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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. A consistent yearly upgrade cycle is actually a good thing. It allows staggered upgrades for people who do not want to upgrade yearly, but still create the necessary incentive for incremental improvement.

A new iPhone every 5 years for example, would be dumb. Ignore the hype and marketing and just pick the one you'd like if and when you upgrade.

A tangent:

Personally, I wish more things had yearly upgrades and the backwards/forward compatibility Apple devices generally have. It's a different model, but it would be nice if game consoles had improved iterations yearly. The once a half decade model creates too much of a boom/bust cycle imho. If the Switch had a new, better version every year that was both forward and backward compatible within a "software generation" a lot of games like Pokemon wouldn't look and perform absolutely terribly.

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A new iPhone every five years means you’ll have a harder time getting one, like whenever a new video game console gets released.

4 years of development time, 1 year of production to build inventory projected to last 6 months or something.

Take pre-orders a few weeks in advance, then everyone can have it day 1. No scalpers reselling them on eBay for 10 times the cost. No stampede at Apple stores because they already have a few weeks of inventory.

The accelerated product cycle is why you have awful launches like consoles. The product is barely finished and rushed into production in time for Christmas. There's not time to build the actual units. Slow down a bit and you can solve that problem.

All of those ‘bad’ thing in launches serve a marketing purpose. Scarcity makes consumers think something is in demand. Additionally, every day of stockpiled inventory costs money.

Yes, artificial scarcity and the accompanying artificially high prices are a bad thing for consumers, in all situations.

Inventory in a warehouse does not have the kind of cost you think it does. Most of the "cost" people talk about are hypothetical profits that a different product occupying that space might generate in the same time. The real costs are insurance and warehouse leases. Per unit, it's almost nothing.

A company like Apple could easily stockpile months worth of inventory and never even notice the real physical cost of storing it.

If you think there's no value to present money flows, I'd love to take $1MM from you. I'll pay it back later, so there's literally no cost to you, right?

Opportunity costs, or any other "virtual" cost, are still meaningful figures.

Not if we are talking game consoles. Sony and Microsoft sell them at a loss and then recoup that loss with a cut from game sales.

Let's put it into perspective. A11 had 3x less bandwidth, 5x less flops, node that's a lot worse(since then we had N7, N7P, N6, N5 and it's many variations). Such big leaps are problematic in terms of project management. Just ask C++11 people. Or Intel, with their EUV nodes. Or anybody else who decided to shoot to the moon. Having intermediate deliverables has an immense value on its own. I'd argue that we are getting much better phones this way than we would have otherwise.

A few weeks of iPhone inventory is going to be in the tens, if not hundreds, of millions.

Perhaps, but a new better one every two years might be pretty compelling.

They sorta do a tick-tock cycle now, generally, its form factors on the 'tick', and significant hardware refresh on the 'tock'

Apple has terrible forwards or backwards compatibility. It is one reason I abandoned them. I wanted off the required upgrade bandwagon when my apps and such started breaking and their UX paradigms kept changing.

i'm curious, which versions, devices and apps did you experience this on?

I used almost all Apple products from 2004 to 2018 when i decided to get off the bandwagon. I started with getting off the iPhone cause I wanted a fingerprint sensor and no notch. (OnePlus 7 Pro had what I wanted.) I hated the touch bar and wanted real F keys because I use those extensively in my IDEs. I also hated fixing my laptop once or twice a year cause keys broke. From an OS perspective, iOS upgrades permanently broke apps for me several times, which were not updated by their providers. For macOS, 10.8 was great and I eventually got to 10.12, but I had devices that work just fine but were 32-bit only. Then Homebrew even stopped supporting old versions, whichnwas the last straw. All in all, Apple just became more and more hostile to me and I am done with them. I keep an iPad solely for Foreflight, but I am sampling Garmin Pilot too. (Does not appear to be in the same league.)

I’m still on an iPhone 8 and it’s running smooth and receives the latest iOS updates.

I couldn’t say the same about an Android phone of similar vintage (not counting lineageOS - there I can even still get the latest Android on my Oneplus One, but it’s more rough around the edges compared to the original OS)

> Apple devices

Well, not Macs. They've never managed to settle into any kind of consistent upgrade cycle there. In the past I guess they could blame Intel somehow, but they're not even releasing an M2 iMac at all.

iMacs aren't exactly a big seller. There are new macbooks every year.

> In the past I guess they could blame Intel somehow,

It was fairly easy. Intel's released products often would not meet original spec, or once it was throttled to fit into spec it didn't have significant performance gains over the prior generation. Often they would go generations without the performance warranting the increased part cost.

> They've never managed to settle into any kind of consistent upgrade cycle there

They would like an annual incremental upgrade cycle and a five year design cycle.

Even without Intel, they still have supply chain constraints. For instance, even with their own silicon, they are relying on TSMC to be able to meet process and production volume targets.

Releasing chips on a new process will likely lead to really odd effects due to yield issues - for instance, having a new CPU show up first in products with lower sales volume. That includes tiering, either with things like a regular vs "pro" phone, or retaining the older model of computer while charging more for the newer version.

Right now they appear to be on an 18 month cycle for Apple silicon, which is driving their new hardware (either with a new machine serving as the launch platform of some new SoC, or a design revamp of a machine based on existing SoC).

Humorously, the only product which has had an incremental update so far is the MacBook Pro 13".

I suspect they'll eventually have a two or three year "architecture" tick for their Mac and iPad SoCs. Depending on those architectures and the upstream changes at TSMC, there might be a lot of different SoCs released against that tick.

> but they're not even releasing an M2 iMac at all.

I'd be really shocked if they don't release a M2 iMac, most likely in March.

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