'Can't innovate anymore, my ass': Apple's bravado clouds the company's real challenges

Baloney.

Apple’s stock hasn’t slid because it’s been putting out uninspired hardware — it’s slid because the company hasn’t been able to enter any major new product categories in years, and major software efforts like Siri and iCloud have faltered in extremely public ways.

Who in his right mind would expect a tech company to enter (note the verb) a new market every couple years?!

First, Apple isn’t entering new markets: it’s creating new ones. The iPad was launched in 2010 and created an entirely new segment, and is now totally owning the competition. It isn’t a tablet market, it’s an iPad market. Apple owns 70% of the market, according to Cook.

As it happens, the key problem for Apple has been expressed in perfect crystalline form since December 2012, when John Gruber gave massive exposure to a piece by former Apple employee Patrick Gibson: “Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services.”

Well, no. The key problem is that analysts have unrealistically high expectations of Apple, and expect Apple to work in the most un-Apple way.

Moreover, there seems to be this growing and ever-present fear of the after Steve Jobs. It’s believed that nobody can replace Steve, and that Apple is doomed to fail and burn in flames. Baloney.

All of the products shown or announced this year are entirely new products Steve had no involvement with. Maybe Steve launched the Mac Pro refresh, okay. But for the rest, the new Apple is in charge. Cook, Ive, Federighi, Cue. Not Steve.

And it’s so bizarre that the analysts hold such high expectations for Apple, yet at the same time they put the bar ridiculously low for competing tech giants.

Compare AAPL and AMZN, and their respective yearly profits to understand what’s going on.

There is no pleasing Wall Street when it comes to Apple.