had a delay between announcement and shipping of three months or more and nine had delays of between one and three months. Roughly the same number of products were launched during Mr. Jobs’ reign, but only one product was delayed by more than three months and seven took between one and three months to ship after the initial announcement, according to the Journal’s calculations.

I would argue that Apple during Steve and Apple during Tim are two different stories. The supply chain mechanics are vastly different. The competitive landscape is different as well, not to mention the growing complexity of Apple devices like the iPhone X and AirPods.

Apple’s large and global customer base also add to logistical and manufacturing challenges, former employees said. The company now has an estimated 1.1 billion devices in use world-wide, about triple the 400 million in early 2013, according to market-research outfit Asymco.

Former employees also cite the increasing complexity of Apple’s devices as a contributing factor in the delays. AirPods feature lasers that detect when the device is inserted into an ear, which has made manufacturing more difficult. With the facial-recognition camera on the iPhone X, Apple had production issues partly because its miniature, infrared laser was so sensitive that it could easily be knocked out of alignment, a person familiar with the production process said.

Interesting read.

Gizmodo:

When two brothers from Naples decided to stop doing fashion design for other companies and start a brand of their own, they went hunting for an attention-grabbing name. They discovered that “Steve Jobs” wasn’t trademarked and decided on that. Now, a protracted legal battle has come to an end, and they have big plans for using the Apple founder’s name on pretty much anything.

And:

As expected, Apple’s legal department soon sent the brothers four large folders of legal documents and went to war. But the brothers won the case.

It’d be one thing if the founder was named Steve Jobs. But this is straight-forward riding on someone else’s coattails.

That said, there are plenty of precedents. Here’s one that springs to mind.

Two nuggets from this Bloomberg article:

Cook’s incentive pay totaled $9.33 million for the year ended Sept. 30, the Cupertino, California-based company said Wednesday in a regulatory filing. He also took home $3.06 million in salary and a previously disclosed equity award of $89.2 million, bringing his total payout for the year to about $102 million.

His top five lieutenants each got bonuses of $3.11 million, bringing their total compensation to about $24.2 million each, including salaries and stock awards.

And:

The Apple board stipulated this year that for security reasons the CEO should use private planes for business and personal travel, citing the risk given his high profile. Personal security costs were calculated at $224,216.

My two cents: Tim Cook is a bargain. Apple is an aircraft carrier of a company, both massive and incredibly complex. Tim is overseeing exponential growth while keeping Apple on track, dealing reasonably well with the problems that arise, all while remaining the very public face of a very public company.

As to the private planes, no issue there, makes sense. I just found it interesting that Apple made it policy, mandating that Tim fly private.

This is a fascinating post from The AAPL Tree, an Apple blog that has moved entirely to Apple News. The linked post mixes a good number of well researched facts about Apple’s India operations with some educated guesses.

If you are interested in Apple and India, don’t miss the crowdsourced revenue/net income chart in the middle of the post. It estimates Apple’s 2017 India revenue at about 11,618 crore. A crore is 10M rupee, about $156,000.

Doing the math (pulls out Pcalc), 11,618 crore is about $1.8 billion. Not too shabby.

Long ago, Google Maps had a huge edge over Apple Maps, but Apple Maps made great strides. In many areas, Apple Maps caught up. In my travels (mostly in the eastern US), Apple Maps works well, gets me where I need to go, does a solid job predicting traffic, rerouting me as needed. And the tight integration with my Apple Watch makes a big difference when I’m navigating new territory.

I realize Apple Maps is great in some areas, lacking in others, but this post is about one specific feature, a feature in which Google has a decided edge: Representing property, buildings, and structure outlines on map.

Justin O’Beirne has pulled together an incredibly detailed post showing these differences. As you make your way through the post, you can’t help but see how massive Google’s lead in this particular area has become.

Google has repeatedly told journalists that it started extracting data from Street View imagery in 2008, as part of its “Ground Truth” project. So this suggests that Google may have a 6+ year lead over Apple in data collection.

And:

And as we saw with AOIs [Areas of Interest], Google has gathered so much data, in so many areas, that it’s now crunching it together and creating features that Apple can’t make—surrounding Google Maps with a moat of time.

This is not a complaint. For me (and I recognize your mileage may vary here), Apple Maps works quite well. But the arguments and images in Justin’s post are fair proof. Google has a big edge in data collection.

Can Apple catch up? Of course. If they spend the money, make the commitment.

As has been said many times before, data is the new oil.

Just checked. In stock. Get ’em while they last.