Ask HN: Getting excited about new Apple iPhones is so 2010s. What went wrong? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Getting excited about new Apple iPhones is so 2010s. What went wrong?

13 pointsbehnamoh20 comments

I used to get so excited every time Apple would announce a new device. But in the past 6-7 years, Apple looks like milking its successful products (mainly iPhone) w/o a clear vision.

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Customers don't really want anything different. Brands don't want to rewrite their apps. Android doesn't offer real competition but it keeps regulators away (Apple doesn't look like a monopoly since it sells less than half the phones even though makes much more than half the profit) and keeps a real competitor away.

The most interesting play in mobile, I think, is spatial computing, not necessarily that Apple Vision itself makes it big, but in that with all the features in an iDevice (particularly Ultra Wideband tracking) a phone can become a "sessile robot" that is quite aware of exactly where it is, what is pointing at, what is going on around it, etc. It's just as feasible to interact with a virtual object in that space as it is to do so with an Apple Vision.

We've been moving towards this gradually (see Pokemon Go) but Apple has been firmly establishing a lead in this space with high accuracy positioning technology and Apple Vision as something that inspires people to realize what is possible. The thing is it will just sneak up on people and people might gradually get into using this kind of app without ever having a moment where they realized it happened.

Phones have reached good enough. In the first years of the iPhone, each iteration brought major important changes. Now, there's not much in the way of changes to get excited about. It's the same with other phones, too. 5G is maybe important, but more inevitable than exciting; same with usb-C. If Apple put a headphone jack back, that might be exciting though. :)

Desktop computers are laptops were around this level of good enough when iPhones started coming out. When was the last time an annual computer release was exciting? Apple's releases manage to get some attention, but mostly because they're pursuing alternate paths than the mainstream, and even when they were using mainstream intel processors, they didn't follow Intel's update cadence. Barely anyone is excited when Lenovo puts the next version intel/amd processor into a Thinkpad. It's expected, it'll be better, but it won't be exciting.

I wouldn't say they don't have a clear vision. Given their size / market-share, one of their goals is probably just not to screw up in any major way, which they've succeeded at. I don't plan on getting anything other than an iPhone in the near future, so they must be doing something right.

At the end of the day it's probably just difficult to create new phone related innovations every couple of years.

Apple has always been about incremental improvements. Once every several years, it makes something that’s very different and leagues ahead. It has never had mind blowing product releases in consecutive years.

In the initial years of the iPhone and Apple Watch, the hardware wasn’t really very powerful (but Apple’s vertical integration and software made the most of it). Talking more about iPhone, ever since the A4 chip was released, the Apple Silicon chips have grown leaps and bounds over the years. Nowadays the performance improvements in each iteration of iPhones don’t matter much for the kind of usage most people have.

One area that does show improvements every year is the cameras on iPhone, especially on the high end models. The iPhone 13 brought a dramatic improvement in low light photography compared to all other generations before it (and the competition). The difference is literally day and night. That’s something you may have missed noticing if you’ve followed or used the devices over the last 6-7 years.

It may probably be the case that the features are or have been good enough for you. It’s been that way for a lot more people, which is a big reason why the upgrade cycle for iPhones has elongated over time from once a year to once every two years and now around once every three or four years. It’s also why Apple has the iPhone upgrade program and other incentives (in the U.S. and some other countries) to get people to buy new iPhones every year. This saturation and extended upgrade cycles are why Apple has been growing its services divisions (and revenues) in the last several years.

Maybe you grew out of the phase where you get excited by yet another thing you have to buy that perhaps is what you needed to achieve happiness and acceptance among your peers but it really isn't?

No, just me? Alright.

Also, Steve Jobs died and got replaced by a bean counter. Large public companies aren't really big on visionaries. They prefer small incremental upgrades than risking a failed moonshot. Much safer, and most people are afraid of change and new things anyway.

I don’t see the point in releasing new iPhones every year (besides making more money, ofc). I mean, if I buy a 1000 EUR phone today, I’m not planning on replacing it the next year (or in 3 years or so). So, as a person who has an iPhone already (and that will last me a few years more), I don’t get excited anymore with these releases.

Are you suggesting we all upgrade at the same time? I like the yearly tick, and my upgrade year is probably out of sync with yours.

In the early days of 2 year contracts and half year batteries there was no out of sync, and that's a very different environment to release a product into. Even someone who still buys the best for themselves and hands their phones down is probably sitting the average year out.

I honestly don’t know anyone who buys a new phone every year. I knew one person who would get a new Samsung every year, but he has stopped doing that now. My experience goes way back to the Nokia 3210 era.

This is in the UK. I’m on a 3 year cycle with iPhones, buying a second hand one-year-old model and keeping it for 3 years.

The two most obvious answers are

A) Not everyone buys phones at the same time you do and if the only iPhone on sale 2 weeks ago was the iPhone 12, they’d have a lot of unhappy customers (and used / returned phone) when they released the 15.

B) Product iteration, the same reason (and benefits) why so many software devs stopped rolling 2-3 years of updates into single big releases.

Steve Jobs died. He had a way of making the mundane, exciting, and the exciting, world-changing.

Just like most systems reach an equilibrium between input and output, I believe we might've reached the optimization stage of the mobile device era. In my opinion, some (maybe all) of these things need to happen in order to spark change:

- some new tech leads to exciting new opportunities, either in durability, size, weight, battery, wireless tech etc;

- the market accepts and nurtures the new tech;

- the market sparks the need in the consumer.

Same reason getting excited about higher CPU speeds is so 90s. Latest tech generations do not enable meaningfully new experiences compared to the early ones, and the hardware capabilities plateau over time (whether due to Moore's Law or other miniaturization limitations).

Not sure what you mean. Their vision for iPhone has always been incremental improvements. Nothings wrong. You don’t need a new phone every year so it’s fine if you aren’t excited about every new model.

Nothing's gone wrong. Apple's phones are good but so are their phones from a couple of years ago. It's not sustainable to have a huge improvement or redesign every year.

Yeah, it’s just a product (or a product category) reaching maturity.

Every new home computer announcement in the 80s was super exciting. Now, exciting new computers are few and far between.

Prosper it is you who changed.

it s been quite a few years that the mobile ecosystem reached its functional limit. now companies are focused on unbundling the product to create multiple product lines that milk the consumer (headphones, watch)

I don't think that feeling is unique to Apple.

Nothing went wrong, smart phones are mostly a done product. There simply aren't new killer features that are going to feel as magical as things like combining an iPod and a phone. There are limits to the form factor and what can be shoved in there so there's likely only going to be marginal improvements.

In product management is there a term for this? I feel like in the software/SaaS world one will encounter a product that is generally in a really good spot but people are getting paid to do <something> so they come up with <something> and it leads to feature bloat or at a minimum it appears like there is "no clear vision".

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