Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord
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* If I open the case near my phone, it automatically pairs and shoes battery levels.
* They sound decent for earbuds (not in-ear plugs which I hate)
* Lasts reasonable amount of time on its battery and quickly charges while in case.
I could not get this experience ever before and honestly, even after I have had it for a year. I don't know of a better competition to it.
But, letting the Mac lineup vanquish with old internals for years and gouging prices on soldered SSDs and memory - no excuse, that's just shitty.
As an Android user, airpods didn't offer that much functionality, was $160+, looked like qtips sticking out of my ear, and the sound wasn't that great either.
I think the $40 enacfires might have had a better bass than the airpods. I've gotten intimate with these products down to Bluetooth compatibility and chipsets. In my opinion, it's a lot of hype at a high price point when it costs nowhere close. I'm mind blown by the marketing genius. At the same time, I will never go back to wired, wireless is amazing. Companies sure are milking this new technology though and it's just getting started.
Walmart has wired earbuds for under $5, which are quite small (they fit in your ears), have perpetual battery life (because they have no battery!), the same functionality (they play sound, in your ears), great range and great audio quality.
And you won't have to replace them in two years. Isn't that great?
And even if the airpods aren’t worth the investment for you personally, the fact that Apple is innovating here will hopefully push other manufacturers to innovate and maybe someday all Bluetooth headphones will be as painless, even ones that are significantly cheaper.
As an analogy, I hated the iPhone in its first few years on the market. I was perfectly happy with my windows mobile smartphone with its QVGA resistive stylus-based touchscreen, enormous thick physical keyboard. I thought everyone that paid $800 for a sexy but functionally limited iPhone was a sheep. But Apple forced the smartphone industry to play by a different rulebook, and now I’m pretty excited with the levels of innovation that happens across all manufacturers.
It's so drastically better than anything on the market, that I'll immediately buy a new pair if I lose my current ones. I wouldn't even think twice about the price.
There is no other headphones on the market where I can play 1:1 basketball for hours, have the headphones never fall out, and I don't even notice I have them on the entire time. They're a part of me. I literally forget that I have them in my ears, and they easily switch between all of the devices in my life in a way no other headphones do. It's a signficant quality of life improvement for me.
Window Maker hasn't changed in a very long time.
Being able to use your phone as a camera to take a photo directly into a document in Pages on your computer is a pretty cool trick.
Having your airpods pairing sync between your devices and easily jump to the device you're using is really well done (from what I hear, I don't have them myself).
A phone getting more than two years of software updates may not be flashy, but I'm more interested in that than anything else that phone manufacturers are doing.
The old Mac Mini started at $499 with a slow processor even when it was new, a slow hard drive and 4GB of RAM. That was a configuration that no one should have bought. The cheapest previous Mac Mini that anyone should have bought was $699.
The other thing I think people are failing to realize, is who is the Mac Mini for? It used to be for Windows switchers who wanted to plug in a small box to their existing mouse/keyboard/monitor situation. It was an introduction to the world of OS X. Nowadays, who uses the Mac Mini? Developers who need to compile in Xcode, and probably some creatives. The device serves a much different purpose nowadays, since most of your casual Apple users can get away with an iPad or a MB/MBA.
Personally, the new Mac Mini really appeals to me, regardless of price. I've been using a 2012 era mac mini machine, and the current bottle neck is the CPU. If I can spend $700 today, and have a capable macOS device for another 6-7 years, with some RAM upgrades, I think that's well worth it.
Apple's strength, be it when they are doing it well or not, has always been UX.
back when it was mac os x versus windows xp, sure, apple was well ahead of everyone else. that isn't true anymore, but people still claim it.
Unless you're holding it wrong.
Or trying to use it in some way contrary to corporate policy.
Or trying to fix it.
In the last two cases, you realize the rest of that aphorism: It Just Works For Apple.
One day I wondered what happens if it can see two paired devices - does it forget one? Is there some unusably awful UX? Does it brick them altogether?
So I paired the Linux laptop. The dongle (which says "Connected" when I turn it on normally near the phone) now says "Second. Device. Connected" when it can also see the laptop. It appeared as one of the output options in the laptop's audio settings. If you play music on the phone, or receive a call, the music on the laptop stops, and you can take the call (or listen to music) instead.
Essentially, with the cheapest available product it appears to be as you say "completely painless". What exactly are Airpods / Apple doing here that makes it worth the extra? Maybe the voice telling you what's going on is nicer?
How long till Apple start putting their A-series chips in Macs?
My bet is that over the years iPad Pro will expand to do more and more of the jobs that people traditionally use MacBooks (or laptops in general) to do. We'll eventually see a world where most people have iPads, not laptops - thereby relying on A-series chips, not Intel, to get their work done. iPad sales are already encroaching Mac sales, and Apple already acknowledges that for most people, the iPad is enough to be their primary computer or soon will be (you can see this in their communications and commercials).
I know it might be difficult for a somewhat technical (and maybe a little bit older) community like HN to imagine, but this is one of my strong beliefs with regards to Apple's product lineup. I truly think the iPad Pro is the dark horse that no one will see coming (especially given that Apple themselves hadn't really focused on iPad deeply for the first couple years of its existence).
I think people have used iOS long enough to see that it's pretty limited as far as file management goes. The great multitasking of the iPad is still limited to split screening just two apps, a big step down in productivity from even classic MacOS of the 90s.
Whether or not the iPad pro has good hardwear is irrelevant.
What matters is that it is missing and extremely important feature, which is a mouse and keyboard.
I don't care how powerful a keyboard is if I can't use a physical keyboard and mouse for it.
Power can't beat UX, and boy is the keyboard good UX when you compare it to tablets or phones.
I know these are synthetic benchmarks, but it's incredible to see the A12X outperform the iMac 27" Retina... These chips have the potential to blow the doors off of Intel's Core i7/i9 while having 2x the battery life.
What most people call a Mac? I'm betting 2020.
If you expand your thought a bit, you could say they already have the A-series chips in a Mac with the new iPad Pros. It looks like before long Adobes creative suite will be on the iPad Pro. It has a keyboard, can hook up to external monitors, etc... And, while it still would not work for most people on HN, it is getting very close to a full computer replacement for many.
Moore's Law truly ending would cause a lot of upheaval. Is causing, but luckily a lot of the industry has shifted focus to mobile anyway, where advancements continue to accelerate for now.
I agree it doesn’t excuse the lack of attention to Mac hardware though. That’s something I find absolutely baffling; I don’t understand the reason why they’re not periodically releasing newer Macs instead of letting whole chunks of the product line rot. I get that consumer devices are more profitable, but I struggle to think that they wouldn’t still make a handsome sum of money. The product lineup is still kind of spotty and weird. That said, it’s possible that the recent releases and upcoming Mac Pro will mark a bit of a change of pace on this front.
It's a fine big pile of beans financially, but ambitions for the future UX and brand image - including support - seem to be shrinking rather than expanding.
Edit: Samsung/Microsoft/Google are free to come up with their own ecosystem and quality hardware devices that don't have the drawbacks that Apple's do. But for some reason they don't.
Microsoft are adding headphones to the Surface range very soon, early reviews are very positive.
and it hasn't been for a long time. Apple was at their peak imo with the MacBook pro a generation or two back. They took out the disk drive (everyone said that was radical, but hadn't used it in years) and worked with the single piece of aluminum. Nowadays, that's not just familiar, it's pedestrian. There's plenty of options in the PC world that have that. What has apple done since? Removed magsafe and usb a??? Made the worst laptop keyboard to be on a flagship in memory?
It used to be that Apple was the only place you could get great design, a phenomenal screen, and good battery life in the same package. But other manufacturers (especially Dell, Lenovo, and Microsoft) have seriously stepped up.
The tech press cares a whole lot about having a steady stream of new and shiny things. But I think most people want to live in a world where their relationship to technology involves just buying the best one you can afford at the time and use it until it either stops working or is no longer adequate to your needs. Then you repeat.
Banking on loyalty isn't a bad thing. It means people think your product is reliable and served them well the last time they made the purchase.
These are all open product frontiers, and the next+++(+) iPad Pro is going to become increasingly irrelevant unless Apple develops a strong lead in at least some of them.
You can see the movement being made in a few of these, but there's no evidence so far of any likely game changers in the pipeline - just slimmer and more minimal hardware, with a few OS tweaks.
I just wish they had decent objective quality numbers like I can find for even fairly cheap wired headphones via InnerFidelity. Anyone know if these are widely published for any of the wireless headphones?
https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/apple/airpods-wire...
They have most truly wireless earphones, but the OP Bullets aren't on there yet.
This is my biggest worry with wireless - paying a lot more money for a lot less in the quality department. Thanks for the link though, seems like good data and I'll definitely check out some other options.
I love 'em, and I want them to be better :)
They were designed to be used whilst people are walking around doing everyday things. That includes being near traffic where cancelling all of the noise can kill you.
Expect them to do noise cancelling in over ear form as part of Beats brand similar to 1000MX3 and QC35.
The Apple ecosystem itself is innovative and I don't think there's a single company that does it better.
They still lead in interfaces (biometrics...FaceID) and multi-touch gestures.
I don't use Siri, but I'm glad they are developing that technology in a way that doesn't flat-out violate the privacy of their users. I just hope all the criticism comparing Siri versus Google Assistant and Cortana don't push them to change that posture.
It feels like Apple hate is becoming a meme. You can certainly criticize the company... their product line is becoming confusing, but to say they "used" to be an innovator is ignorant.
Hasn't it always been, though? This probably comes off as conspiracy-theoretic, but I feel like there's a real financial incentive to keep their stock prices as in-flux as possible to allow for proper buy-in/cash-out gains.
By far the most common cause of Apple hate I see is what appears to be consumers who are essentially disgruntled that none of Apple's products are targeted at their own use case: eg. gamers who always decried the Mac Pro because they wanted a cheap traditional desktop, not a workstation; or people who wish Apple was competing in the $500 laptop market, or the 8+lbs mobile workstation or gaming laptop market. A large portion of complaints about Apple hardware being overpriced can be traced back to misunderstandings about what Apple's actually selling and how it differs from the Dell that somebody tries to compare it to. (Of course, there are plenty of things that Apple does over-charge for.)
Next most common are probably the people who despise the "walled garden". They're quite vocal in these parts of the web, but I doubt they outnumber the previous category of Apple detractors.
Anybody who thinks Apple isn’t innovating is an ignorant jackass.
Of course let's count the number of years it took them to get there from the newton. You can't just shit out a new groundbreaking ecosystem/product every year like clockwork. If you try 99% of those will be huge misses.
And the level of sophistication and complexity in the Series 4 version is really impressive e.g. ECG, Heart Rate Monitor, Siri, Apple Pay.
huh...not a joke
I think that title is still held by Samsung's Note 9 stylus.
The face is not a particularly good biometric modality - its main use is identification without user cooperation.
Iris recognition wins in pretty much every category.
Also, good luck finding a phone that doesn’t do that.
> Also, good luck finding a phone that doesn’t do that.
Not a good defense of amoral behavior.
Perhaps the worst one is that you cannot easily unlock your phone while it lays on a conference room table to see the contents of a message. You need to picking it up and point it at your face. Likewise when using the phone while it is in a stand/holder.
The one and only benefit I found is during the winter, it is easier to unlock the phone with gloves on.
Both of them are terrible for security.
Please stop propagating this falsehood, or at least accept that it comes with caveats. Biometric ID on Apple devices is likely to be a significant improvement for many users.
If you're trying to secure your data from the NSA, carry a flip phone and turn it off and throw it in the freezer before you have any sensitive in-person conversations. Also have all of your sensitive in-person conversations right next to a loud white noise generator (i.e. on the seashore). And memorize all of your confidential information. And always carry a highly reliable suicide method in case you get captured and interrogated.
I'm not being funny here, these are literally the precautions that people take against state-level espionage.
I think the OP is signaling they were already aware of the threat model point before your comment.
[1]: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/hackers-trick-apple-iphone-x...
With therapy.
Here's a contemporary article doubting it: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/hacke...
Given how sensitive FaceID is I don't think this is a realistic bypass approach. Not that it was even confirmed anyway.
However, I recognize this is an edge case.
But in situations where it fails I find that it fails harder and repeatedly, which makes you want to choose a simple password (perhaps that's why Apple tucks away the alphanumeric option). When a phone is laying flat on a desk, you can lean your face over the phone. When your head is on a pillow, you can lift your head off the pillow. When the lighting conditions aren't good, you can just turn on the lights and position the phone at that "magic distance" until it unlocks. But if you don't it'll just fail again and again.
As a minor point, I'm surprised that you prefer to double press while looking at your phone, versus having a fingerprint reader on the back so you can unlock your phone in one gesture of hand toward the payment system.
Huh? Face ID uses infrared. It doesn't need external light.
You're right about the pillow thing, but the way I see it, if you can't lift your head off a pillow you probably shouldn't be using your phone!
The double-press for Apple Pay? In many situations you don't actually have to do this. Just place the phone up against the store's reader, then look directly at the phone and Apple Pay will activate without further interaction.
On London Underground and Buses, though, that's awkward and might hold up the queue, so I do double-tap to activate Apple Pay in advance before getting to the reader. But that's certainly no more difficult than with Touch ID, when you had to double-tap the home button.
(Also, you don't have to double-press and look simultaneously. The double-press will activate Apple Pay, then a quick glance at the phone will unlock it for payment. You then have a minute or so to actually touch it on the card reader).
Apple did not need to introduce FaceID... seems to me a non-inventing landlord would have just ridden TouchID as long as possible.
that's easy to do if you're driving a car and you get pulled over, but what if a cop stops you on the street? reaching into your pocket is asking to get shot.
The one that does is to rapidly press the power button 5 times.
considering a random scribble on a receipt or check is enough to authorize/authenticate a transaction, that bar is pretty low.
Somewhat like Windows Hello, that also existed, based on technology from the Xbox Kinect?
> Two months ago, Apple announced an ECG sensor for your wrist.
Okay, so this is cool. But, putting on my paramedic hat for a moment, there is _SO_ much disinformation about what this does and what it is capable of detecting, what the difference is between FDA _clearance_ and _approval_, etc.
It can detect A-fib. This is a common, but usually not life threatening medical condition. It's good to have it diagnosed, but even undiagnosed, many people live happy lives blisfully unaware of it. Another way you can potentially recognize A-fib? It's not quite as fancy as the Apple Watch, though: put your fingers on your radial pulse by your wrist. Feel yourself skipping every fourth beat? That _could_ be a problem (though there are other diagnoses).
The Apple Watch does not and _cannot_ (despite ill-informed articles by Cnet and others) take the place of a "12 lead" ECG (random detail, in the medical field, ECG usually refers to an echocardiogram, an ultrasound imaging, and EKG, for electrocardiogram, is most commonly used for what the Apple Watch and other devices are doing).
From Cnet[1]: "Traditional EKG machines have 12 leads with electrodes that are attached all over your body to measure the electrical signals. Apple compares what the Apple Watch Series 4 does to a single-lead EKG, which research shows is just as effective at measuring the heart's electrical signals as a 12-lead machine."
This is flat out and factually wrong. The linked research shows nothing of the sort, and tries to walk someone through using a single lead system multiple times (up to 10), to get the full results of a 12 lead (if you've ever wondered why a 12 lead EKG only requires 10 physical leads, think of them more as 'axes', measured multiple ways, i.e. from lead 1 to lead 4, lead 1 to 5, etc), and then being able to aggregate them manually. For one, this requires moving the end points of the leads multiple times, something you could not do with the Apple Watch (or, to be clear and fair, any other watch), unless you're planning on holding it in many different spots in sequence (which then has issues of being more a time lapse, than a snapshot).
What does that mean? It can't diagnose impending heart attacks, nor heart disease, valve problems, circulatory disorders, and it likely never will, especially with current hardware.
This is also why it's obtained FDA clearance, not approval. To use a metaphor, it's more like a fitness device on steroids, so to speak, with some minor overlap into general health. But not that much more.
[1]: https://www.cnet.com/how-to/apple-watch-ekg-what-is-ekg/
The criticism always comes back to how impactful the original iPhone and iPod were. Apple has failed to live up to that standard ever since, but to be honest it's an impossible standard to be held to.
Bloomberg is in the midst of a credibility-destroying fight with Apple over a sensational story that no other journalists can corroborate. Bloomberg has dug in, staking their reputation on Apple being wrong.
Seemingly in response Bloomberg... publishes a hand-wavy piece of cultural criticism about the meaning of Apple doing iterative design?
Don't worry, Apple can survive some criticism.
I don't think there's a conspiracy. I don't know whether Bloomberg or Apple are right. I didn't comment on that. But I do think this article and the lack of a disclosure is a horrible look for Bloomberg.
P.S. it's even worse that the hypocrite fans don't callout when the paid-for praise happens without disclaimer. And that happens way more often.
I agree with you—if a company advertises with a given outlet and journalists write stories about that company, positive or negative, I'd like to know about it. Unlike in this case, there is the supposed "separation of church and state" that protects newsrooms from the advertising side of these businesses. But I'm skeptical that works perfectly in practice.
But this is something else entirely. There's no firewall between Bloomberg's editors and... Bloomberg's editors.
So, when SJ came back to Apple, he reorganized their (then at the time) computer lines into more streamlined ones. Something like (I might get some of the names wrong), into consumer/pro and portable/desktop
iBook/Powerbook, iMac/Powermac
Now look at their line now
What the F is an iPhone XR? Is the XS "better" than the X or not? Why are there 2 iPad Pros? Is an iPad 4 better than an iPad? Which one is which?
Not to mention the dongles, USB-C mess, etc
To your point, you can actually buy 2 different Macbook Airs from their official shop, clicking through the glossy introduction of the one released last week, 5th generation i5 or 8th generation i5 with TouchID, slim bezel, USB C etc
Expanding SKUs was also a Jobs decision. He cut the computer line back to the quadrants in the late 90s as a way to triage the company. But later he oversaw the introduction of multiple new product lines, models, sizes, and color combinations.
Critics fretted about focus when he introduced the Cube, when he introduced the iPod, when he introduced the Macbook Air, when he introduced the iPad, when he introduced the Xserve, when he introduced the Hi-Fi. Some of them worked, some of them didn't. The ones that worked, really worked well though.
iMac SE / iBook SE iMac Aluminum - Core2/i3/i5/i7 20, 21, 24, 27 iTools/.Mac/MobileMe/iCloud iPod Mini/Shuffle/Nano/Touch 3rd 4th 5th gen USB1/USB2/FireWire400/800/30-pin/ . . iPhone XS/XSMax/XR lightning/usb-c
Apple has stopped including strings like "2.4GHz Core 2 Duo/2GB/256MB VRAM/160GB 5400rpm", but then only half of that is accurate for the machine I just read that off of, because of upgrades. (And that label was only accessible by pulling out the battery.)
>What the F is an iPhone XR? Is the XS "better" than the X or not?
Somewhat agree about the XR, though I guess the idea is it's one less than an S, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and say their "S" naming scheme has been consistent since it was introduced after the iPhone 4.
> Why are there 2 iPad Pros?
Steve once said netbooks were dead, then released a laptop in exactly that form factor (11 in MBA). Clearly there was market demand for it, and I assume their must be demand for both sizes here as well.
> Is an iPad 4 better than an iPad?
Agree here, they've changed this particular convention a lot, but looks like we're settling on Pro and base.
> Not to mention the dongles, USB-C mess, etc
Very much agree here. I really, really hope dongle hell will be a short lived phenomenon and USB-C adoption in peripherals and the rest of the industry picks up. Apple has been right about big bets like this before, so hopefully here too, but right now, it is definitely a mess.
Just a point of clarification on netbooks. Netbooks were a flop because they were bulky, slow, hard to type on, had terrible screens, and came with minuscule trackpads.
The air was none of those things, and was the progenitor of a new class of laptop that would be known as "Ultrabooks".
SJ was a salesman - he'd say untrue things to make his product look good, like trash-talking 5.5-inch phones(!) and saying "no-one wants 'Hummer' phones" while - you guessed it - Apple had larger phones in the pipeline, because the demand was there.
Same with the netbooks, weren't those often 9" 16:9 with terrible Atom CPU and slow HD?
We may never be fully rid of USB-A since it's embedded everywhere into things like homes and cars, but it makes a lot of sense for USB-C to replace all the other permutations (B, mini, micro, lightning, etc) found on devices.
What is lacking, perhaps, is a standard way to visually identify these capabilities.
An internal message of “I dare you to prove me wrong” could be demoralizing to some but cause others to rise to the occasion.
I certainly don't find it obvious that XR means "less" than XS. I could just as easily see it meaning "greater", in the way that the 18th rank is greater" than the 19th rank (in this case the ranked things being letters). Until I actually learned the difference, I actually had thought that the XR was the more expensive one.
Personally, I think they should have just called it the new iPhone X. And eventually we'd start differentiating by year (iPhone X 2017), as we have with the iPad and Mac line for quite some time.
†Then again, this is the company that released a product called "iPad" and managed to make us forget how stupid that sounds.
Apple is milking its essentially captive audience. I hesitate to call it “loyal” — these are, essentially, people who look with trepidation at the idea of moving years of photos and other data to a different system.
My wife gnashed her teeth when she got one of the new, wildly overpriced iPhones — but she just can’t imagine switching to Android.
But the kids who didn't get on the Apple bandwagon when iTunes was a groundbreaking exciting thing with an Apple ecosystem that made it all work wonderfully?
I suspect that the kids who expect parents to pay for everything might be burdened with commodity Android devices that cost a lot less than the deluxe Apple phones. Lose the phone too often and it becomes a distinctly mid to low end commodity Android device. If that happens then they get to be outside the Android ecosystem and grow up not needing Apple. Meanwhile, the parents just don't replace their phones often enough as what they have is good enough.
Apple can't produce a low-end device as this would cannibalise their premium sales so they are stuck in the realm of hardware and need to push this services model on their customer base.
As time goes on an a phone is just a commodity 'hand rectangle' with little class value. Having the latest and greatest doesn't make you one of the cool kids any more than having a fancy laptop makes you special. There are no queues outside the stores on launch day anymore and there is no returning to that.
A further problem that Apple have is the amount of markets affected by currencies that have gone south or are protected by tariffs. This affects their competitors too, slowing down the upgrade cycle. The UK is a significant market for Apple and after the Brexit vote the pound lost 20% of value making the latest and greatest iphone cost a pretty penny. Unless you are rich enough for these things to not matter then you do have to ask what you are getting for paying five times as much for a fancy iPhone rather than a similarly sized screen on an Android budget device, particularly when signal strength/battery is a huge part of what the product is.
I've really really enjoyed the switch. Admittedly, it helped that I got the iPhone SE which hadn't been discontinued yet; I might have been less happy with the newer X-series phones, particularly given the sticker price.
How so?
I've been a mac user for many years but can't really justify the price of an iphone. I've been considering making the switch though, for better integration, privacy and smaller phone. Not sure it's worth it.
Of course, the price issue was a little different for me since I prefer not to replace devices often, so the longer software support actually means if I amortize the cost of the phone over the time that I use it, iPhones actually come out ahead of Android phones on price.
A two-year-old iPhone still gets about 3 years of updates - more than most flagship Androids.
Heck, I'm still on iOS 10 because I havn't found 64 bit versions of some of my most used apps.
OS fragmentation: doesn't apply if you're not a developer, just pick a phone that will have a reasonable amount of updates over its lifetime
Privacy protection: really depends how you feel about Google on this one
Presence of a secure element: this one really depends on your threat profile
Easier said than done, especially when looking for more obscure apps. Also, it's not easy for non-technical folks to tell the difference...
> OS fragmentation: doesn't apply if you're not a developer, just pick a phone that will have a reasonable amount of updates over its lifetime
How long is "reasonable" relative to iOS? I recently moved from Android to iOS mainly because of this.
> Privacy protection: really depends how you feel about Google on this one
I'm not sure feelings are relevant here. The truth is simply the truth.
> Presence of a secure element: this one really depends on your threat profile
Agreed, but it's good to have the extra security guarantees.
4 years, basically.
Nexus 6 was supported for all security updates from launch in November 2014 to this month (November 2018). In terms of feature updates, it got up to Android 7.1.1, and I am not aware of any major app that wouldn't run on that today. Not exactly great, but certainly not a new phone per year. I believe Apple's policy is 5 years, rather than 4, with a reported risk of iOS updates purposefully making the original hardware performance worse (e.g. battery life).
Strictly as a geeky side note, if you have the time to spend DIYing your primary mobile OS (which, admittedly, very few people would prefer doing), there are pretty cool third-party Android distros and other OSes that will keep a Nexus 4 (2012, 6 years old) alive and well. Possibly a Galaxy Nexus (2011, 7 years old) too, but I am less sure about that...
Edit: To clarify, what I am saying is that, for most users, iOS' long term support is better than Android's. But, for Google phones and the like, it is only slightly better, not day-and-night better.
Can you make a recommendation here? I am an iPhone user who might be inclined to switch to Android, but I still haven't found a phone that would satisfy this criterion. To clarify: "reasonable" for me means ~5 years, as this is how long I expect to keep using the same phone.
FWIW, phones aren't designed to last 5 years. The batteries aren't, the screens aren't, the casing isn't, and the hardware generally doesn't (newer software = more demanding).
That said, if you do require to use the same device for five years, and need the latest software on it, than Apple is probably your only option.
I have and enjoy the Pixel 2 and plan on keeping it for at least another two years. The Pixel 3 (non-xl) would be an ideal phone if you are moving from iPhone and are looking for a long term, well-supported phone.
So which Android phone could I have bought in 2013 that would still be getting updates like the iPhone 5s?
Define reasonable. In order to get Android updates for any amount of time, you mostly have to pick higher end phones. Well, If I am expected to pay laptop prices for a phone, I should be able to keep it for as long as I keep a laptop. Two years of updates isn't cutting it anymore.
I'm not sure what you mean by OS fragmentation. Different vendors offer their own branches so maybe you will find that you like one vs the other? Some people prefer Samsung's Android, others prefer the stock experience. Its really just a matter of personal preference for most people.
Privacy can definitely be a problem, though. It is getting a little bit better, but the pace of improvement is not great.
I don't have update issues as I only buy Nexus/Pixel. I've yet to encounter a single piece of malware in the years I've been using android, so this seems like an overblown issue. Mind you, I don't download that many apps, just use some of the more mainstream ones.
I believe Google protects my privacy just fine, but I do admire the extra security that iOS has built into the OS. Wish android did better here.
Since then, apple has migrated from being a brand focused on the shear love of using technology to essentially any other luxury brand (I disagree with the premise that they aren't still inventors in the engineering sense, but they certainly aren't innovating in the way they had prior).
The closest thing we have today would be something like Alexa, where people young and old can be deeply immersed with a new, and further humanizing, piece of technology. Apple certainly had a head start with Siri, but they were never able to keep up and clearly misunderstood what people are getting out of digital assistants with their homepod since it's too much of a luxury sound product rather than something more utilitarian.
I get that, but they didn’t “invent” the smartphone. They executed an existing concept far better than anybody else had been able to up until then, and the result of that was a complete industry change. It’s great, but they weren’t there when the first smartphones appeared - they came along with a much better implementation of the concept.
I think they’ll continue to do this in other markets as they develop.
What does 'invent' even mean to you, and the others, then?
If Apple didn't do what they did, where would we be?
> I disagree, when apple released the iphone, they changed the face of what smart phones would ultimately become.
It looks like you're actually agreeing: They (Apple) executed on an extant idea (smart phones) so well that they changed the face of the industry (app stores, etc etc).
That having been said, of the two post-Steve Jobs Apples that we've seen, this one is still pretty damn decent. They aren't killing the entire company by throwing all their software engineering resources at a Second System Effect technical quagmire like Copland, they aren't selling laptops that spontaneously burst into flames like the PowerBook 5300, and they aren't investing in solutions in search of a problem like OpenDoc. They also aren't selling dozens of indistinguishable products that are only distinguishable by arbitrary four-digit product numbers.
Still, I think their attention to detail and user experience is about as strong as ever, for both their hardware and software. Innovation will still come out of Apple, just not as game changing as it used to be. I think they’ll transition to being sort of a “Samsung with better UX and attention to detail”, which is a company I’ll continue to buy products from, even if it is a bit of a letdown from what they were with Jobs.
They bought themselves out of this, of course, by buying NeXT (managed by SJ). But NeXTstep itself could have easily fallen prey to the second system effect. Was it luck or skill that saved it?
Back in 2000, SJ said that Mac OS X would set up Apple "for the next 20 years". It's 18 years later. What's next? I'm an avid Mac user but these days it pretty much just looks like a good implementation of a 1980's Unix workstation. The ways I wish it were improved are not easy to add to the current architecture. When Apple decides that it has run its course, who's going to lead the team to make its successor? There isn't another SJ startup to buy.
Then again, I don't see Microsoft or the various Linux-based groups or even DARPA taking the lead on next-generation operating system design, either. I don't think it's fair to single out Apple. The whole industry has put all its eggs in the basket of "basically a Unix workstation". That was a great design for its day but I wouldn't use it if I were starting from scratch today. Are we going to just keep adding new syscalls and userspace layers for every new idea we have? Is this the endgame for computer science?
I'd still look at projects like Dynamicland [1], or to scifi: the form factor for the iPad appeared in ST:TNG 20 years before it did on shelves[2], many AR researchers reference Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End.
In the 1990's, he also said that if he ran Apple, he would milk the Mac for all its worth and move on to the next big thing. That was the iPhone, and now Apple is milking that for all its worth, too.
It's not a historical necessity that we ever do invent something bigger and better than "basically a Unix workstation", any more than we need to fundamentally reinvent any of the other foundational technologies of our civilization. A Mac today is a good implementation of a 1980's Unix workstation the same way an airliner today is a good implementation of a 1960's Boeing. Invent a better operating system? Sure, you could also invent a better jet engine or make concrete obsolete if you wanted to, and maybe someone will, but it's been a long time since anybody did.
A few very successful corporations have come to the point where they are practically worshiped and almost universally admired, but we are not getting all the cultural benefit from them that we can. That needs to be part of the deal--we give you our markets and cultural attention, you return to us your cultural technology in a more concrete form, at the very least by publishing standards that can be applied to other human organizations. This will help us accelerate human cultural evolution and we'll all benefit.
"Rent extraction from a user base that finds it hard to go away may sound a bit like extortion. But it’s more honest and upfront than extracting data from users in ways they often don’t understand and then making money off the data, as Facebook does. That honesty is in itself a competitive advantage for Apple as it gradually reimagines itself as more of a services company."
We're nearing the top of the S curve with regards to the smartphone business. Upgrade cycles are getting longer. Phones are getting as powerful as laptops and people are finding them good enough for most things, for longer periods of time.
You can't expect the same level of novelty and change every single year. This headline also under-appreciates just how much the world has changed in the past 10 years because of the smartphone. Everything is wildly different and even as I type this, it's really hard to have perspective about just how significant the changes have been especially since we experience them incrementally. 10 years isn't even that long of a time period.
It's all about the ecosystem and services now. Companies are investing deeply into integrated bundles of services and ecosystem add-ons (HomePod, Watch, Apple Music, iCloud etc) with the smartphone sitting at the center tying everything together.
Each piece might not be the iPhone in terms of size, but that's unrealistic. The iPhone is probably one of the greatest single business lines of all time. That type of step function product doesn't come along every year let alone every decade.
It's not about any single product anymore. It's about integrating technology deep into your life with the smartphone at the center (or in Amazon's case, Alexa since they missed the Smartphone era).
Ecosystems are inventions in their own. How they grow matter. What values they espouse matter. Focusing on the individual parts instead of how the pieces tie together to make a powerful whole is missing the forest for the trees.
Apple also isn't the same company they were in 2007. Just look at the iPhone install base growth: https://www.valuewalk.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Screens...
That's just iPhone. If you count all iOS devices (iPad, iPod Touch, etc), they're well over a billion users globally. They serve more customers, in more countries, with more preferences than ever before in the company's history. If you're expecting the company to move the same way they did when they were barely international and had a tiny fraction of the operations and customers they have today, then that's also unrealistic.
Look at complex multinational products like Apple Pay and how difficult it is for anyone to deliver a service like that seamlessly in every country in the world (even Apple hasn't launched it everywhere). Services like that require multi-year planning, complex dealmaking, geopolitical factors, operational risk, complex financial operations, etc. Things like Apple Pay are severely under-appreciated because it doesn't make for a good headline and it doesn't make for a fun product review on The Verge or YouTube.
If Apple can make iPhone your only wallet and convince banking partners and retailer around the world to accept Apple Pay AND do it in a way that respects the privacy of every transaction. THAT is innovation. THAT is magical. But that is also hard to appreciate and it will happen incrementally over the years. We'll take it for granted, move on, and demand more.
As Bezos said in his previous shareholder letter: "Customers are divinely discontent"
The author emphasizes how Apple has created an ecosystem with its iPhone, but that it needs to extract more value from the services provided to that ecosystem to make up for declining sales of the devices themselves (instead of continually raising device prices)
Authors for these publications rarely if ever write their own headlines
I can’t help feeling like we should stop apologizing. They suck, they’re inflammatory. I think it should be okay to complain about them.
No, I really believe we must complain about them. Loudly, and in numbers.
In 1900, Lord Kelvin famously gave an address at a physics conference in which he stated: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement."
I had hopes that the Apple Watch 4 would be the iPhone 3g moment, but it’s not enough faster, smaller, or long running to make that logical leap.
For instance, if I could make calls from my watch and have an iPad mini 5 without also carrying a phone around with me, I might be tempted by that. But neither the hardware nor wireless plans are there for that. Yet.
The thing is, I want the biggest screen that can fit into my pocket. Maybe something else can replace that need (glasses, projectors, holigrams) but whatever it is will have to be at least as portable as a smartphone.
I think the pocket was critical to iPhones success.
I think this very article shows the author understands this phenomenon well, he just doesn't use terms like "S curve" to describe it.
When a company is growing if you let yourself get pulled in too many directions you’ll suffocate. But maybe the message becomes “we concentrate on a few important things” and eventually those things become boring. You need a new message before you become stodgy.
There’s also JWZ’s dotcom era theory about people wanting to make a company successful vs people who want to be at a successful company.
Google's problem isn't innovation, it's supporting and following-through on their innovations past the honeymoon period.
Only google is in the uncanny valley. They go far enough to get people engaged a bit then cancel or reimagine the projects (or people wander off and their replacements have different theories?) and so instead of having no product or engagement they get just enough to draw negative attention, pissing people off who thought something good was going to happen and never did. Like Fox Networks with Joss Whedon...
FaceID? ECG monitor? AirPods and the general continuity between Apple products? Seems like Bloomberg is just an attention whore. I can see an argument for the Apple customer market becoming saturated, but Apple has not lost its inventiveness.
The idea of becoming a landlord who is unable to bring in new people with exciting technology is only true if you consider
I would argue that under Steve Jobs both the supply chain and the technological edge had some focus but there wasn't a huge gap with the competition, This could be either because it required time to achieve this gap and Steve simply wasn't at the helm for that long or it wasn't his main focus and is currently the focus of Tim Cook considering his background, either way, I think Apple is currently and going to continue to blow everyone out of the water with technologies like their SOC's and will continue having the most efficient supply chain and manufacturing capacity in the world churning out products that beat the industry margins by a mile.
Regarding the quality, design and user experience it mostly stagnated, don't get me wrong they're still way higher than the industry average and I can see Johnny Ives touch in most of their products, but I don’t see the kind of passion that went into designing the interface of a device like the iPhone with ideas like pinch to zoom and the spring effect. Apple seems to have a design team that is world class but uninspired and just doing their job.
Now the most important point and this is what I honestly believe is the problem with Apple is the Product Innovation, this appears to have completely stopped after Steve, I try not to believe that Steve Jobs was THE product manager at Apple and avoid the cult of personality, but it's very hard to shake this idea when during his tenure they've released multiple industry-changing products, and they've failed to release a single one after he left.
I think Apple is going to continue to release high-quality, well designed, cutting edge and high margin products, but I highly doubt with the current leadership they'll be able to release a single new product that changes the status quo like Steve used to.
Meanwhile, since I was watching Apple in 2000-2007, when they "used to be an inventor", they used to put out barely incremental updated for the iPod, the OS, and Mac laptops every year.
People would circulate rumors for months, and then cheer, for tiny generational spec updates on iPods. Now we get 10x the technological change we got every year of that era between iPhone models, and people are blaze about it.
Also, Google aside (and them only on the software assistant side) who solves any interesting consumer problems in the space Apple works?
You cant modify the new Xboxes or Playstations.
Some Android phones are dependant on the manufacturers customised version of the AOSP.
On Macs it is not easy to install another operating system, like you can do with a PC (although I have managed to get Ubuntu 18.10 running on my Macbook Pro 13,1)
Consumers are going to be really challenged at some point and think, "hey, I have very little control over this thing I bought. Am I ok with this or am I going to start hacking?"
We could see another renaissance like you had in the early 80s with hackers sharing and porting software onto the weird and wonderful computers they were building back then.... who knows?
By the way, ironically, with its single user OS, an iPhone is more a "Personal Computer" than most PCs.
The PC model was an accident and not generally considered a win for IBM, even if it was for other players (especially Microsoft) in the surrounding ecosystem; but Android is largely Google being trying to the Microsoft of the PC clone model without anyone having to be IBM (with much of their OS free, so that it enables the Linux-equivalent—where both it and the DOS equivalent are, well, Linux under the hood.)
Isn't that Android?
Smartphones are not PC's, they're just hobbled embedded devices.
Wonder if this is a trend, especially for larger companies.
What can always happen is that they fail to see change coming and drop the ball like Nokia did. They had incredible moat in multiple areas: manufacturing, supply chain, technology and scale. They were able to produce high quality phones with the same cost as cheap brands and pocketed the difference in profits but they didn't see the revolution coming.
The future of Apple's growth is pivot to services and rent from platform.
Even Microsoft's Surface line (which is a similar mess) is easier to comprehend now.
And from sales numbers, clearly the naming of the new iPhone lineup hasn't deterred people from looking at apple.com and figuring out what device suits their needs.
The same is true on my MacBook, the only way for me to use Apple Music is through iTunes, a complete dumpster fire of an app on OSX. Apple Music is an otherwise fantastic service, but it is hobbled by terrible UX.
I understand that not all apps can be perfect for everyone, but I find the latest iOS app overall very regressed from the previous ones. For example, from a fresh start (as it often happens due to iOS nuking apps in the background) none of the tabs are cached whatsoever, so I have to wait for them to load every single time. Music.app has a completely different feel than other iOS system apps I use frequently, like Photos for example: All tabs are loaded upon start, and importantly, it remembers which tab I was last in, even from a cold start. I discover a lot of new music via the Radio tab, and I almost always find myself waiting for it to load. Often times when dealing with a bluetooth disconnect I have to go into system bluetooth settings to reconnect because for whatever reason, they won't be in the audio output menu in the Music app.
This may seem like a rant, but I use their music service hours every day on my way to and from work, and while working. It's the little details that made me like Apple's ecosystem in the first place, and that seems to be missing lately.
I'm not even talking about the mess that is iTunes.
- There were mp3 files and player long before the first iPod
- Before the iPhone there were other smartphones
- Before the iPad there were other tablets
- Don't get me started on the Watch...
Apple was never an Inventor. Everything they've ever created was built around a technology or even products that existed before. Apple "just" gets the user experience right and and builds products that most people find accessible, easy to use, and reliable.
The iPod is THE mp3 player, the iPhone is THE smartphone, and to a lesser extent the iPad is THE tablet.
No, Apple didn't invent the concepts but they created the definitive product using those concepts.
But as for the click-bait headline, we both just bought our first Apple Watches, the Series 4. Strap one of those puppies on your wrist for a day and talk to me about "used to be an inventor". (Side note: AAPL might not have sold us phones for a while, but they did "invent" a watch that we'd buy. They still got our hardware money.)
Objectives: notifications so the phone can stay in bag/pocket. The more "phone stays in pocket" features, the better. Must function as a standalone fitness device (IOW, must have GPS; syncing later is an expected compromise).
Series 4 is finally the perfect storm to get me to buy one. The first ones had no GPS or water resistance. I'm not paying that much if I still have to keep a Garmin around. Series 3 added LTE. Ah, now I can go for a long run in the woods and leave my phone at home. But I'd laid out big bucks for a Fenix 3, and meh, nothing about the 3 really grabbed me, and by then I was used to ignoring the Apple Watch. But with the 4, it looks like Apple decided to make the fitness aspects stop sucking. IOW, maybe I could use this as a running watch, too. As a person who has Wolfe-Parkinson (heart condition fixed with ablation), the ECG piqued my interest. Now, doc said I'm fixed, so ECG shouldn't be an important feature. But it got me thinking, which led to talking to the wife, which led to "well, why don't you just buy one, then?".
"Well, maybe I just will."
"Buy me one, too. Silver aluminum with nylon band."
"Yes, dear."
We've not had them but a week, but I'm more impressed than I expected to be. (I mean, I'm really impressed, but I don't want to drip fanboi on anyone, so I'll tone it down.) The stock workout app would do just fine for most folks. If you're not most folks, WorkOutdoors has been impressive the few times I've used it, and there's RunKeeper and the like. We used the LTE functionality first day we ran with them to co-ordinate (we run separately, with dogs). The screen, OMG, it's head-and-shoulders better than my Fenix. Raise-to-wake is reliably better than the Garmin (you'll need raise-to-turn-on-backlight for the Garmin in anything but outdoor sunlight or a bright room). It's gettin' dark here in the PNW, and for my old eyes the Apple OLED is easier to read on a dark run than the Garmin backlight reflective.
As far as the "smartwatch" part, I'll just summarize and say that IMO it's the best smartwatch going right now. YMMV, or maybe that's not even all that important. Of the functionality the Garmin replicates, the Apple version is just much more refined. As one example, if there's a notification on the Garmin, better hurry and look before it goes away. Apple waits until you raise your wrist to look at it before the timer starts.
The Garmin will stick around in the rotation. Even as a close-to-three-hours marathon runner, I wouldn't trust the Apple battery to go the distance, let alone anything longer. If I'm knocking around on wooded trails, the Garmin will probably take a hit better than the exposed glass on an Apple. IOW, serious outdoor work. But I'm not as adventurous as I used to be, so for everyday-carry I'm really enjoying Apple's offering.
User 1 wanted to connect her MacBook Pro to the Wifi. User 2 picked up her phone and was prompted to share her WiFi credentials with the MacBook - it was almost like magic and it worked.
Also, I contend that Apple's "invention" has been to repackage computing in a premium package. Smart phones, music players, tablets all existed before Steve flashed them on stage, he just made you want to use them by making them sexy and cool, which wasn't that hard, because the early days of computing is about as unsexy as it gets.
All the other smartphones then were laggy/poor screen/plastic shells/etc. Their UIs stunk. It was a huge step up with a bunch of key incremental innovations in a single package.
Microsoft also pushed tablets long before Apple ever did. Like I said, Apple repackages things.
There, I said it.
I made the mistake of buying a Macbook with a touch bar because I thought it was kind of cool when I finally got to see it in person. The novelty that came from this cheap gimmick wore off in a matter of minutes, even though the technical obstacles that had to be overcome must've been great.
The face-tracking cameras in the latest iPhones and iPads? Impressive on their own, but Apple has failed to do anything really fascinating with them besides using them to unlock your device or to puppet an emoji.
Apple invents only for the sake of creating additional cheap gimmicks without creating genuinely exciting products. As I fumble with the awful keyboard on my Macbook I question just how capable they are of even creating quality products.