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Apple ties CEO bonus to stock performance

Apple on Friday modified its CEO compensation policy, potentially trimming how much Tim Cook will earn in bonuses over the next few years based on Apple's stock price.

This measure was approved by Apple's board on Friday, the company said, while noting that CEO Tim Cook was applying it to his existing and future stock awards.

In Cook's case, he's got serious incentive to stick around with some 800,000 restricted stock units that are set to finish vesting in annual chunks of 80,000 through the fall of 2021. That reward was previously time-based, meaning … Read more

Twitter to Paula Deen: H-word has more power than n-word

Twitter can be an ugly place.

Invective instantly rolls off the tongue and into 140 characters before the mind has been asked an opinion on its merit.

However, since the revelation that famous Southern cook Paula Deen allegedly admitted that she used the n-word (details embedded), at least some of the Twitterati decided to rise above base instincts and cook up something different: The Humor Kabob.

There appeared the hashtag #PaulasBestDishes.

And there, various people from around the world added a little sugar, a touch of salt, just the right amount of vinegar, and wrapped it around a skewer.

Angelo … Read more

Tim Cook maintains Steve Jobs' Beatles business model

Tim Cook likes to talk about Apple's values and the virtues of teamwork. At the Worldwide Developers Conference this week, he told the 5,000 developers in attendance to build products for Apple's platforms that trigger emotional responses, such as "delight," "surprise," "love," and "connection" for users.

One of the videos shown at WWDC, and released as a TV ad, introduces the world to Apple's value system: "We spend a lot of time on a few great things...until every idea we touch...enhances each life it touches.&… Read more

iOS 7 looks great, but can it lure this Android user?

iOS 7 is still not quite the Droid I've been looking for in an iPhone.

I've been an Android devotee for about three years now, but ever since the introduction of the iPhone 4S and Siri -- something totally new running on a nice piece of hardware -- I've been considering making the switch to iOS. As intriguing and enticing as the 4S was, I balked due to the lack of LTE. The iPhone 5 fixed that, but by then iOS seemed stale to me, and the lack of any major new innovations kept me tapping away on my aging Droid Razr and led me to declare that the iPhone and the ascendant Apple of this century's first decade had peaked. (Actually, the phrase I used was "jumped the shark" -- I suggest reading the original post for an explanation.)

So I watched with great interest on Monday as Apple unveiled a reboot to its mobile operating system in the form of iOS 7, which is being hailed as beautiful and ambitious. CNET editors have dubbed it a "radical new look" and part of Apple's "quest for perfection and the devotion to creating objects of profound and enduring beauty," as our Dan Farber put it.

From what I've seen of the OS, you'll hear no disagreement from me, but I'm still left comparing Apples and Androids.… Read more

Social media users like the sound of iTunes Radio

Apple finally unveiled its music streaming service, iTunes Radio, and the social Web approves.

Social media analytics company NetBase found that 94 percent of social media users had positive comments about iTunes Radio following the product's release during Apple's WWDC developers conference on Monday, which means only 6 percent had negative comments.

The streaming service, which is tied into Apple's popular ecosystem, was highly discussed in the media in recent weeks as a competitor to services like Pandora and Spotify.

NetBase said iTunes Radio received the most positive comments among all of Apple's products announced on … Read more

Is Marissa Mayer worth more than Tim Cook?

You can never underestimate the competitiveness of your average CEO.

You can also never underestimate the business sense of charities who know when they're on to an easy earner.

Tuesday brings news of Marissa Mayer trying to see whether lunch with her might be more valuable than coffee with Tim Cook.

Recently, someone who clearly values power over food paid $610,000 to have coffee with the Apple CEO. This was all organized by auction site CharityBuzz, which guilts people into doing exciting things and paying for them hugely.

Now, similar forward-thinkers are being asked how much it's … Read more

Apple's quest for perfection and enduring beauty

Product introductions are usually predictable, orchestrated events. Company executives in jeans stalk a football stadium-sized stage and let their products do the talking: "This is our great new product, here are the specs, and now we'll demo some of the features. It's better than anything else on the market, and it's available soon for this price in these configurations. It's really amazing."

Apple execs did their fair share of stalking the stage Monday with well-rehearsed, Steve Jobsian product intro panache, demoing alternately what they described as "incredible" and "stunning" products … Read more

Facebook post about hungry child gets school bus driver fired

Let's role play.

You're a school bus driver at Haralson County Middle School in Georgia. A 6th-grader gets on your bus and complains he's hungry.

You ask him why he's hungry. The kid says he was 40 cents short on his lunch card, so he was denied food.

When this scenario played out for bus driver Johnny Cook, he took to his Facebook page to express his shock and offer to help any child who is short of lunch money.

However, as CBS Atlanta reports, the school wasn't too pleased with this expression of concern. … Read more

Tim Cook let his gut make decision on Apple job in '98

Despite Tim Cook's own analysis and the advice of his friends, the Apple chief executive let his gut make the final decision 15 years ago on whether to take a job at the then-struggling Mac maker.

Cook, who joined Apple in 1998 as a senior vice president of worldwide operations, revealed his thinking on the matter during an onstage interview in April at his alma mater, the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. Even though he considers himself an analytical engineer at heart, he said he often trusts his intuition for important decisions, calling his Apple decision "… Read more