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Comment by atlasunshrugged | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty excited to see what Apple releases. Generally, it seems like they're later to market rather than on the cutting edge of things but bring a high design quality and make tech approachable for a broader audience but this seems like one of those ones where the market hasn't been really made yet. Although, I've been pretty disappointed over the last few years with the quality of their products, especially software. I usually upgrade every ~2 years but for my last device that was 2 years old I was trying to hold out until a new release but it would constantly freeze up and crash after downloading the new software release they usually do when they announce a new phone (not trying to go into conspiracy theories but it seemed a little too convenient that just then is when my phone would start going on the fritz).

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Until recently I would have agreed with you. It seems to me that Apple is in a luxurious decline. Cook is great at squeezing money out of their product lines but he's done it at the cost of good will.

I was in the market to upgrade, I love OS X and I was willing to pay a premium... but with crappy keyboards and systems that can't be upgraded it's just was not worth the price tag. I recently switched from my macbook pro to a thinkpad X1. I have to say the first week was hard -- especially the trackpad -- but the adjustment so far has been fine. I'm struck by how much better windows has gotten. Even more, I'm impressed by how innovative it and the eco-system has become again. I think that's the challenge for Apple. How can they stay big and remain innovative? Right now it seems they are coasting on good management and design... but they are missing that element that presumably Jobs brought to the table by directing those elements towards a new innovative vision of a product line.

Anyway, I could be wrong but it seems to me that Apple is coasting. These announcements seem more like a big company flailing around to get in on the next big thing. On the other hand, Apple is great at the self-contained devices (ipad, iphone, etc.) with no moving parts. These products seem rock-solid and I think this is where the real revenue is. My concern is that this money is going to allow everyone to hide from the fact that the company is not as innovative as it used to be.

Interested to hear from others though. My work is elsewhere so I don't track this company closely.

While Apple's Mac line is stumbling a bit, the rest of Apple's hardware is pretty spot on. The Apple Watch, AirPods, iPhone, & iPad are all rock solid. The AR headset is a lot more like the Apple Watch and it's basically slaughtered it's competition and is widely considered a best-in-class product.

The big question mark with Apple isn't hardware, its software. iOS 13 and Catalina were both pretty ambitious and deeply flawed.

iOS 13 can at least be partially explained by the difficulty of tying OS releases together with hardware when both require lengthy pre-planning.

Just having a hard deadline with an annual release cycle is aggressive. Seems like they should be doing a lot of these releases in point upgrades instead of forcing one giant upgrade per year.

>...but with crappy keyboards and systems that can't be upgraded it's just was not worth the price tag.

>Right now it seems they are coasting on good management and design

Are you saying Apple has poorly designed keyboards yet their design is still good?

I mean, if you wanted to be maximally confusing, or insist on pointing at what amounts to a pun, but the person you are responding to neither stepped in your joke nor is saying something unreasonable: most people would use the term "design" to mean "how it looks" not "how it works", and while the word can be used for both purposes, it robs us of an easy distinction. To draw an analogy: Apple is still great at making clothing that looks amazing and feels great to touch, but has become increasingly inept at making sure that clothing fits comfortably in different poses or even simply doesn't fall apart / tear at the slightest stress. Sure, these are both part of the "design" of the dress, but there is a reason why in engineering we don't assume a "designer" knows anything at all about how to make a keyboard that doesn't break.

But that's exactly what good design is. It's not just the look. It's also reliability and choice of materials, and likely at least an overview of the manufacturing and assembly processes. And perhaps even the packaging.

Looks-only designers are almost entirely useless. While it's not true absolutely anyone can sketch nice-looking things, people who can sketch nice-looking things and also have an understanding of the practical constraints that can make the nice-looking thing a practical product (or not) are very rare indeed.

Apple used to excel at both. Under Cook/Ives, the balance shifted to style over substance. Arguably it's still stuck there, especially in software, where the UX and the reliability have both become increasingly poor.

So a pre-announcement of a revolutionary product is nice, but the suspicion is it's primarily there to pump up the stock price and deflect from some of the recent missteps.

Unfortunately the recent missteps have been most obvious in software, so I think it's reasonable to be skeptical about Apple's ability to craft a reliable and outstanding UX for not just one but two completely new classes of products.

„Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works.“ Steve Jobs

https://www.wired.com/1996/02/jobs-2/

In the past, Apple's entrance with improved design has bolstered a market quite a bit; iPod and iPhone are examples. I feel like if Apple does release something, the market response will inform us whether AR itself has a viable market at all.

I mean, if Apple can't bolster the market for such a thing, perhaps no one really wanted it after all.

>bring a high design quality

I can picture Jony Ives cutting glasses out of the cereal box. Hopefully those will be thin enough for him.

>it seems like they're later to market rather than on the cutting edge of things but bring a high design quality

That was true of Apple under Jobs but Tim Cook's legacy is one of terrible quality assurance and superficial design over considering function. Apple is coasting on their legacy.

Apple have always had a fairly consistent hit-to-miss ratio, so it’s easy to pick and choose products to find evidence for a set narrative.

As a counter-example to yours, the faux stitched leather of Find My Friends was all Steve Jobs, whereas the Apple Watch is all post-Jobs.

Remember that Jobs gave us the toaster desktop, which in my mind is still their very best example of superficial design over considering function. (Well that or the early QuickTime player for OS X.)

Meanwhile, AirPods are a phenomenal product. Up there with the best work Apple has done.

Do you mean the Cube? It’s a nice computer. Fanless and practically silent, with very easy to access internals. It was too expensive, obviously.

headphones? I guess I'm surveying their entire ecosystem

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