The biggest thing that Ahrendts did was merge the online and physical stores. People forget that before she came around there was very little overlap. If you bought something online and you wanted to return it you had to ship it back instead of going to a store. It was one of the things that Cook wanted to get done by retail.
Katie Cotton’s departure was in no doubt at least partly to do with her health. She died not too long after leaving Apple.
It also isn’t clear to me how much Phil Schiller was “sidelined” vs him just wanting to retire.
Funny how that seemingly forgettable caveat is seen as a huge achievement for an executive. As a customer my biggest issue with the apple store is not the return process. It is the lack of them for the population of apple customers given how long it takes to get attended to and the difficulty of securing genius bar appointments. It worked alright 15 years ago but the stores needed to expand along with iPhone market share and they did not at all.
There’s probably some threshold they’ve reached at which just adding more stores doesn’t generate any incremental revenue. So you’ve got to wait a bit longer, well, where else are you going to go?
And that is exactly the difference between old Apple and New Apple. Old Apple uses Apple Store as experience and services. It is part of the Apple ecosystem. It is not another "real estate property" like other Retail brands that is solely measured by incremental revenue.
Exactly. The entire thing no doubt cost money. That is why we were paying $2000 for a two year old intel chip mbp 10 years ago because the service aspect was a big part of the value proposition.
The "idea" to merge online and physical stores was way before even Ahrendts arrival. I remember it was a common topic during even Steve Jobs era. But it wasn't done because I think it wasn't a priority. People forget iPhone could lose out to Android like how Mac lost to Windows.
Katie Cotton passed away in 2023. She left in 2013/2014. I think that is quite some time after Apple.
Katie Cotton’s departure was in no doubt at least partly to do with her health. She died not too long after leaving Apple.
It also isn’t clear to me how much Phil Schiller was “sidelined” vs him just wanting to retire.