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Apple has Rejected a Diversity Proposal

Even though Apple repeatedly claimed that diversity is one of the company’s biggest values, the actual numbers fail to confirm that.

Apple has rejected a diversity proposal, even though the famous company has repeatedly said that the company values diversity very much. When we think that the CEO of Apple, Tim Cook is the only gay chief executive found on Fortune 100, we might agree. But some reports came and questioned the company’s variety, especially when it comes to people of color and women.

At the beginning of January, the board of Apple actually refused a proposal that asked for the board of directors and the senior management to be more diversified. The proposal came from Antonio Avian Maldonado II, who has approximately 600 shares in the company. He is also the creative director of the Insignia Entertainment music company. Maldonado claimed in his proposal that the Native Americans, the Hispanics and the African Americans in particular failed to make it in the high positions of the company.

Last year, Maldonado said that he wanted things to change a bit when it came to Apple’s diversity, according to Bloomberg Business. He also said that not one of the diversity proposals made since 2000 was accepted. It is important to know that he was not asking that people should be fired or replaced. He was simply asking that more people should be added to the board in order to make it more diverse, which would not be unusual, especially since Apple is such a large company.

The executive team of Apple is made out of 18 members, of which only 3 members are women and one member is black. The board is made out of 8 members, of which only two members are women and one member is black.

The company’s officials said that the proposal is not necessary, since diversity and inclusion are the main values of Apple. Even though the number of women and black people decreased in 2015, Apple claimed that the company has been hiring more minorities and women than ever before.

According to Malli Gero, the president of the 2020 Women on Boards advocacy group, big companies like Apple should be more diverse, especially as many smaller companies lead by example. She also stated that giving the fact Apple has rejected a diversity proposal and that the lack of diversity is still a problem of the company, more action should be taken towards accomplishing better results in 2016.

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Apple Watch Could Make A Stand

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Apple Watch Could Make A Stand

We never thought the Apple Watch could make a stand. Yet here we are, after Black Friday, noticing that this was the event that Apple’s underwhelming gadget needed to set things right. While it will never be as awesome as the iPhone, the Apple Watch is now officially one of the best selling devices the company has ever had. However, this event actually shows us that the Watch will never have the potential that the company might have desired in the first place.

It appears that that the Swiss watch industry is going down while the Apple Watch one is going up up and away. Apple has proceeded to sell more than 10 million devices and 4 million of them were sold during this period. And if you are wondering what new brands we will be having in this particular area, the Apple Watch 2 is expected to arrive somewhere around summer or autumn next year. Maybe you have friends and family who will get attached to these devices.

The Apple Watch had a pretty rough start and the reactions that Apple had after its launch were quite ambiguous. The expectations were not as high as the iPhone’s, but the tech giant obviously wanted to hit the jackpot. Needless to say, things did not exactly go according to plan and the Watch ended up being a more or less irrelevant addition to the Apple collection.

It is also custom for Apple to pride on the number of devices they have sold and how much profit they made from the sales, but the Watch situation was different: Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, declared at the time that Apple would not be revealing any information so that they would not give any details to their competition. The answer seemed relevant, but this pretty much tells the world that numbers were not at all pretty.

There were even some leaked sources at the time which mentioned that Apple employees had some serious meetings in which they actually saw how bad the Watch was performing. Nonetheless, things did not get official at any point, but you could feel that Apple was not as strong as they thought they would be after the device’s release.

But the Apple Watch could make a stand and while is a temporary optimistic one, who knows if this year’s Black Friday might have given birth to a new tech trend that could last for a few years. Looks like we will have to come back to the subject in 2016 to see exactly how far the Watch has gone.

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Tim Cook Might Be Apple’s Biggest Problem

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Tim Cook Might Be Apple’s Biggest Problem

Tim Cook might be Apple’s biggest problem at the moment. Yes, we’ve all seen the graphics showing how Steve Jobs had poor numbers compared to Cook, but the truth is that Jobs had to do the hard part: he had to start the company, build all the concepts, find the people, build the mentality and create a big name for Apple. Cook just took the thing wrapped up and moved forward, but he did not work for anything that Apple has to offer today.

Let’s look at some of the greatest issues that Apple has to face right now: too big a market cap, investors who have absolutely no clue as to why they should invest in Apple or not and they have way too many projects coming up in the future, those “new projects” that Apple always prides itself with, but in fact offers the same thing with no observable tweaks.

It’s good that the new iPhone had all its pixels reworked and that you’ve never seen plastic done the same as in an iPhone 5C. Oh, and did we mention that Cook and his partners say that Apple made another 50.000 gazillion sales this year? Yes, they say so about every year. No surprise really.

Now there is no reason to directly blame Cook for what is happening to Apple. The market has been rather terrible this year compared to others, but let’s look at the people: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Staya Nadella, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Google/Alphabet’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

What do all of these people have, but Cook doesn’t? For starters, they are the geniuses in this era’s tech industry, these guys know what tomorrow has to offer, while Cook still offers stuff discovered yesterday. Have you heard about the under-promise/over-deliver concept? Everybody is doing it. Except Cook, of course. All of the other companies are making smart hires while Apple is still stagnating.

That’s not enough? How about active funders? Amazon, Google/Alphabet and Facebook excel at this chapter and you can see how well they perform because of them, but this is not exactly Cook’s fault.

Now with all due respect, Cook is not the guy who needs to be in charge of Apple, at least not now. You pretty much need someone who can predict what tomorrow has to offer and who can hold their ground in a company as promising as Apple is. Remember when we said that Tim Cook might be Apple’s biggest problem. Scratch that. He surely is.

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Russian University Takes Down iPhone Monument

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A St. Petersburg University took down an iPhone monument from its campus after Apple CEO Tim Cook announced his sexual orientation. Some claim that this decision springs from Russia’s ban on homosexual propaganda.

Russian media provided conflicting reports about the taking down of the iPhone monument on Monday. One report claimed that the monument had to be dismantled according to Russia’s federal law which is aimed at protecting its children from information presenting the rejection of traditional family values.

On the other hand, there were reports claiming that the decision had not been connected to Cook’s announcement and that dismantling the monument had been decided upon before Apple’s CEO announcement.

“There’s an official letter from ZEFS saying they’re dismantling it for renovation,”

a University spokesman told reporters.

The same spokesman said that future statements clarifying the issue would follow soon after, revealing why the monument was removed.

The monument’s dismantling came to be after a St. Petersburg lawmaker insisted that Apple’s CEO be banned from Russia for being gay. The same lawmaker originally sponsored the legislation inspiring Russia’s homosexual-propaganda ban. Vitaly Milonov, the lawmaker in question, made these statements last week.

A statement made by Milonov allegedly read:

“What could he [Cook] bring us? The Ebola virus, Aids, gonorrhea? They all have unseemly ties over there. Ban him for life.”

The monument was six-feet high and shaped as an iPhone.

“In Russia, gay propaganda and other sexual perversions among minors are prohibited by law,”

a statement in ZEFS read.

According to the same statement, the iPhone memorial was located in an area where young students and scholars would be directly exposed to such propaganda. The statement went on to say that Tim Cook had publicly called for sodomy.

President Putin explained that the reason why the gay propaganda ban was issued was only out of concern for young people and that members of the gay community would not suffer discrimination.

Apple Acquired Beats Electronics for $3 Billion

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Let’s take our minds off those numerous iPhone 6 rumors and take a look at what Apple’s been doing these days, because it’s big and important. It was announced that Apple acquired Beats Electronic for $3 billion ($2.6 billion in cash and $400 million in stock that will vest over time). Great news, don’t you think?

Apple Acquired Beats Electronics

Beats Electronics is a company founded in 2008 by producer and singer Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, chairman of Interscope Geffen A&M Records. It offers premium headphones, speakers and earphones, as well as the popular and patented Beats Audio software technology that is incorporated by smartphones and laptops. Another cool and innovative service that Beats has to offer to the public is a streaming music subscription service, Beats Music that focuses on providing personalized music experience. In short, Beats Music delivers the right music any time and for any situation. It’s a smart service, one that has so much more to offer the public.

Apple acquired Beats Electronics and the Beats co-founders will join Apple. Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services had this to say about the purchase in an official statement:

“Music is such an important part of Apple’s DNA and always will be. The addition of Beats will make our music lineup even better, from free streaming with iTunes Radio to a world-class subscription service in Beats, and of course buying music from the iTunes Store as customers have loved to do for years.”

Apple is expected to finalize the deal by the September 28 2014, which signifies the end of the fiscal year. The company will preserve the Beats brand and it will continue to operate the popular streaming service, Beats Music.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, called the deal a no-brainer, stressing the fact that Apple doesn’t always want to build everything on its own and that sometimes help is welcomed. Apple has acquired 27 companies over the last year. Tim Cook also had something to say about Beats joining Apple:

“Music is such an important part of all of our lives and holds a special place within our hearts at Apple. That’s why we have kept investing in music and are bringing together these extraordinary teams so we can continue to create the most innovative music products and services in the world”

What are your thoughts on this news? Do you think the fact that Apple acquired Beats Electronics is a smart move? Share your thoughts with us in the comment section below.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has “big plans” for 2014

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Apple has always been a company famed for its product launches, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad all were new products built off the back of old and boring ideas, with Cupertino reinventing the way the product works, refining and redesigning until it works just right.

The iPad was the last flashy product launch in 2011, the last year Steve Jobs would step on stage to deliver the new product to the masses. Since then it has been two years of iteration and a redesign of iOS7, the mobile operating system Apple ship every iPhone and iPad alongside.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook wants to break this yearly iteration, announcing big plans for 2014. In his goody bag could be anything from an Apple TV, to the iWatch, to simply bigger versions of both the iPad and iPhone with new performance enhancements.

Whatever the case, Apple wants to break the norm and show investors they are still a creative and exciting company, even without their leader Steve Jobs at the helm. The new Mac Pro and redesigned iOS show they have the flair and creativity for redesign and now we will see if they have the creativity for new markets.

Jobs was always known for pushing new teams to explore a certain market and product and would spend months if not years running through a single product, making sure everything from the hardware, to the software, to the services running alongside the device worked perfectly in tune with each other.

Tim Cook obviously is not this hands on leader and likes to delegate all jobs to specific employees and teams – even with his degree in engineering, Cook is a born businessman and loves to keep his eye on the cash flow, while also trying to make sure Apple keep to their high standards.

Apple CEO Tim Cook Strongly Criticizes OLED Displays, Calls Them Awful

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Apple CEO Tim Cook is certainly not one of the fans of OLED displays. He very strongly criticized the color saturation of the Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) displays and called them awful. He elaborated saying that if you are buying an item online and want to know what color it is, you should not depend on the color that you see on an OLED screen because the color may be distorted.

On the other hand Tim Cook had words of high praise for the Retina Display used in Apple devices. He said that this display certainly provides the user with a better experience and also noted that this display is two times as bright as OLED displays. This inference by Cook was actually a shot taken at the mobile devices that have OLED displays, especially the highly successful Samsung Galaxy S3 Smartphone.

When he was asked whether Apple will launch an iPhone having a larger display, Cook emphasized upon the great experience and brightness of the displays used by Apple devices. He refrained from discussing the company’s plans, however he criticized those companies who focus mainly on the specifications and size. He said that companies do this when they cannot provide the users with an amazing experience.

For instance, in the PC industry, companies lay a lot of emphasis on price and specifications. Cook said that Apple does not want to get into that kind of race. He stated that most people using electronic devices don’t know and don’t care about the speed of the processor used on the PC or mobile device that they are using. It does not matter as long as they have a great experience while using these devices.

According to him Apple gives a lot of attention to every little detail. He also believes that Apple aimed at providing its consumers the best display and has succeeded in doing so.