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>Fix design. Fire Jony Ive's a$$ and hire some real designers.

I think that's almost certainly unfair on Ive. I do strongly suspect that Apple has a culture problem because of the secretive nature of their design lab. A very small team working in absolute secrecy enabled them to create disruptive new categories of product, but it carries a substantial risk of stagnation in the long term. It's difficult to sustain a culture of innovation when the flow of information is so strictly controlled. There's an inevitable risk of inadvertently fostering a yes-man culture, a risk well known to anyone who operates in a classified intelligence environment.

I'm not even sure Ive does that much design any more day to day. But there's definitely issues piling up in that regard. The most notable Apple design of the last few years is the notch, and that's very much in the "it's not a bug, it's a feature!" category. Apple got what people liked about the Macbook Air so completely, totally wrong I'm baffled.

Apple's design lab used to be amazing at balancing usability vs design. It feels like that has tipped far too hard towards "thinner at any cost" as a design philosophy, and that's come at a cost of clean lines and product quality. The design lab doesn't need reigning in as such - Apple needs someone who can challenge them at a senior level and call them out, which Jobs did and it feels increasingly like nobody else has ever replaced.

> Apple's design lab used to be amazing at balancing usability vs design

Agreed. There was a thoughtful pragmatism to Jobs-era Apple products. That pragmatism is gone.

Ive is a great product designer.

His weak points seems to be:

- UX and Software design

- Better integration with hardware/physical needs (see overly bendy hardware, cables that fall apart, etc)

- (Maybe) Delegating and accepting new ideas

Ive is a great visual / 'tactile' designer, but only a good functional one. This leads to things like beautiful cables (cables!) that exhibit the problem you highlight, the removal of headphone jacks, and an amazing mouse that you can't use whilst it's charging because the port is on the bottom. I'm not sure which software he's been responsible for, but I wouldn't be surprised if the same sorts of issues could be spotted — macOS certainly looks really, really nice and works easily and properly in many situations, but there are certain very basic flaws which just seem inexplicable.

I don't know anything about what's actually going on, but it seems to me that any contribution by Ive has been seriously diluted. How much time did he spend on Apple Park? That's years of non-focus on products, right? Lately, he's working on diamond rings[0]. I'm happy for him doing whatever he wants to do; he's earned that. But Apple does seem to have lost design mojo, and it looks like a lack of leadership is part of the problem.

[0] https://www.dezeen.com/2018/11/16/jony-ive-diamond-ring-marc...

In terms of design, those fat bezels around the MacBook displays feel very dated just a few weeks after I started using a Dell XPS 13 notebook (which was years ago).

I can't believe Apple is lagging behind in this area so badly.

Yep, apart from the latest iPhones having the best screens ever, the quickest most convenient and most secure unlock mechanism ever, the best computational photography ever, the fastest mobile CPUs ever released and overall being 2+ years ahead of their nearest competition, that was all a few months ago. Old news. What have Apple done for us just now?

Those are all incremental improvements. Nobody's saying Apple's phones are bad, just that they lack compelling differentiators to other phones, including older iPhones.

Of course it's arguable, my tongue was firmly in me cheek when writing that. It's just that the post I was replying to was so over the top, including half of it's points being entirely out of Apple's hands, it deserved an over the top retort.

For example, any improvements Apple made to wireless networking would by necessity be available to competitors - and they actually do it anyway! Apple are a major contributor to wireless standards, kickstarted Wifi in the first place and are major contributors on connector standards too including USB-C. But as I say, these are standards so not inherently differentiating features.

We're at the point with handsets that one person's differentiation is another person's feature bloat. Take the people replying to me saying they prefer touch ID. Fair enough, I can understand why, but the corollary to that isn't that therefore face ID is worthless and not an innovation. That's just crass and why I phrased my post in a 'what have you done for me recently' framework. When a company is dressing a market of billions, 'I don't like new feature X that's popular with hundreds of millions, therefore Apple isn't innovative' comes across as whiny self obsession.

Their SoCs are a massive differentiator. Unfortunately I don’t think the iPhone is in a good position to leverage that.

Having much better single core performance means the chips tend to be better at running (JS) websites. However most mobile websites are awful and full of “download our app” type popups/dark patterns that means “good at websites” isn’t really the advantage it ought to be. I suppose this also lets webview and JavaScript type “apps” work better.

There are very few workloads on mobile that can take advantage of more than a handful of cores.

Is it really a "massive" differentiator in 2019? Even an iPhone 5S is "fast enough" in most situations. Even a $250 Android phone bought today will not be so slow or incapable that it becomes an issue for 2 years.

One compelling differentiator is that they don't lag and stutter when you scroll the app menus directly in your mobile OS.

I think a lot of these superlatives are highly debatable, starting with the photography where Google and Huawei are currently leaders. For biometrics, for example, I prefer fingerprint readers over facial recognition and I'm not the only one. Newer Android phones are also coming with 3D facial recognition and sell for half the price, eg Xiaomi Mi 8. WRT CPUs, that's great that they're very fast but there's barely any software that uses that to the max, the same way practically every iPad Pro review complains that the A12X is held back by iOS.

On top of that, iPhones have suffered negative press about battery life and slowdowns from new OS updates -- iOS 12 fixes this but a lot of people may have been soured by the iOS 11 experience.

Android facial recognition implementations are a poor joke. There was an article on here a few weeks ago where someone tricked all(?) of them using a 3d-printed head: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18693738. Apparently the OnePlus implementation can still be fooled with a printed selfie.

The Pixel Night Mode begs to differ.

Oh wow, the best unlock mechanism. What a feature!

It's a major improvement over having to fingerprint unlock every time I pick up my phone. I can't speak for the comparative security of each, but as an ease-of-use feature it's a home run.

The unlock mechanism is probably the most-used feature on my phone :)

They skimped on RAM. No finger print scanner. Falling behind in photography. Poor OS.

> They skimped on RAM.

How so?

> No finger print scanner.

It’s not like they didn’t replace this with something else…

> Falling behind in photography.

By what metric? iPhone is still competitive with leading Android flagships, as it always has been.

> Poor OS.

“Poor” is not a very descriptive word.

> iPhone [photography] is still competitive with leading Android flagships

Nope, for the first time it is isn't even close to Huawei phones, let alone the Pixel 3 in both low-light performance and zoom performance.

How about some more sensors. No phone can tell me the temperature, without checking weather online. What if I want to know the room temperature. Could put humidity, atmospheric pressure sensors in there too, IR cameras, all kinds of cool stuff. Think of the software applications, right know my "smart" phone has no way of knowing if I'm outside or inside.

Then, voice mail. Why doesn't this still not work locally? There is no reason the phone shouldn't be able of answering and recording messages by itself.

> How about some more sensors. No phone can tell me the temperature

Electronics get hot when operating, and even more so when they are sitting in the pocket. Typical temp sensors are attached to 30cm long cables.

Nevertheless, I'm sure phones can do that already if you install a weather station in your house.

Someone figured out how to measure ambient temperature based on _battery temperature_ a long time ago, with high reliability!

How does it compensate for being in your pocket?

Locally recorded voicemail only makes sense for landlines; there’s a good reason it doesn’t exist in phones.

Visual voicemail is implemented if your carrier supports it.

I've felt that expensive (> $300) phones should have more than basic functionality for a while now.

In fact it does work the other way: for less than 300 euros, you can get a totally _normal, functional_ phone. See moto c plus, moto g line, moto e line, wileyfox spark x.

For more than 300 euros, you get essentially the same phone with a slightly better camera, which I suspect is mostly (custom) software doing the hard work. Or alternatively you get a finally FOSS device, which I understand pushes the price up.

Most phones already have a bunch of temperature sensors, air pressure sensor, magnetic field sensors, humidity sensors etc.

I'm pretty sure the iPhone has them too, but perhaps they don't make them available to app developers.

Off the top of my head, iPhone’s barometer and magnetometer are accessible via public API.

The Galaxy S4 had a temperature sensor. Believe me: It was very unreliable since the phone has a different temperature than the room.

What’s the benefit of local voicemail?

Well the obvious benefit is that you could access your voicemail recordings offline. Also for Android devices there would presumably be some way to access the raw audio files and transfer them to another computer for long-term storage.

Sure, but aren’t those extremely niche use cases? How is that innovation?

Well, I'm not sure exactly what OP meant when he said "innovation" I was just stating some practical use cases.

> Fix design. Fire Jony Ive's a$$ and hire some real designers. Apple used to be insanely great at design. Now they are a nobody. Take a look at HomePod. It is an amorphous blob. Every single Bose speaker looks better than HomePod.

I'm not a designer, but wasn't Jony Ive largely responsible for leading many of the great designs at Apple, including the iPhone? Or do you think he's stagnated, or perhaps is unfit in his current managerial role, or something else?

Not so much. Most of his iconic designs are actually pretty direct copies of the looks Dieter Rams of Braun created a decade or three earlier. That includes a fair selection of the original iPhone apps and icons. Surprising perhaps considering the brouhaha over rounded corners.

That doesn't make them bad, but Ive seems to take mostly the look not the design philosophy. Meanwhile he pursues the cult of thinness.

> Or do you think he's stagnated, or perhaps is unfit in his current managerial role, or something else?

Partially unsuited to his current role and surrounded by yes-men who play to his worse instincts, and partially in that he used to have several powerful counterweights that are no longer present on Apple's exec team to challenge him.

> wasn't Jony Ive largely responsible for leading many of the great designs at Apple, including the iPhone

Steve Jobs was the tastemaker. Without Steve's input Jony is apparently not able to produce insanely great designs.

AirPods prove this wrong.

I have two pairs of AirPods. Technically they are a marvel, but their design is quite ugly (large white bars).

I disagree, but I’m not sure where else we can go with this, since it’s a matter of taste :)

He was promoted to handle all design including software. He was best focusing intensely on industrial design for hero products, under Jobs

Hopefully does not end up being a case of Peter Principle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

I agree with all your points. On the TV issue, put an SDR inside the phone. Let developers use it to decode the many signals around us, like digital broadcast television. The potential for interesting apps is enormous.

Are you listening China? Want an iPhone-killer?

Apple has descended into mediocrity at this point. Their devices are more about form than function because they have sacrificed functionality for thinness and style. They kill background processes to save battery so we can’t do anything cool.

Also, they need a company-wide press to fix the goddam bugs in the APIs. Bloody new network framework doesn’t work worth shit. I can almost forgive leaving broadcast out of IPV4, although it is crucial for many technical tasks, but leaving multicast out of IPV6? You absolute effing morons!

And geofencing is the stupidest non-functional horrendoma ever conceived by humans. You dipshits, we don’t want to know that we passed the geofence ten minutes and a mile-and-a-half ago, we want to know right-the-eff-now. What is wrong with you people?

Seriously, one of the major applications for geofencing is security. I want to draw a precise perimeter around my kid’s school and get notified the very actual moment my kid crosses that boundary. Not ten minutes later when they’ve already been picked up in a white van are are in the process of being disssembled.

And you changed the compass so that it is corrected by GPS, but you didn’t tell anyone? What is wrong with you, Apple? Are you insane? The way you do that is to create a new method, “NSHeadingWithGPSCorrection”. You don’t just change the way the existing compass heading works. You want planes to crash? Cos that’s how you get planes crashing, ya idiots.

So they need both hardware innovation and software innovation that works properly. And someone like Steve to yell at them and make them feel bad when they are being twits. RIP Steve.

>- Improve cellular reception. We are now heavily reliant on our cell phones, yet half the time our cell phones don't work because we are inside a building or not close to a tower and so on. This needs to be fixed ASAP.

Everyone wants to buy the cheapest cellphone plan, then they complain when it doesn't work in buildings. Your location matters here, but at least in the more enclosed bars in san jose, AT&T and T-mobile are super unreliable; Verizon works fine.

I mean, I understand, I also want things that are good and cheap. And when you can get it, that's great. But I don't think this one is apple's fault.

My biggest complaint about the reception on my own cell is that if I'm within range of a wifi network I've connected to in the past, but that network is broken at the router at this moment? My phone keeps trying to use wifi rather than connecting to my cellular network.

> Everyone wants to buy the cheapest cellphone plan, then they complain when it doesn't work in buildings. Your location matters here, but at least in the more enclosed bars in san jose, AT&T and T-mobile are super unreliable; Verizon works fine.

In the UK we have one set of physical lines, owned and run by BT. BT has to, by law, lease the lines out to sub providers at it's own "internal" costing rate so that there is competition in telephone providers.

It remains bemusing to me that Mobile Towers weren't treated in the same way, with every provider using the same network of towers and sharing. We do it for emergency calls (999 will route the nearest/strongest tower irrespective of owner), and frankly you'd have fewer towers over-saturating the high population areas for the 4-5 networks.

Here in Norway we have two mobile networks (Telenor and Netcom). Telenor is the old state company like BT, that used to be called Televerket. They also own most of the physical lines like in the UK. Netcom is the only privately started company that acquired a license in the 90s.

When Telenor were privatised the license required them to sell capacity at cost to other operators. The same license requirements hold for mobile towers so all the small operators can piggyback on their infrastructure at cost. The result is that we have over 50 operators competing on services and add-ons while having approximately the same base network quality.

This is largely the case for ISPs too and it works great I think.

>The result is that we have over 50 operators competing on services and add-ons while having approximately the same base network quality.

what kind of services or add ons would you possibly want with a cellphone? most of the "features" they offer around here are things I'd pay money to not get. I mean, I guess tethering, but I personally am a little bit offended I have to pay extra for that rather than just paying for the data (I do pay extra for tethering, because if you want the good network, that's another fee you have to pay if you are being honest and don't want to spend a bunch of extra time sysadmining your phone)

> My phone keeps trying to use wifi rather than connecting to my cellular network.

This already exists and it's called "Wi-Fi Assist". It's disabled by default but you can enable it by scrolling all the way down in the "Mobile Data" settings menu (after all the apps).

Yup, I turn that on. It doesn't seem to help much at all, which seems weird; I mean, most network-level mitigations only help if the error is on the immediate link, so it's unsurprising that it doesn't help when my home router is down but my home wifi is still strong... but I get a similar problem at work; the wifi at work is setup to be strong in the building and to cut off almost immediately when you get outside (no, I'm not sure how it's implemented, but they did a good job) and the transition from wifi to cellular is just not very smooth; I'm out of contact for a good 30 seconds, a lot of the time. Not what I expect from a cellphone and plan of this expense in this age.

Both Android and iPhone have put lots of effort into the 'broken WiFi network" problem. Apple has done MPTCP (allowing data to be split over WiFi and mobile), and Google has led on captive portal detection and disconnecting from non-working WiFi networks.

Despite that, results both sides of the fence are lackluster. User experience wandering through a city with WiFi hotspots is still terrible.

I want to be able to start a video call on Skype and go for a jog through the city and have it dynamically switch from WiFi to 4g every few paces while not dropping any frames. We're far from that world.

To achieve my proposed connectivity, platforms would need:

* Ability to connect to multiple WiFi networks at once (already possible with firmware mods).

* A worldwide shift to MPTCP or QUIC to handle IP address changes without disrupting user traffic.

* A VPN/gateway to tunnel legacy traffic which isn't QUIC or MPTCP. Google already does this for Project Fi

* Preferably the ability to subscribe to multiple phone networks/cells at once to avoid the few hundred millisecond gap in data connectivity when switching cells. Mediatek devices can already do this with firmware mods.

Facebook is launching their own satellites to beam down high-speed internet. (See https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/21/17598418/facebook-athena-... ) Why isn't Apple doing that? More than anyone else Apple needs it.

People have been talking about LEO internet for as long as I've been working; It didn't work in the '90s, mostly due to launch costs

(you see, for decent network performance, the satellites need to be low - that means you need a lot of satellites, because each one can't be seen from much of the earth's surface, and because they are so low, there is enough atmospheric drag that you have to replace the things every few years. If you use satellites at a regular orbit, you use fewer of them, sure, but you also then have the problem of really looong ping times.)

I mean, I'm sure someone will eventually get it, but we probably need to lower launch costs, and we need to do a lot of engineering on the rest of it. It's not an easy problem.

> If Google can do that ( https://fi.google.com ) why can't Apple?

I think Apple planned (still is?) to become a carrier as part of their eSIM rollout, but the carriers who sell a lot of their phones are not so welcoming to carrying a competing carriers products.

If Apple can move iDevice sales to their own stores to a higher degree this is more likely to happen.

I feel like Apple can just have a popup that says "Verizon has no service here. AppleNet has 4 bars service. Do you want to connect to AppleNet instead($35 per month)?".

Click 'Yes' and you're subscribed, billed to your Apple account just like any other in-app subscription, and only used when your main provider has no service or you have no SIM inserted.

Yep. But with that functionality it could also be: Turn iPhone on, get asked the same, never worry about a separate carrier, ever.

Carriers don't want that.

Apple has shown that they can dictate whatever terms they want to carriers before. Them not being able to do so in this particular instance doesn't make sense.

This presents wrong view of innovation: Apple has money and smart people, just throw more money and innovate more.

Major part of innovation for tech giants like Apple is buying out small companies with big innovations and developing them into products.

Big companies can usually develop true innovations faster than small companies but they rarely produce breakthroughs.

> Voice and text should go over data

That's what Facetime and Messages are, no? If you need to call non-Apple users, then Skype should work.

I figured he was suggesting a voice over IP solution more like Google Voice that can still communicate with the regular cell networks.

Skype can call out to standard phones.

That's true, although I was surprised to find a few weeks ago that Skype does not actually support porting phone numbers in, so you would need to get a brand new number.

I would have switched to android this year due to high iPhone XS price had it not been the “need” to stay in iMessages. When most of your friends are having a blue chat bubble, you don’t want to be “that guy”.

iMessages is apples secret weapon and I’m surprised android hasn’t done their own iMessages api where all android can interoperable. Or at the very least why hasnt Samsung done their own?

Finally, other secret sauces apple has that keeps their customers in place: iCloud Keychain (very handy when switching between multiple iPads, MacBook, iPhone) without the need to pay a third party password vendor (whose security is not backed by a one trillion dollar market cap).

iCloud sync: easy way for app devs to sync and for customers to have automated syncing between multiple devices that “just works”. I don’t know if android has such easy syncing between different android manufacturers (ie Samsung phone to asus tablet to chrome book, for example). I doubt it.

Finally really nice features like Handoff where my safari tabs are all synced automatically between multiple iPads, iPhone, and MacBook.

And final finally: part of the high price I pay for using apple evosystem is security: I know that safari (unlike chrome) isn’t bent in tracking my every move in order to sell me more ads; or that my cloud password manager is safe (even safety in numbers in terms of security by obsurity (one in many iOS users) backed by a trillion dollar company: pretty sure nobody wants to f with that); my os isn’t bent on tracking my every move or file to analyze later (chromeos, google calendar, google docs); apple has hard stops in place on apps from over snooping (android apps such as fb tracking your calls and sms data); you pay once for your apps and then you can reuse them on the next iphone (app devs are free to release new versions or discontinue support in some reasonable timeframe); and finally all of the above is in apples interest to do for you as long as you pay more for hardware.

Heck even windows 10 tracks your every move and tried to serve you ads. Office has become a yearly subscription model (ewww!). Google offers you free products but you know your every move is tracked and stored into some obscure database only to be analyzed and used some years down the line.

I have been tempted for a while now to switch to android due to cheaper phones but the above benefits are just too strong right now for me to give up over the worry of being labeled some kind of apple fan boy (I’m not; my first smartphone was a galaxy s1 and I prefers thinkpads).

At this point, apple is a service company which offers a lifetime subscription model with free upgrades in exchange for high hardware prices. I’ll take that over security issues, data tracking, and highly convenient features that all “just work”.

> I’m surprised android hasn’t done their own iMessages api where all android can interoperable

Google have tried this at too high a level (allo and duo). I guess the reason why it wasn't made for AOSP and instead put on the play store is because they want the masses to be using a Google product. A bit of a shame, since given android ownership rates a 'free' service like that over IP would be cool. Maybe the real problem with that is deciding who controls the servers handling this data or something.

interesting ! Google has strategists of all kinds in place, I wonder if they would make a stupid short term blunder of greed in owning an app over offering a free api for their business customers to compete against the apple juggernaut. The data ownership issue is real; seems to be a tough problem to solve given that not every manufacturer would play ball (why would Samsung want to yield their hard earned ecosystem to upstarts who plan to uproot them?). And also the security implications too, with so many smaller players in the android game (similar to fb issue with letting their other api users have access to user messages).

It does not seem possible for google to solve this problem for a long time, since they seem to rely on ad revenue to invest in their other businesses.

I don’t foresee apple going down any time soon due to that one issue that google has alone.

whatsapp has already replaced iMessage in most of the english speaking world. in fact i'd say anyone using iMessage outside the US is the anachronism. i had to explain the concept of how iMessage uses the internet to send messages to someone else with an iPhone instead of SMS to someone in the middle east for example

whatsapp has fast caught up in features too - you can send and receive files/music clips/gifs etc. animoji/blue checkbox isn't enough of a differentiating factor to matter

WhatsApp suffers from the same issue that android has: its owned by an ad revenue company, and one that already has built a dubious reputation (warranted or not) for privacy and security.

The thing is - the cultural inertia of the USA is huge. American culture has a thing about not giving a flying f what the rest of the world is doing. In that sense, if nobody can defeat iMessage on American cultural ground, it makes it hard for the other messaging guys to look cool or legit. IMHO all message networks and social networks is built solely on inertia and I don’t think the inertia of any one region of the world can overcome that of the USA. Maybe if WhatsApp can take over the entire rest of the world - but China is lost already and so the war is already over.