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Comment by zepto | Hacker News Reader

This piece is pretty circular. It talks about the maturing hardware being a reason people don’t upgrade, but at the same time doesn’t accept a lack of innovation as a criticism.

People buy new iPhones when they offer something new and meaningful they they are going to appreciate.

The iPhone XS simply doesn’t offer a significantly better experience than the iPhone X.

It is better, for sure, but not in any way that the iPhone X doesn’t already excel.

In previous years, even S models had significant new features. And speed used to really matter to how the device felt.

Both of these seem like rectifiable conditions.

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doesn’t accept a lack of innovation as a criticism

It's really hard to fault a company for not innovating when nobody else is innovating either. It's a mature product category which means all the low-hanging fruit is gone.

For Apple to really innovate their way back into massive growth they're going to need to find another new product category. I have a really hard time seeing what that may be, as do most observers, I would imagine.

>> It's really hard to fault a company for not innovating when nobody else is innovating either.

CES 2019 starts in few days, and rumor is that we'll see foldable smartphones there, so there are still some companies innovating, Apple just isn't one of them.

so there are still some companies innovating, Apple just isn't one of them.

I agree and it’s been true for some time. I was an early adopter of iPhone but went one upgrade cycle with a Windows Phone. It gave me several benefits that iPhone either didn’t have at the time (like wireless charging) or that they still don’t have (easy “child” mode that limits access to specific apps and disables ability to send or read messages).

>and rumor is that we'll see foldable smartphones there...

Wait...

what?

You think making a smart phone fold is innovative?

I don't know man?

I think maybe I'm just crazy or something. I still use my iphone 5, it seems to work fine. I don't really understand why I need to upgrade to the latest and greatest thing every year. But for me, asking me to pay hundreds of dollars for a new phone, when my old phone works perfectly fine, seems a bit silly. And then to say, "But this one will FOLD!!!" just makes me think you're insulting my intelligence.

> You think making a smart phone fold is innovative?

To be clear, the screen itself folds.

I'd say that is a pretty nifty innovation (assuming the quality of the image is still comparable to non-foldable screens). Not sure it'll work as for the UX, but technically it is quite an advancement.

....I think it’s pretty innovative.

Even just straight up copying the folding tablets from Westworld, it would change how I interact with technology to have a device that spans pocket sized and tablet sized.

A tri-fold phone could be a really big deal for me.

Apple eye glasses might be worth doing.

An Apple electric car would have ridiculous earning potential. Real estate and cars are (I think) the two biggest expenses that most consumers have and one of the few ways to earn much more money than with an expensive, great selling smartphone brand. Apple reportedly tried but somehow didn't pull it off. If I were Apple, I'd put all my energy into it.

I don't see Apple being able to build a car. Look at all the struggles Tesla has had. I don't see Apple as a fundamentally more innovative company than Tesla. I don't see what advantage Apple would have in automobile manufacturing. Apple doesn't even manufacture their own products right now.

I'm not necessarily disputing any of that, just... if they want to keep growing, they'll just have to do it somehow.

The biggest advantage Apple would have over Tesla is "cold, hard cash". They have far too much money to throw at problems than Tesla. Even if they are 2x less efficient than Tesla in setting up infrastructure to manufacture Cars, they have more than enough cash to make up for it.

Why would I trust Apple to make a car? After a phone that bent in my pocket and the reliability of their new laptop keyboards...

I probably wouldn't buy it either. It was only about the option(s) from Apple's (imagined) perspective, which is, surprisingly enough, "how can we still make much more money?".

It’s not that cars are king of reliability either.

They tried with watch, but that was really a limited success, if one at all. VR/AR was supposed to be the next thing according to everyone else, but that still has a ways to go. IoT is also pretty limited, there are only so many people who get excited about changing bulb colors over the internet.

Hard time seeing what’s next indeed!

What are you talking about? You’re describing the watch as if it’s over, when it’s a huge growth area with massive headroom.

Maybe? It just hasn’t done that yet.

Apple Watch ate the entire wearables market alive, and it’s still growing.

Yes, but that wasn’t a huge market to begin with. I think Apple pulled back a bit after realizing the market wasn’t growing as fast as they hoped.

Did they? As far as I’m aware, they’re pushing full steam ahead. I think the current estimates are that the category is growing at 50% YoY.

They definitely dedicate much less space to them at Apple stores than a couple of years ago.

Also not the case. In the updated store design there are many tables of them in the center of the store. More than before.

I have yet to see any such stores and can only comment on the ones local to me in the Seattle area. I’ve also seen a few people with Apple watches, which are still pretty notable as they are far from common like iPhones are.

That’s fair. I went into one of the new style stores last week to get a battery replacement.

The area displaying watches was at least twice the size of the previous version, and more central. They also had a much more deluxe area in accessory section displaying watch bands much more visibly.

I see all kinds of people with Apple watches around here. The entry level black sport band model seems to be the default men’s watch.

Again, what are you talking about? It is growing spectacularly.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=apple%20watch%20growth

Top of wearables market. I assume Apple wanted more than that (ie a much larger wearables market). Like with smartphones, it wasn’t enough to just beat the competition already around in 2007, they wanted to grow the smartphone market exponentially (which is what happened). The Apple Watch is definitely at the top of the wearable market, but it hasn’t grown it massively yet like the iPhone did with the smartphone market.

It’s not just too of the wearables market (including regular watches) - it has massive and continuing year on year growth.

It is growing the smartwatch market exponentially. Not as fast as the iPhone for sure, but that’s to be expected.

I don’t think the market is growing exponentially, do you know of any articles that make that claim?

More to the point, I get the impression that Apple expected more growth than occurred already by the initial effort and marketing they put into watch. All of the hoped for growth hasn’t come yet, though it could still come in the future.

I think what they are looking for is a wearable (Apple or otherwise) being seen as a must have device, which isn’t the case in 2019.

15% year on year growth, year after year, is exponential.

Also - why do you keep saying Apple ‘expected more’?

It’s a multi billion dollar business and a growing hit.

You talk about hopes for growth that hasn’t come, but is that just an impression?

According to many, health is where the next big thing will be (rationale: health is what people say they value most, and the numbers agree: the fraction of income spent on health increases).

So, if they manage to make the watch a ‘necessity’ in the health market, it can become very, very big.

The next step is to innovative _away_ the smartphone I think. Who wants to lug around a large smartphone anymore? Apple’s Watch series 4 with LTE feels like a great step in the right direction. I come to love it since I got it around Christmas. I find myself leaving the phone home more and more and pounder returning my new XR. Then I think we’ll see glasses with LTE and meaningful AR.

Except that phones used to be a lot smaller, too - so if anything, the market has been going for the opposite direction. You can find plenty of quite tiny, "not-so-smart" phones on Alibaba already - that "small brick", vintage form factor makes for a great combination of ease of use and long-lasting battery power, and is IMHO better than a smart watch.

At some point hardware is "good enough" and people have to upgrade less often, or are able to push the hardware more.

We can see this with for example laptops (and PCs though that's an older example). The laptops of this decade are all still useful unless you're a hardcore gamer. And even for gamers (a specific market and niche) the need to upgrade their gaming laptop is lowering if they're OK with not the latest of the latest settings.

We should also take price into the comparison. A phone costing between 1000 and 1500 EUR is a lot of money for people.

Finally, we should take into account Apple's biggest competitor: the second hand market of iOS devices. Everything older than 5S still works with the latest iOS.

Very true, I'd say a downgrade is the trend. I saw like 10+ people deciding to switch from "superphones" down to mid-range models, and even dumbphones for their new phones.

People who had ultrabooks, often try Atom based notebooks and sufraces. The key deciding factor for such people, I think, is having a good screen and bearable ergonomics (no microscopic keyboards, or batteries.) The data I have access to tell that the "big screen, small CPU," is the category with the biggest year on year growth. Atom based 14 and 15 inchers are selling like hot cookies.

As a person working in the industry, I can say that's a very visible trend. People switch their devices more due to battery and physical wear than actual need for more features.

In that respect, things got very "Japanised" in respect that Japanese cellphone makers are often making new models every season with no real changes other than cosmetic.

Japan is also the only developed market where "dumbphones" ever saw few upwards trends in last 5 years.

These things have happened in my family. For one thing, everybody now knows that phones break or get lost, and a cheap phone to buy is also cheap to lose. When we go somewhere and need a computer along, we grab the smallest laptop in the house, an Atom 2-in-1.

Software too. The kids have stopped using MS Office. They do all of their schoolwork in the cloud.

I also wonder if the downgrade is influenced by optimism about technology being replaced by a dread of being manipulated and harmed by it.

I thought Intel discontinued the use of Atom in consumer machines?

No, they are just called Pentiums and Celerons now.

The product segmentation is confusion here. Pentium Silver (N5000) actually has more performance than Core based ULV Pentium Gold.

If you want "big screen, small CPU" you might as well buy used/refurbished. Unless you care a lot about that battery life, I guess. Oh, and I don't think mainstream OS's are going to work so well on a weak CPU, though a well-maintained Linux distro (read: not *buntu, not Mint) is a different matter.

A clean windows install without "crapware" is more than enough to watch movies and web browse at 4GB ram for regular people.

People who buy "big screen, small CPU" are not your usual refurbished hardware buyers, I think they really are "socially antipodal" to them.

Some bling and, "freshness" is definitely a deciding factor for them, unlike to people who buy "refurbished ABS plastic slabs" office class hardware.

Asus has a 15 incher that they sold close to $600 just half a year ago that was Atom powered. It was a very basic machine, with a surprising pricetag.

No wonder, every OEM is already on the trend.

> is more than enough to watch movies and web browse at 4GB ram for regular people.

And that's exactly the issue. Watch movies and web browse, oh come on... put a high-quality distro on it and 4GB is plenty enough for a snappy, solid, general purpose machine. Put another 4GB in it and you've basically hit workstation class, while Windows 10 needs as much just to be barely usable! Like, this makes no sense to me actually. It's so far out of a sensible perspective.

Not sure quality of the distribution has much to do with it.

Look at Electron apps. A chat app takes more resources than my entire computer used to have and doesn’t do significantly more.

Lack of `innovation' seems accusatory and unfair, however. Apple hardly seems to be resting on their laurels, they simply have delivered a product that satisfies most consumer needs fully. And now it's at the point of trying to push out new needs.

The neural engine on the A12, for instance. Tiny power consumption and massive performance could be a game changer. But it isn't because there is nothing in the user space that needs it, yet.

And really Apple's game isn't to usurp last year's phone in some massive way -- it's to compel the year before to upgrade. e.g. an iPhone XR or XS for the iPhone 7 user. Even that is getting tough because the devices were already so good that outside of battery decay many users are 100% pleased.

It was an inevitable outcome that the market would mature, and there is very close to nothing that Apple could do but push to additional markets. They foolishly tried to make up the difference through extra premium pricing and that was just folly.

I get that people might hear lack of ‘innovation’ as an accusation, and that’s fair because usually it’s used in a bullshit way.

I don’t define innovation as improving things for the sake of it. I think of it as delivering meaningful improvements to the end user.

To me, Apple has been the master of this kind of innovation.

Your point about the A12 neural engine proves what I’m saying.

I’m not saying Apple is resting on it’s laurels - that’s something of a straw man. I think what Apple is achieving technically is outstanding.

I also don’t accept the inevitability of the ‘outcome’ that Apple has fully satisfied people’s needs or that the market would ‘mature’. Most of the ‘needs’ that the iPhone X serves didn’t even exist when the first iPhone came out.

The idea that the iPhone X represents the pinnacle of what a pocket computer can do for a human being seems almost absurd to me.

If you think about it as a bicycle for the mind, as Jobs famously did, almost every dimension of the system has room for more depth.

I’d like to assume Apple knows this, and that there is a lot more to come.

However I still think that in terms of the pipeline of delivering innovation to end users, it’s fair to say that the iPhone is in a patch of friction.

"Most of the ‘needs’ that the iPhone X serves didn’t even exist when the first iPhone came out."

Didn't they? It takes pictures. It sends emails and messages. It watches media. It listens to music. It plays games. It's a web terminal. It's an alarm clock. All of these needs most certainly existed, and the iPhone has sold billions of units by fulfilling those needs beautifully in a more convenient, portable fashion.

Of course the market matures. Beyond some hand-wavy nebulous conjecture, there is a limit to what the device can do without getting into science fiction, especially when your basis of comparison is one year over the next. If the complaint is that Apple hasn't completely upset everything in a single year, that's a completely unreasonable, irrational expectation.

Nowhere is anyone complaining that Apple hasn’t upset everything in a single year. Nice straw man though.

At one point, the iPhone itself was science fiction. The iPhone X was science fiction when the iPhone came out.

Even after the iPhone came out people continued to be dismissive of its potential.

By all means be like them and believe that pocket computers are now done.

My point is twofold - one is that I think there is a huge room for continued progress in this field.

And the other is that the path of progress of the iPhone has involved delivering significant capabilities that enabled people to interact with it in new ways, and this has driven demand.

The rate of delivering those new ways of interacting has slowed.

We both agree on that.

But you think that’s because there is no more progress to be made and that pocket computers will not gain meaningful new features.

I don’t believe that.

Everything isn't a "straw man". You specifically highlighted the, to you, negligible difference between the iPhone X and iPhone XS -- phones over a one year difference, yet still with a number of significant improvements -- and when I questioned that you claimed that I must therefore believe that the iPhone XS is the "pinnacle of a pocket computer".

Which is of course absurd. But you are jumping between "not enough change over a year" and "over an infinite timeline imagine what is possible". Try to rationalize your thoughts.

You’re the one who wrote:

“Beyond some hand-wavy nebulous conjecture, there is a limit to what the device can do.”

And you are the only person taking about infinite timelines.

You seem to have not noticed the next part of that sentence - "especially when your basis of comparison is one year over the next"

It doesn’t change anything.

I’m simply saying that year over year, Apple has typically had significant features to drive adoption, and that has slowed. But it doesn’t need to have, since there is much more to be done.

I don’t know why you’re talking about infinite timelines, but you are saying the market is matured and the job of the smartphone is done.

We just disagree about how much innovation is still possible in the space.

Yeah.

Their own "innovation" was raising the prices, and saying ", the only viable strategy it was left with was to raise prices to extract higher rents from its existing user base" is just ignoring elasticity and demand.

"Sure, just make your customers pay more, that will work out fine" yeah, right

> The iPhone XS simply doesn’t offer a significantly better experience than the iPhone X.

Depends on your definition of “significantly better experience”. For example, you can adjust the depth effect on iPhone XS/XS Max while framing/shooting a photo, whereas on iPhone X this is possible only in post. And that’s just one of the differences.

Sure - but for most people that’s moot. I agreed that it was better - but improvements like that are not changing most people’s usage patterns.

On a low level, the iPhone XS brings some interesting new innovation in that it is a new sub-architecture "arm64e".

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