Is This the End of the Age of Apple? | Hacker News Reader

Is This the End of the Age of Apple?

nytimes.com

16 pointsdaschaefer9 comments

"There would be no Uber and Lyft without the iPhone (and later the Android version), no Tinder, no Spotify" > This is clearly an exaggeration. Iphone clearly had an impact on design and smartphone apps, but they did not invented it. They made it easier to install apps and monetize them. And invested a lot in marketing. Apple strongest competitive advantage is their ability to make people pay and it seems to have reach its limit because you cannot ask people to pay more than 1000 USD for a phone when more competitors have similar products costing half.

>This is clearly an exaggeration.

I would argued it is not. Many had tried to make "Smartphones" for years before Apple. None of them succeeded. And Android prototype were like blackberry before the iPhone announcement. People often look back and think what we have today was so simple and inevitable, but when it actually first happen it was pure genius.

The LG Prada came pretty close...

What do you call success? If you call success having 30% market share, then you are right. But HTC had smartphones, Nokia as well. They made it a commercial success, but saying that we would have no Spotify without Apple is an exaggeration. Because even without smartphone we would have had Spotify.

The age of Apple innovation sadly died with Steve. I think the time since he passed has shown that without a strong willed visionary leader their products have become fragmented and reactionary. I’m sure they have great engineers and designers but I wish someone had said no to some of the recent ideas including abandoning highly useful features like displays, magsafe chargers, usb ports, headphone jacks, etc.

Have you used Apple Watch 4? AirPods?

This is the end of leaps and bounds of innovation in the smartphone sector. Everything will be minor incremental innovations and a gradual saturation of the hardware capabilities of devices.

I can't think of any sensors not already on phones.

I can't think of any innovation in hardware, apart from the usual pace of improvement in speed, computing power and efficiency.

I don't think phones will be getting any bigger.

There is a point of screen pixel density beyond which it is impossible for the human eye to differentiate quality.

Maybe there will spring up a market for innovative attachments to phones.

Maybe phones will become portable computing powerhouses for bigger machines.

In 2013 I saw iPad sales growth figures quoted at 57% per year. There were very rosy projections with that rate five years out.

Well there is no such thing as infinite growth. Are we to believe that Apple is ever going to reach a two trillion dollar market cap?

In the year 2000 Cisco was worth over 550 billion dollars. 19 years later it is now worth less than 200.

It was a good run. But it’s a long slide back to reality.

on a different note - Cisco is trying to reinvent itself as a SAAS company. Acquisition of AppD, BroadSoft etc, imply that. More here https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/about/corporate-strategy-offic...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com