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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

I think the Apple future may not look good for a few reasons:

1. iPhones units sold stalled for 3 years in a row. This means the company need to seek every year some trick to earn more from each phone. It is not obvious if they'll be able to do for a long time.

2. Top Android devices are improving and Google Pixel 2 is really an incredible device that is making some iOS users switching. I've no data but my nerd friends are doing this a lot, and sometimes what you see in the nerd-sphere in a few years happens in the normal market.

3. They are struggling at competing in the space of the biggest ecosystems around phones. Cloud, computational photography, assistant.

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You are joking, right?

1. They have grown since last 2nd quarter, and are still pulling in ridiculous profits.

2. No one is buying the Pixel, they will probably sell 5 million this year if lucky. Less than 1/10 what Apple sold in this quarter alone. The S9 has also been struggling.

3. Cloud has grown.

> I've no data but my nerd friends are doing this a lot, and sometimes what you see in the nerd-sphere in a few years happens in the normal market

"Nerds" are the group most adept at switching back and forth so your anecdote really isn't useful in the slightest. And the numbers really don't show a systemic move back to Android.

Also this group may be trend-setters because it does happen sometimes. But far more often it doesn't. Otherwise we would've seen everyone cancel Facebook, use Bitcoin for all payments and vote for Bernie Sanders.

> They are struggling at competing in the space of the biggest ecosystems around phones. Cloud, computational photography, assistant.

iMessages is a killer platform that only exists on iOS. iCloud simply just works for most people storing photos and backing up their devices. Portrait Mode has been a key marketing differentiator in the photography space. And whilst Siri isn't as good as Alexa/Google Assistant in some areas it is better in others.

Just a slight point: iMessage is only relevant in Australia and US. In Europe, its WhatsApp, in China, WeChat, in Japan, LINE, etc. iMessage is not a competitive advantage in the markets where Apple can extract greatest growth going forward.

It's incredible this comment was downvoted. Is verifiable truth.

iMessage is good...for now. I don't know about others, but more and more I notice little quirks and bugs, like messages being out of order, and syncing with macOS can be iffy. I really hope they work to improve it in the next year or two, because it's starting to wear on me a bit.

No way.

They don’t tell you the longevity of devices. From what I see, iPhones are cutting off the oxygen from android. My kids school is what use as a reference... literally 80/20 iPhone to non iPhone. The SE and used phones make it more attractive than throwaway androids that are un-upgradable.

Enterprises, same thing. I talk to a few companies/gov with an aggregate total of probably 200k phones. 95% iPhone.

Google is amazing at services. But the OEM bullshit, carrier concessions are hurting them. My guess is that they will make a Chrome phone to fix that. Google Photos alone is a killer app when they do that.

The future looks good for their services revenue considering the current growth momentum and the 1.3 billion active Apple devices they can sell services to.

2. Here's one nerd who made the exact opposite jump from Android to iOS in 2017-2018, also from misc Linux machines to Apple. But personal anecdotes don't really matter, do they?

After half a year of this, I'm quite happy. The competition will have to make some miracles to make me want to change back.

I agree that Apple has revenue challenges, and that the smartphone market has fully matured.

However, I think there is a compelling future where the iPhone is the heart of a constellation of devices that we use everyday. Actually, that is not even the future, that is the present. The sheer power of the devices in our pockets is only just now being realized.

In such a world, Apple is poised to have significant competitive advantages over others. That is, hardware and software integration. The next 5-10 years are going to be as exciting as the original smartphone revolution.

I still think there are huge potential market for iPhone and Mac. Especially on the Mac, the problem is Apple is a little slower without Steve Jobs.

I think the past two to three years they have been way too distracted with Apple Park, arguably the biggest Apple product since the iPhone. I think next two to three years will be important to show if they could really steer well without Steve. But I am already not liking their touchbar and quality issues on mac and FaceID, notch on iPhone X

2. No, iOS people are not switching. They are staying but not buying newer models due to lack of innovation. Personally I would never switch to the cesspool named Android. Laggy, malware infested garbage

I switched to Android due to no 4" phone options, there's less options on the Android side too though. And the incredible push of Apple Music and removal of the headphone jack were just the icing on the cake of switching.

However, the experience of the Samsung Galaxy S8 (which was just to get me familiar with the platform while I looked for a better phone) was incomprehensibly poor. People keep telling me that it's Samsungs software that's crappy but it's really unacceptable for a flagship phone to be this crappy.

> Personally I would never switch to the cesspool named Android. Laggy, malware infested garbage

Yeah, those sound sketchy to me too. Perhaps you could switch to the non-laggy non-malwareinfested non-garbage android phones.

> Laggy

At least Google isn't making your phone laggy on purpose! (too soon?)

Joking aside, there are a lot of sketchy, crappy Android devices, but there are also some decent ones (e.g. straight from Google). I suspect you've only been exposed to the crappy ones.

Google has tried to release a phone before and they fail hard. The phone stops getting updates. If you want an android device with updates you have to get a BlackBerry.

Android OS is horrible because it's always different. From release to release. From phone to phone. Everyone has their own little tidbit to add and makes it non uniform.

> The phone stops getting updates

What? They provide major OS updates for 2 years, and security updates for 3 years.

> Android OS is horrible because it's always different

Are you referring to OEM modifications to Android? It's really hard to follow your rant.

> They provide major OS updates for 2 years,

In iOS land, 2 years is just getting started for OS updates - generally you get 5 years or so. That's one of the reasons so many iPhones get handed down and resold compared to Android devices.

Hence the stalled iphones sales growth. I don't disagree that having a phone that is supported by the manufacturer for so long is a good thing, I very much agree with this! But if the manufacturer loses incentive to do so, then don't expect them to continue doing it for long.

You mean that time when Samsung and practically all major Android makers cheated at benchmarks? https://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/state-of-cheating-in-and...

1. Maturing smartphone market.

4.No other growth drivers in sight after the failure of apple watch to become huge.

I think it would be highly surprising if anyone invented a new product category at the scale of smartphones any time in the next few decades.

> No other growth drivers in sight after the failure of iwatch to become huge

Apple Watch is the number one smart watch.

It sold 8 millions unit last quarter (a rise of 10.3%) and represents about half of all smart watch sales. You would have to be deluded to think that it isn't anything other than a huge success.

Apple watch is successful in smart watch market. Smart watch market seems not to be a billions-unit market. That's what I mean.

> Smart watch market seems not to be a billions-unit market.

How many billions unit markets are there out there?

One. There is one, and Apple makes almost all of the money in that market.

Two—don't forget about ballpoint pens.

yup...

1. iphone is a mature product.

2. no onvious new groundbreaking product releases on the horizon (a watch is not it).

3. desktops are dying, and their replacements, the ipads, are stagnating.

4. intel screwed them with processor roadmaps intel had no hopes of meeting (cannonlake, anyone?)

5. no longer visionary on the future of computing (seem to be chasing all the flavors of the month lately).

6. services growth is a lagging indicator on the health of the ecosystem (or walled garden, if you prefer).

7. product and design mishaps all over (dongles, broken keyboards, homepod's a dud so far).

8. waning customer loyalty (customers are staying with apple not from excitement but from apathy in the space)

9. the low hanging fruit in ubiquitous, mobile and personal computing have been plucked (just the hard stuff remains).

i'm not suggesting all is lost, but from my vantage point outside the company, it's concerning. airpods and the pencil seem most promising in the short term to me. airpods hold the promise of voice computing (if siri could get her act together), and the pencil promises to be the first techology to truly kill off paper, but neither of those hold any certainty.

The Watch plus AirPods = the easier 2/3ds of a pervasive computing system. Audio plus haptic feedback is significant. Add a good set of AR glasses, which is the hard part, and you have something really interesting.

Siri needs improving, though, no question.

yes, but pervasive AR is not coming any time soon.

i think the next step is getting a computer to be contextually useful through an audio interface, rather than sight and touch. haptic is helpful but i don't see how it can encode enough useful yet intuitive info to be a standalone interface.

the problem is not that apple is not working on this (since it is). it's just that it's not obvious that apple has a clear vision of how to get to the future. they are chasing all the shiny things at once, throwing them all at the wall to see which one(s) sticks.

(to be clear, this is not an endorsement of google and android btw. they're even worse in this regard, but they're taking more of a microsoft strategy of being all things to all people anyway.)

> 6. services growth is a lagging indicator on the health of the ecosystem (or walled garden, if you prefer).

How very convenient that you seem to think you can handwave away the ridiculously huge growth in services by saying it's a lagging indicator. No chance at all that it could be partly due to new and more compelling services offerings (music, icloud)?

You sound almost as confident as the 'analysts' who predicted a down quarter with a failing and cancelled iPhone X.

the point i was making is that, yes, the services business is growing, but that's basically reaping the fruits sown by the iphone/ipad business (and macs and ipods before that), so it's lagging as an indicator of the trajectory of the company.

apple is the best at understanding what ordinary consumers want out of computing devices, and services are very complementary to that. but i'm skeptical that services should be the future of apple, because that's straying away from what they're best at. services as the long term strategy is a (potentially dangerous) distraction, and apple should keep its eye on the consumer electronics ball.

i wouldn't mention such things if i didn't think it had merit to consider (as a customer, investor, competitor, or simply a spectator). we're on hacker news, not sitting in a trading pit trying to eke out 47 nanoseconds of information asymmetry, so take it for what it's worth.

Desktops are dying while they realized highest Mac revenue ever this quarter? Not following the logic.

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