Two Years Without Steve Jobs: Has Apple Crumbled?
Has Apple Crumbled? is an infographic from WhoIsHostingThis.com that takes a close look at the business and financial results of the last couple of years under Tim Cook’s leadership.
With the passing of Steve Jobs in 2011, many tech industry experts were quick to predict that his company, Apple, Inc., would soon falter without its charismatic founder at the helm. Yet in the years since Jobs’ successor, Tim Cook, has taken the wheel, Apple has not only continued on, but flourished.
The design starts off well, but gets lazy towards the bottom with a number of statistics shown in text only, and not visualized. Readers will perceive these values as less important and visually skim right over them. With a mix of visualized data and text only data, the text only values are perceived as secondary information and often ignored.
I really like the character illustrations. They are minimal, but still easily recognizable. The same goes for the product icons. Minimal but easily recognizable.
The footer does a good job with sources and the company logo, but should have also included the URL link back to the original infographic landing page so readers can find the full-size original version.
Found on MacTrast.com
apple, business, comparison, financial, history 
Reader Comments (2)
- 2% higher popularity. the triangle makes it look like a much bigger difference because it isn't to scale. Also, they show this data point again in the next level down.
- apparently in the last 12 months the shares lost 25% of their value. but despite this being a very easy thing to put on a graph, they did not. instead they put this text directly under a graph showing sales growth.
- iWatch purchase intent. the text first asks "how likely would people be to buy" and says 7:1. the graphic shows 6:1. and the reader needs to go to the small text to see it's actually 1% and 7%. and showing a ratio like this implies some kind of volume, but instead it's a ratio of intent, and very low intent at that.
- switching users assumes all iPhone buyers who used to be on Android had a Samsung. and does the infographic mean "previous owners" or just that it was the one most recently beforehand?
- OS share, again, are they conflating Android with Samsung?
- coffee. again, they ask a question and do not actually answer, but instead show something tangential. who would you rather share coffee with != how much is a rich individual someone willing to pay to share coffee.
- 2%: triangles implicitly use non-zero baseline, and don't show that, to visually communicate a much larger difference than 2%
- moreover, use of 2-D objects like triangles vs. 1-D bars further distorts difference
- 77%: circles are showing 77% larger diameters which produce 1.77*1.77= 3.1 (310%) area difference
- Share Price: totally confusing
- Switching: 20%/7% is best represented by 3 persons/ 1 person, not 3 and 2
Overall, this is best seen as infographics gone awry with graphics superseding info.