Money likely spent on crap.
Apple is now a really bloated company that barely innovates, and now with plenty of governments breathing on its neck.
Just look at how many IPhone models exists nowadays, Steve Jobs would be shocked to see Apple in 2024.
Apple is now a really bloated company that barely innovates, and now with plenty of governments breathing on its neck.
Just look at how many IPhone models exists nowadays, Steve Jobs would be shocked to see Apple in 2024.
I don't mean to come across as standoffish here, it's just, this complaint reads to me like the "HN is becoming reddit" complaints. People have been saying it forever, so, without any new evidence, it just reads like the same old prediction that hasn't come true yet.
These are the evidence of the opposite.
Apple's hardware from the 70s and 80s, like the original Macintosh, were something special. NeXTSTEP, the Steve Jobs thing that got rebranded as Mac OS X when Apple bought them, was the first modern OS to be simultaneously good and popular. The iPhone changed what a phone is.
The iPad is an iPhone, but bigger. The watch is an iPhone, but smaller. These are not innovations of the same kind. They're the sort of thing you'd expect out of Facebook or Amazon or any other large mature bureaucratic corporation.
If the Apple II was the 70s and the Macintosh was the 80s and NeXTSTEP was the 90s and the iPhone was the 2000s, name the thing of this caliber they did in the 2010s.
Well, you had to wait for the 2020s, but Vision Pro. It's an entirely new computer, meant to be your primary device. It's similar to how the Mac came out when PCs already existed, but were just different.
Just wait 10 years until the market realizes it.
People said that about Google Glass 10 years ago.
This is a whole computer strapped to your head.
As long as Moore's law limps along, eventually performance/weight/battery will work out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_Portable
Or maybe worse than that, because the trade off never really goes away. Desktops and servers are still faster than laptops, but portability is a huge advantage, so sacrificing some performance is worth it to have something with you everywhere you go. But how much performance is it worth sacrificing to avoid having a phone in your pocket? Nowhere near as much as it is to avoid lugging a desktop computer around with you.
Or to measure it from the other side, lots of people still have a Macbook even though they also have an iPhone.
The trade off is always there, but more people are using their phones over their desktop computer these days.
That said, I do have serious concerns the greater impact to society in general when transistor technology hit a hard roadblock. Probably outside the scope of this discussion though.
What they're really doing is getting more power efficient. The "feature size" (number of nm) is fiction at this point. And the tricks they're using to eek out improvements at this point are, uh, interesting. Like they can't make it better without causing errors to occur so they just do that anyway and cover it up by using more error correction. It's really not obvious how much more of this there is to be found.
> The trade off is always there, but more people are using their phones over their desktop computer these days.
That isn't exactly true. The growth in the number of people with a desktop computer has leveled off, but it hasn't really gone down, and the things people use them for are still the same things. If you're going to write a long document, you're going to want a full-sized keyboard. The GPU needed for modern AAA games isn't going to fit in a phone. Professional activity that requires a lot of computation, like compiling code or editing video (or, going forward, a lot of this AI stuff), is a lot faster on a high-power device with more CPU or GPU cores.
What actually happened is that at least the same number of people still use a desktop computer, but now everybody has a phone, including the people who traditionally had a desktop (and still do). So more people have a phone than have a desktop, but not because fewer people have a desktop.
And it would be hard for some new technology to do the same thing to phones because nearly everybody has a phone. A new device can't have 20% more users than phones do when 97% of people have a phone.
I think their approach is unique. They are branding it as a replacement for your computer. The one and only device you need to be productive. And don't underestimate the value of not needing controllers.
Pay attention to how people talk about the experience of using Vision Pro vs other headsets. The eye tracking interface is widely praised and described by third parties (not just Apple) as feeling like magic.
I haven't used it yet, but I can imagine what using a computer would be like if I didn't have to actually point my mouse anywhere and instead it could effectively read my mind about where I want to click. IMO this is the interface revolution that will become ubiquitous over the next 5-10 years, and Apple is once again leading the charge.
AirPods. It’s a category-defining product, and in pure Apple tradition, a refinement of an existing one.
I seem to remember there was one other similar looking device at the time, I think from Samsung. But it wasn’t as small and got terrible battery life.
There was absolutely nothing like them at the time in the category.
Because making them that way is more expensive.
> There was absolutely nothing like them at the time in the category.
iPhone: There is now a usable internet-connected general-purpose computer in your pocket.
AirPods: We got rid of the piece of wire between your earbuds.
It's not the same thing.
Most people who have AirPods didn’t have earbuds with the wire. Those who did didn’t wear them like AirPods. The iPhone is a computer in your pocket you interact with through touch. AirPods are computers in your ears you interact with through voice. Especially with LLMs, the latter is a huge step forward.
Also, the processing power in an AirPod outclasses Apollo 11’s; if we’re going to go full tech reductionist, it’s still a feat.
Apollo 11 was in 1969. It had a 2048 KHz processor. The processing power in a Bluetooth headset from the 90s outclasses Apollo 11's.
> Most people who have AirPods didn’t have earbuds with the wire. Those who did didn’t wear them like AirPods.
Are you really contending that this is a difference of the same magnitude as the iPhone?
Yes. Convincing a large fraction of the population to not only adopt a novel computing device, but attach it to their person in a publicly-visible way is something that happens a few times a generation at most.
I feel like people are just grasping at straws.
The iPhone changed how people communicate, how they buy things, how they access information.
AirPods got people to stop complaining that Apple took away the headphone jack. I suspect that might have even been the main reason Apple made them.
AirPods are far more broadly adopted than the Apple Watch. I’d also argue against the latter having the sense of design finality the AirPods came out of the door with. Similar to the iPhone.
> AirPods got people to stop complaining that Apple took away the headphone jack. I suspect that might have even been the main reason Apple made them
Doubtful given development timeline and sourcing. It’s more that they arise from a shared vision.
https://www.statista.com/chart/26791/most-popular-headphone-...
Arguably, the iPod was 2000s and the iPhone was 2010s. The iPhone really didn't get started until the iPhone 3GS in middle-2009 so it started slowly but really defined the 2010s for Apple.
Apple Silicon?
The trick is that there aren't a lot of new iPhone models. Instead they just keep selling the old ones for a while.
Or so I've been hearing for, what, the last decade or more?
Marketing is strong on Apple, but they do have great products. They just failed to do anything meaningful since the IPhone.
Don't come tell me about Airbuds, iPad and iWatch, they are all really obvious and soulless products. This isn't anywhere the kind of product innovation Jobs used to push.