The apple cart play pdf Continue Eddie Cue doesn't look like a man in the midst of his toe year in decades. Sporting an untucked apricot camp shirt and blue jeans over camouflage socks and a pair of blue leather racing boots from Germany, Apple SVP Internet software and services pulls a chair on one of the marble desks near Cafe Macs, a staff restaurant in the center of Apple's 23-year-old Campus Cupertino. (The company will begin moving into its new spaceship headquarters next year.) Cue dives right into telling me about his latest horror story: Crash, two nights earlier, his favorite Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals, which Cue had the grim pleasure of watching from the court seat. Am I in mourning? He asked about the loss of his team LeBron James to the Cleveland Cavaliers. You better believe it. I don't watch ESPN, I didn't get to the sports site, I didn't read the newspaper. When I turn on the TV, I only go to the DVR. Eddie, it's on the record, warns Craig Federighi, Apple SVP software development, from all over the table. I have no problem with that, replies Kew, who is such a Warriors fan that he was featured on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle after the team's comeback victory in the conference finals a few weeks ago, in a photo that showed him screaming in a red-faced celebration alongside Stephen Curry. He leans over my iPhone, which records the interview, and banishes his next three words to make sure they are loud and clear. I love LeBron! It then gives way to a set of hearty and coulb guffaws. It's 62 degrees in Cupertino, the sun shines, the smell of cumin and garlic from the cafe chicken masala special fills the air, and the chatter among a couple of hundred employees enjoying their lunch seems lively and bright. Nowhere is there any hint that Apple is doomed, as suggested by Forbes and other outlets, or that it is involved in a user-hostile and stupid campaign against its customers (The Verge), led by CEO Tim Cook, a boring old fart . supply chain petitioner (cultural critic Bob Lefsetz). Under Cook's leadership, Apple began to seem rather uncomfortable for many people. His latest products seemed much less than perfect, at least compared to the collective memory of his amazing iPod-iPhone-iPad run from 2001 to 2010. There are public embarrassments, like his 2012 introduction maps, or those 2014 video reviewers bending, and breaking, the iPhone 6 Plus. Apple Pay has not become the standard for cashless society, and the Apple Watch is not the watch we expect from Apple, according to John Gruber, editor of Daring Fireball, an outstanding Apple-focused website. Then there are the design flaws: Apple Music was saddled with too many features, as if it were something designed, God Microsoft; The lens on the back of the iPhone 6 extrude; The new Apple TV has an illogical interface and a confusing remote control. Maybe being restless, Apple is doing too many things at once, cranking out several edition watches, endless varieties of watchbands, iPhones and iPads in numerous sizes, own headphones along with headphones from Beats. Credible reports that the company is spending billions of dollars in RESEARCH to explore the possibility of developing a car only heighten fears that Apple is spreading too thin. Steve Jobs was the company's editor, proud to say no to features, products, business ideas and new hires far more often than he said yes. Apple's seemingly diffuse product line reinforces the argument that Cook is not so strict. (Fear has a troubling precedent: In the early and mid-1990s, Apple's product line was a marketing mess inspired by the offerings, and how its reputation as a unique manufacturer and its business suffered.) Criticism plummeted last April after Cook announced that Apple's revenue was down 13 percent for the first time in 13 years, compared with the corresponding quarter a year earlier. iPhone sales have slowed even further, with 16%, alarming development, given that the smartphone accounts for 65% of the company's total revenue. Meanwhile, the company's competitors seem to jet ahead. Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have dazzled the press with announcements about upcoming products that will use artificial intelligence, or AI. Some of them, such as Microsoft's Cortana, are software applications that promise to anticipate customer needs in useful, personalized ways. Others are already packing this ability in equipment; In less than two years, Amazon has sold more than 3 million Echos, its $199 canister that is a voice personal assistant. Google revealed plans for a similar product, Home, in May, a lot of fanfare. Critics are looking at Apple's five-year-old Siri, its voice-controlled agent, and on cavil that the company has nothing like flashy to reveal. So, is apple doomed? Of course not. As John Gruber says: Any conversation that uses that word in a silly la la land. With Macs, iPads, and software applications and services, Apple is not a one-trick pony like BlackBerry, using an example cited by those most freaked out about the recent iPhone slowdown. During this disappointing quarter, the company's sales totaled $50.6 billion, more than the combined revenue of Google's parent company Alphabet ($20.3 billion) and Amazon ($29.1 billion) for the same period. Its $10.5 billion profit was overtaken not only by Alphabet ($4.2 billion) and Amazon ($513 million), but also by Facebook ($1.5 billion) and Microsoft ($3.8 billion). I don't read all the coverage on Apple that is, Cook tells me, after a few after my lunch with Cue and Federighi. In B that I look at it, I really know the truth. And he's willing to talk about it. Traditionally, Apple execs only give interviews when the company has a new product to hawk. Often Jobs collaborated only with magazines, which promised to photograph him next to one of the company's devices. But changes in Apple, and not just in the communications department. Apple has embarked on a mission to improve its four operating systems (for Apple TV, iPhone, Mac and Watch), services such as Apple Pay and Apple Music, and even the size of the iMessage bubble on the iPhone screen. It has redesigned the location of its retail stores and its online app store. It makes radical changes to maligned offerings like cards, Siri, and watches. He takes care of app developers in whole new ways, knowing that their creativity is what enriches the $250 billion-a-year ecosystem built on Apple devices. It is almost certainly exploring the possibility of producing a car. These moves are the building blocks for the newest iteration of Apple's future.Apple may look very different from its past, and Cook, Federighi, and Cue won't have it any other way. See, says Kew, who somehow manages to look like a person who has just woken up and a compact ball of perpetual energy, one thing you know if you were in technology at the time, you're only as good as the last thing you did. No one wants the original iPod. No one wants an iPhone 3GS. Apple executives are careful not to assume that the company goes beyond the vision of its founder, but that's exactly what's happening in Cupertino. It's a subtle, evolutionary change. Cook is pushing Apple into a future that is bigger and wider than anything Jobs can influence during his too short life. I want Apple to be here, you know, forever, he says. Those lulled by the bad news last spring in dismissing Cook and his team are likely to miss out on the scale of the company's ambitions and its progress in achieving them. While Amazon, Facebook and Google may shout loudly about their bold ideas, Apple may well play the biggest role in determining our technological future. Overheard during Apple Freak-OutReal reactions, taken from tech commentariat, to Apple's tumultuous 2016. The Apple faithful have never been more polarized. Illustration: Peter Umanski: Do you have more flaws than before? I've always had flaws. Always! Now we get where I like to go! I tell him. You can lie down until the end of the interview. Cook stays upright, and when his laughter subsides, he answers the question I intended to ask. Is Apple making more mistakes than we used to? I tracker on this. despite a job that became more challenging during his five years as CEO, it doesn't seem to be the age of nit. Having your company lose $180 billion in market value (which Apple has in 17 months since I last interviewed Cook) should manifest in some way, but it's still trim and fit, its eyes alive, its good mood intact. We never said we were perfect, he continues. We said we were committed to it. But sometimes we break away. Indeed, the iPod, iPhone and iPad - and the financial success they generated - overshadowed the fact that Jobs watched almost as many flops as he did during Apple's renaissance: the circular, almost unusable mouse that came with the first iMac in 1997; 2001 beautiful PowerMac G4 Cube, which was discontinued a year later; Rokr, Apple's music phone released with Motorola in 2005; iTunes social network recommendation Ping, and more. Most importantly, do you have the courage to admit that you're wrong? And you're changing? Cook says.