Apple in 2021
sixcolors.com
sixcolors.com
I can't imagine anything interesting happening to the watch that doesn't include a big increase to battery life. I don't want any other feature except a battery that can make it a full day.
Apple software has seemingly regressed every year recently. Native apps like Music and Podcasts, the only two I would regularly use, have become so bugged that I had to move to other options. Every time I take a look and see if they are working again, they are buggy messes that I have to constantly wrestle with.
I thought the Series 7 could make it a full day? My wife has a S6 and makes it about 36 hours with her normal usage (which is admittedly quite light).
For me, it's not a watch if it has to be charged every day or two. I need 4+ days of battery life so that I don't have to bring another charger on every overnight/weekend trip.
From what I understand, impact of radio on battery life is very real but often invisible / not thought about. Cellular really can chew through battery when the base stations are far away.
When the AirPods first came out there were a lot of reviews saying "Battery life is about 5 hours, this is just barely acceptable but it's not a problem."
And then two years later the same authors were writing articles complaining that their AirPod battery life has gotten unacceptably short as if they'd never owned anything with a non-removable battery before and had no idea it was going to happen.
Maybe I should have bought a signal booster for my office instead. I got one for my car because I would consistently drop calls in one spot; with the booster I had 5 bars the whole commute. Before COVID, anyway.
That makes me wonder - what does Apple Watch do that Mi Band doesn't that makes the time on battery so much different? I guess screen size and GPS during workout (Mi Band uses phone GPS), but other than that? (I'm not sure what other features it has, might be comparing apples to oranges, no pun intended)
> If you don’t agree to let them sell your information, then every single time you connect your watch to the phone, it automatically transfers you to settings on your phone because it wants you to alter them so they can sell your information.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mc.miband1
I have to ask: What are you doing with your Apple Watch that drains the battery so fast?
I've never been able to drain my Watch battery anywhere near that fast, even with the always-on screen still enabled.
I get the 10% low battery notification a few times a week.
My 7 year old Samsung Gear watch gets around 2 days with minimal use (IE workdays). On average hiking/running day, it will still have 25-45 percent after maximum use from like 7 AM to 6 PM. I have also: -ran it over -lost it on trail for 2+ days in rain/sleet -Sanded it tomatte, then back to shiny after....accidents -showered with it for years.
I cannot believe an apple watch does what you're describing without being a dud.
My Garmin lasts just over a week (less if I record a lot of activities, but even recording an 8 hour hike it still has over 50% left at the end of the day).
I don't have any particular interest in a smart watch - even if you gave me one for free, I doubt I'd bother wearing it. But if it's also a fully-featured health monitor? Yeah, absolutely.
I'm waiting for them to add glucose monitoring into it
By comparison my Polar V800, which has been in constant use since 2017, can last over a month on a single charge! It tracks my movement during day and detects sleep through lack of movement.
Under heavy use - GPS, heart rate, pedal cadence and wheel speed sensors all at the same time - it can last 5-6hrs.
Outstanding piece of kit :-)
I’m curious what use case you have where the battery doesn’t last a full day. I generally charge my 40mm S7 once a day but there is always at least a 25-30% charge remaining. I suppose if I did a multi mile bike ride while playing a podcast from the phone that might change. But otherwise it’s ok. I would love a two day charge because since days I miss the morning charge and don’t realize until I’m out of the house but that’s by not common these days.
Edit: I also do sleep tracking each night and walks most days. Battery life was similar on my older S4 up until the last six months where it started running low.
However, I turned off almost all notifications on my watch because they are mostly annoying, except text messages and protonmail. I turned off the “always on” watch face. I keep a very small subset of apps on the watch.
I also don’t have a cellular version of it, wifi only.
Apple loves to show off its bloody oxygen sensor and its ECG capability. But they do not take key metrics that the watch measures all day and tell me what they mean. Heck the watch even measures heart rate variability but only logs it into the Health app.
But they need to be taking the resting HR, heart rate variability, HR, respiratory rate and develop a model for determining a stress and recovery score which ties into sleep etc. Showing these metrics on their own is great but they need to take the key metrics and show us what they mean.
Garmin, Whoop and Fitbit all do this and it's a key differentiator. I think the largest differentiator between it and its competitors.
of course in a company as big and wide ranging as aapl, there are so many competing priorities and things to focus on but, IMO, tim cook is a real life paperclip maximizer. early on in his tenure there was some criticism that he was a "bean counter" and would ruin things cause he wasn't Steve, but rather than cutting costs as a traditional beancounter type would, he has been ruthless in pursuing what works to continue the endless revenue climb.
there are certainly many things they could work on but choose not to, or could do better, but when you're in Cook's position and you are the preeminent Elephant (far larger and less capable of dance than Gerstner could have ever imagined), you have no choice but for changes in direction to be slow but large in magnitude.
and at such a massive scale, while aapl could stumble out a new product/service and vacuum up tens of $millions, there are fewer and fewer opportunities which will clear their IRR. Taking some liberties interpreting here, but hence why they feel the need to extract value from App Store payments, turn a blind eye to scam apps, Google as default $earch, etc; their gravitational pull is so powerful that, as a proper paperclip maximizer, they would be derelict of responsibility by not simply sticking their hand out the window and siphoning incremental revenue. I imagine Cook in Ballmer's sweaty Oxford shirt yelling "Services! Services! Services!".
back to the OP, all that is to say i see aapl's future as rocky, since there will be less and less of a cohesive product vision going forward as emphasis skews back and forth across revenue categories. Not to mention navigating the regulatory waters.
How much did the original iPhone and iPad cost to create? I imagine it would be an easy effort for 2022 Apple, and even a total failure would not dent their revenue by much. I can't imagine Cook being unable to do it.
…and he has: AirPods, M1, Apple Watch, cleaning cloth…
Also some failures that made it out the door, like HomePod…
I’d like a little more focus on quality and consistency but that would mean stepping off the annual treadmill. Which they could do everyone a service by being the first to do so.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi 1. https://www.wired.com/2015/04/the-apple-watch/
Also to note an idea is great but you need execution. While PA Semi may be responsible for the existence of the M1, Apple and subsequently Tim Cook are responsible for getting it in people’s hands for a grand or so.
maybe this is an over simplification but, who has license to consume large amounts of resources across the company, potentially all of it being a loss, and not be fired?
It may surprise you to learn that for a very long time, Apple’s de facto head of product (aside from Steve, obviously) was Phil Schiller. The “marketing people” have always been near the top of the food chain.
of course Marketing is an integral part of any large business and of course apple has been well above average in how their campaigns and messaging would rank in that regard.
i added the commentary from Steve about the Scully era to the original post for context. from his explanation the nuance is, IMO, that when a company gets into this endless revenue cycle, a sales/marketing effort can demonstrate growth - hard numbers - far easier than a new product could. the new product could take years to become positive in NPV while a marketing campaign can "show up" by next quarter's earnings release.
This seems like an accurate assessment. Fortunately much of it has resulted in great products like the Apple Watch and M1 Macs, but service marketing leaking into the UI leaves a bad taste.
As a shareholder I'd be happy with the revenue and dividends, but as a customer I want the focus to be on building great new products and improving reliability and usability rather than trying to convince me to buy more service subscriptions.
We've already seen what happens to mobile games when they prioritize monetization over gameplay: they turn into slot machines. Sadly Apple Arcade is a sort of response to a problem that Apple grew in its own walled garden.
The second problem is that Apple themselves are missing a number of functions that are baffling, such as not having history for metrics. I can't understand how it's impossible to have e.g. a history of temperatures in HomeKit.
I'm not sure how Apple would approach this though. Would it be part of your iCloud data and require a minimum plan (similar to how HKSV operates). I don't ever see them allowing the option to control /where/ that data is stored exactly.
From Wikipedia: "A Likert item is simply a statement that the respondent is asked to evaluate by giving it a quantitative value on any kind of subjective or objective dimension, with level of agreement/disagreement being the dimension most commonly used...
The format of a typical five-level Likert item, for example, could be:
Strongly disagree Disagree Neither agree nor disagree Agree Strongly agree"
This is much different than "Give a number 1-5 to iPhone."
"This is much different than "Give a number 1-5 to iPhone.""
They wrote:
"They were prompted with 12 different Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1 to 5 and optionally provide text commentary per category"
So, unless they are not being explicit about their survey question, which imo would make little sense, especially if it is a traditional Likert scale which is used in context of a question, it does tell us that.
Regardless, my point is that the survey trying to quantify a score is much less valuable than the qualitative points in the article.
Things went downhill rapidly when Jony Ive’s team took over software design. I wasn’t a huge fan of the gaudy extreme skeuomorphism of the late Forstall era, but at least you could tell what was a button. What you could do with a piece of software was much clearer.
The current team are insistent that simplicity is when controls are hidden behind hover and tap states, or inside overflow menus in a toolbar only 5% full.
The general lack of visibility into what is actually happening is incredibly annoying. Anything that involves syncing is in dire need of “stop and start again” button.
Finally I can get rid of the tagging button in Finder and replace it with a New Folder button. And I can ditch all of those buttons I don't use at the top of the Mail app to keep the "search" bar open at all times.
Funnily enough, I remember many, many tech reviewers in 2014, 2015 criticizing the MacBook Pro for that "ancient" design. And Apple eventually gave in and redesigned both the laptops (yuck) and OS X (maybe even more yuck). UI/UX is tricky, I think, because in an industry where folks move around every couple of years to maximize their salaries, people aren't rewarded for being good, iterative stewards of an existing system. Instead, they change jobs, someone new comes in, and they try to make a name for themselves by redesigning everything through a big bang redesign. And then they move on a couple years later, and then someone else comes in and redesigns... etc. etc.
Sidenote: Holy cow, this also explains why the government sucks so much.
Which ends up being about as expensive and about the same size as a MacBook Air. And for any work that requires any sort of interface density, or complete access to the file system, or fast I/O, or…I’d way rather have a Mac.
Point is, I’m using it as a periphery device and it absolutely kicks ass in that regard. I wish they would do more of that.
(and also, my use case is also an edge case)
However, things have shifted enough that on the artistic/creative front, the iPad is actually a really nice thing to have. When the iPad Air 4 (I think? The iPad ecosystem has terrible nomenclature) came out, it not only had a USB-C connector, but worked with the Apple Pencil 2. I did something I thought I'd never do - I bought an iPad.
There are music & synthesizer apps that only make sense on a tablet, and they can talk with other music apps on the iPad pretty seamlessly too these days. And with the Apple Pencil 2, it's like a magic art pad. I've been sketching and drawing and 'painting' like I haven't done in 20 years.
And I can charge it with the same cable that charges my Pixel 6, my work-issued Macbook pro, or my wife's Thinkpad's power supply.
It certainly took long enough, but I no longer think that iPads are pure consumption devices.
Now... would I try to use it the way I use a laptop? Oh, hell no.
I have no doubt that the iPad is great at the things you list in your post, and I wish I had any skills that would justify buying an Apple Pencil.
However, I don't understand why Apple and we on HN are so focused on making the iPad "more" than a consumption device. What's wrong with consumption?
If I were to buy another iPad, it'd be for reading PDFs (terrible on e-book readers), for listening to podcasts and audiobooks, or to let my children play an educational game sometimes. But Apple keeps investing in productivity features while their Books app seems moribund at times (widget please?), their Podcasts app is an ongoing disaster, and they still don't have a read-only guest mode for children or friends. iPadOS has gotten so "pro" that buying an iPad for grandparents is not the no-brainer it used to be, either.
For all the derision that iPads get for being couch potato devices, I wish they were better at being that.
The base and mini iPads are great for that.
Human beings are more than vessels for SV douches to make billions they don’t need.
Or in the case of Peter Thiel (hello HN), to make billions to use to go out of their way to make the world a more miserable place.
Computers should empower people. They made them more than they were. The likes of the iPad go out of their way to take a device that someone, nearly everyone on this site, can learn from and grow from, and replace it with one that works hard to prevent you from exercising any brain cells. It says pleasure comes from being a potato, when the people who created it know that the pleasure in their lives can from being active creators.
If I buy an iPad to read PDFs or books, many of which are free, I am hardly making SV douches more money than when I buy a "Pro" device for productivity.
Ironically, the idea that people shouldn't read or listen (consume), and instead just build build build, also strikes me as a very Silicon Valley idea.
I really don't know what it is about the iPad that makes it the target of this discussion. I have never heard anyone say the same things about e-book readers, or headphones that don't come with a mic for content creation.
A consumption device is nothing more than something designed to extract money out of a person.
And no, being productive is not a SV idea. In fact, it’s only recently (in the past 50 or so years) that buying something that doesn’t have a productive purpose is even considered.
But I’m not surprised that SV douches have convinced themselves that they’ve created the concept of being productive.
I would understand that objection if people could only own a single computing device. But us who want the iPad to be a dumb consumption device probably own a proper computer for creation. In fact, having an iPad that is supported by all the big companies (native apps, DRM, ...) makes it easier to use a main operating system that runs none of the SV junk.
From my POV, it is really the opposite. People who want the iPad to be a universal computing device are the problem, because they'd be willing to move to a locked-down platform if only it had Xcode or whatever.
A big part of what interested me about computers was the ability to get in there and do stuff with them. Whether that was from the perspective of software - cracking open a hex editor, or learning to write code, make music, edit photos, etc. etc., or from a hardware perspective. Having standard connections that allow for modular changes to my computer, whether that meant dropping in a Firewire card to take advantage of professional audio and video equipment, swapping in SSDs as they become more affordable, upgrading RAM, changing out power supplies, and so on - all accessible with a Phillips head screwdriver. Lately I've been thinking that it's actually had an influence on the houses I've bought and lived in.
Nothing about the original iPad appealed to me. It was a big iPhone, and I already had an iPhone. Everything that I wanted to do on a bigger screen, I could already do on a bigger screen, whether that was my laptop, my desktop machine, or a television. A lot of my peers bought iPads, only to find them kind of... extra. Not great for watching videos, not as easy on the eyes as an e-ink Kindle, not great for listening to music - okay for browsing the web, until you hit Flash, which was still not uncommon at the time, especially for leisure activities like the kind of games that have become dominant on the iOS platform. For me, when the iPad came out, it was a solution looking for a problem. It wasn't for me. Now it is!
What's funny is, now I almost feel like it's too easy to "create" - there is an unfathomable amount of video content being produced or remixed or stolen & reposted, every single second, to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, you name it. There's amazing stuff coming out of that, for sure, but they're needles in an ever-growing haystack. Wild times.
I would get on just fine without an iPad, but getting one last year was one of the most satisfying tech purchases I've made in a long time.
iPhones you'll get tomorrow. Macs in two weeks. That's an intentional decision.
Other than that, the new MBP reverted many mistakes they made before. And yeah I love the iMac design with the colours. They really need to bring back target display mode before I'll actually buy one though.
I guess these comments somehow paint the overall media sentiment on the brand and consequently the stock. Nonetheless, meaningful discussions can result still.