Is this the slow decline of the Apple "cult"?
birchtree.me
birchtree.me
From what I know everyone and their dog on social media uses an iPhone Pro. Given the high usage and addiction of social media, the iPhone that shows 3 cameras on the back is still the gold standard of status. People thought (including me) that raising the price of the flagship to 1000$+ might affect sales but it didn’t. As long as Apple maintains its luxury, people will buy it no matter what you say about them. The problem is that unlike LVMH where margins are insane, Apple is still a tech company thriving on innovation. So unlike other luxury brands, Apple stock may not do as well as others.
But if you think the cult is buying something else now, just open Instagram and count how many people have selfies with a pixel and thousands of followers (who are the part of cult). You’ll have a tough time spotting one.
These gains are also available elsewhere. You are not superior, nor do you have access to superior things or ways of working, just because you buy Apple.
That is the success of the Apple marketing team making you think that way.
This is obviously a subjective debate now, its all personal opinion. I would love to have that debate calmly and intelligently, but I feel here is not the place. Maybe we will meet in another place and time and be able to figure out what the other likes and prefers in their OS choice :)
Thanks for teaching me something today :)
Don't you think you're generalizing from a set of cherry-picked examples? How would you even approach trying to demonstrate this?
Just because that other store exists and sells a similar product doesn’t mean I have to shop there, even if other people prefer that store.
If you agree that the gains you get are also available elsewhere to people who prefer other platforms, then I objectively apologise and retract my statement.
To extend their grocery store analogy, the layout is a gain to them. You may not care, but it is tangible to some.
Your comment reads like you’re saying “all platforms must be considered equal or you find offence” but you’re ignoring subjective needs and opinions.
Someone else’s choices and priorities are not a reflection on you as a person or your choices.
What if they care about AppleScript? Nothing else has that. Or if they care about running Logic because there’s some unique plugin there?
All platforms can do everything. They are all just computers, you just have to learn how to do it.
Everything else here is subjective, which I think we agree on.
> but you’re ignoring subjective needs and opinions.
No I'm not quite the opposite. All platforms are equal if you put the time and efffort into finding the ways to do things you want to. After that, the preference on which you would like to use is subjective.
To clarify definition, needs are not subjective but opinions are.
And the idea that “all platforms meet your needs if you put in enough effort and time ” is flawed because that time and effort is part of the needs.
Again, to take their grocery store analogy: the layout doesn’t change the capability of the store. But it does provide them with the ability to get things done sooner, faster and with less cognitive load.
User experience matters more than I think you acknowledge.
People can and do change all the time. Humans instinctively stick with what they know, but in reality most people could be more efficient by learning things outside of their comfort zone. The few people that do this are rewrded greatly by having multiple strings to their bow, and being adaptive to many environments.
Those that stick with they know are super efficient in their own environment, but take them out of that and they invariably complain that they could be better if they had the tools they know.
User experience matters and it’s not just about adapting.
But we can agree to disagree, thats fine. Thankyou for the respect :)
Then I am curious, in your orignal statemnt you said you get gains from using their ecosystem. Gains over what exactly?
Could I do all these things with other manufacturers…probably. However, all these things I can do with Apple by just logging in to my devices with an Apple ID. I don’t know of any other solution or combination of hardware/software that provides that level of out of the box ecosystem just off a single login.
They didn't say they were or did. They said that they personally get value out of that product ecosystem.
Me choosing a product because I find value in it doesn't mean that I am calling you inferior for not buying that product. It's not a zero-sum game. You're allowed to be happy with the value you find in the products you choose as well!
No they didnt, they said 'quality and productivity gains I get from their product ecosystem'. Inferring they dont get those gains from other platforms
They didn't say anything about personally being superior to other people.
It doesnt need other people chiming in trying to clarify what someone else was trying to say.
If it bothers you that I (Some random person on the internet) prefers Apple over whatever you prefer or did not illustrate every possible alternative in my comment…well you should probably explore concern that with your therapist of choice at your next appointment.
If it bothers you that I (Some random person on the internet) prefers Apple over whatever you prefer or did not illustrate every possible alternative in my comment…well you should probably explore concern that with your therapist of choice at your next appointment.
Then apologies for misunderstanding your statement.
> If it bothers you that I....blah blah blah
Your preferences dont bother me in the slightest. It only bothers me when people claim that there are certain objective advantages in one platform over another, which you have clarified you did not do.
However you seem very quick to jump to personal statements, and suggesting therapy. Maybe you should stick to the content of the discussion and not insult people in future? You will find you get on much better on the internet that way.
Happy to do that, and suggest the same for you. You don’t need to go to such great lengths to parse out meaning where it doesn’t exist.
I wouldnt need to if people in forums were more willing to just immediately clarify what they mean in a response instead of jumping to attack the people who are questioning them.
In normal conversation, it’s generally not necessary to acknowledge all the ice creams you like and don’t like just because you mentioned how much you love chocolate. I think it would probably be a pretty normal response that if someone demanded that you do that, that you would be irritated at the absurdity of the demand and respond accordingly.
But hey, if I misread that you were being intentionally obtuse, I’m sorry.
Heck, I had this opinion back in 2008 or so.
The problem is that it's a thought terminating cliche. Once you've assigned apple customers into the rich/dumb/cultist category you become blind to the actual reasons why Apple is successful.
My own take, after using Apple stuff for 15 years now, is it's the attention to detail. It still shocks me that macOS has better support for using EMacs style text shortcuts (^A, ^E, ^K, etc) in basically any applications text field than Linux does.
There is such a thing as a satisfying explanation. Personally, I like Apple's hardware in general. The 2005 Mac Pros in particular are beautiful machines, possibly the nicest-looking desktop computers I've seen, inside and outside. I would still not pay what Apple asks for, when for the same money I could buy a more powerful non-Apple computer. That leads me to conclude that the people who buy Apple products have more money than me and care more about aesthetics and less about performance than me.
This is a huge part of what gives them their battery life - it’s not the OS, it’s not the node, it’s not the accelerators, it’s that they pull 1/3 the power running a browser/electron app or a word processor as x86 does.
https://i.imgur.com/Kcwo1OM.png
https://i.imgur.com/IP6vBqk.png
https://i.imgur.com/1pTFnRj.jpeg
Again, you’ve volunteered to self-identify as someone who is doing precisely what GP said: you’ve made your little box and you’ve put people into it and you’ve closed your mind to any alternative possibilities.
Presumably this is because decoding x86 is quite difficult and x86 chips lean really heavily on SMT to keep the cores filled as a result. I’m excited to see how Arrow Lake/Lunar Lake end up working out and if efficiency is improved, but right now it’s not good, some would say objectively bad (60w peak for a literal single thread on AMD, 50w+ on intel, for scores that are +/- 5% from apple and Qualcomm).
If you feel like this is brought up a lot: consider that efficiency under light mixed workloads is pretty much the primary consideration for a large number of laptop buyers. I have a 9900k and epyc systems if I want something beyond what a laptop will deliver (and M1 Max isn’t exactly a lightweight to begin with) so this complements each other quite well.
It's also very helpful to have proper first-party driver support. Linux is a mess and not getting better. HDMI 2.1 still isn't upstreamed even 4 years after AMD started trying, for example. Windows is (ineptly) doing an ARM-to-Windows switchover and (ineptly) doing a big "AI PC" push too, in ways that are much more adversarial than apple. Hard to enunciate the difference, but it's really the same classic "you're the product, not the customer" whereas with apple that's never really in question. I do really enjoy never having to fight bluetooth drivers and whatnot. Linux is great for server PCs etc, but "year of linux on the desktop" is a meme for a reason... and "year of linux on the laptop" is even farther away.
And before you say framework... framework laptops actually do not have very good battery life at all, even among x86 laptops. That's sort of the problem in general: there isn't a turnkey "just buy this and linux works and it's just as good as a macbook" option for x86, at any price, even ignoring the 1T efficiency problems. For example even the latest AMD laptops still have broken HDMI support under linux. That's unacceptable on a big-ticket purchase.
Make a decent x86 laptop and I'll consider it, but right now the AMD and Intel offerings just aren't there. Far from your original claim, to me it's the exact opposite and people are constantly pushing you to buy x86 and overlook all the problems and defects and shortcomings. Offer me something comparable and I'll consider it, but for now I am not going back at least on my laptop.
Sounds to me like you haven't even tried using the recent laptops. My 5800u Lenovo Thinkbook is one of the best laptops I've ever owned (better than my 2018 Macbook Pro) and I've yet to be in a situation where HDMI 2.0 needs an upgrade to HDMI 2.1. I'll let you know if anyone at the office brings it up.
It's fine if you want to settle on a more expensive solution, but I concur with the parent. You are overpaying for performance with every single product in Apple's lineup, laptop or desktop. The majority of users will get equivalent or better performance on a cheaper Windows machine. This was even true back at the M1's launch, when Ryzen 7 4800us could be had at half the price of a base-model M1 Air.
Yeah, it's great in terms of ops/J. It absolutely is, and if I was in the market for a laptop, I could see myself seriously considering a modern Apple laptop. But, I only use desktops, so I don't care about ops/J, I just care about ops/s. Apple desktop computers are and have always been atrocious in terms of ops/s/$.
So tell me, exactly what alternative possibility am I missing? I'm not even saying it's wrong to care about things that I don't care about, I'm just saying that the people who care about those things... care about those things? Honestly, I don't know what you're complaining about.
(Apple TV is another one... the apple tv is an A15 and is probably unironically the fastest single-thread performance I own right now. For $129 for the ethernet model. Remember, the A15 (the little brother to M2) has been in the iphone SE 3rd gen for several years now too, and Android is basically just catching up to that.)
I have a 9900K+3090 system for gaming, I have epyc and supermicro 2011-3 systems and tinyminimicro pcs for homelab. Apple doesn't add value in that area. Horses for courses. And actually that stuff complements the laptop really well for self-hosting!
But phones and laptops? Yeah, Apple hardware is literally objectively better than the competition. Strix Halo is going to be the first real challenger to a loaded-out macbook and it literally won't even launch until next year. I'm definitely keeping an eye on it etc, I'd love a little mini-PC with a strix halo, but right now apple is running at least 3 years ahead of the x86 laptop/Android phone market.
And honestly the problem even as I'm writing this - is x86 is "fine, except for laptops where you care about battery life... unless you want to do LLMs in which case Apple is still the only game in town... and if you buy AMD the HDMI 2.1 also won't work, and the real Mx-Max performance competitor on x86 should be launching next year, 4 full years after the M-family hit macbooks... and the driver situation is shit on Linux, except for Framework, which has terrible battery life instead". Not exactly great, is it?
Make an x86 laptop that isn't a pile of compromises and defects and I'll consider it. But right now it feels much more like the x86 people are the ones blindly pushing for consideration of their sacred cow far above the actual merits of the product. I'm not going to give x86 a handicap as a product on something that I'm going to use every day for the next 5 years. I want a nice laptop.
Objectively? I don't know about that. I think phone hardware is all basically the same. I'm sure there are minute differences that one of us cares about and the other doesn't, but I'd say it averages out to it all being "fine".
In terms of software... Doesn't iOS still not let you install apps except through the app store, and doesn't let apps do JIT? And don't I need OSX if I want to develop for iOS? I don't know, that seems to me like an objective disadvantage of the platform, as a user. It means I can't use my hardware however I please, at least not without some major inconvenience.
>unless you want to do LLMs in which case Apple is still the only game in town
Nah, it depends. 3090s are going for cheap nowadays, and 24 GB is enough to run some hefty models at acceptable performance, and you get a nice gaming card on top. It's not UMA, but hey, it also costs eight times less than a decked out Mac Pro. It's a shame Nvidia doesn't seem interested in bringing large VRAM sizes to the consumer or at least prosumer segment.
Also no, 24gb isn’t enough to run the good models right now. Ideally you need 40GB-ish.
So when you finally do want to upgrade, there will be a nice new shiny version of the same macbook air ready for you to buy.
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Works globally in windows.
I fail to see how this applies to the mouse where you can't use it while charging, let alone the whole Vision Pro thing.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t think that this was an actual position that people honestly believed beyond 18 year old edgelords.
As a user of Apple devices I agree with the first part (unfortunately - their RAM and NVMes are much more expensive than anybody elses) but not with the second. I live in Europe where every second person I meet has an Apple device, so it's hard to perceive it as a status symbol.
This means many Apple buyers are now people who just want a bloody powerful laptop, rather than people drawn to the tasteful design who would be more likely to preach about it. The power buyers don't need to preach, every chart tells you what they would. The Macbook Pro has become the Top Right Messi of the laptop game.
They only incrementally improve the status quo now.
In fact most of the time I'd rather people just left stuff the fuck alone.
People said that about phones in 2006 as well, they had looked the same for a while then, why would you want more than a phone that can call, make messages, and has a built in calendar?
And I say that as a major Android fanboy for most of my life. Apple doesn't surprise you. The products are damn good, and they don't change too much, too fast.
Also Gen Z doesn't understand why SMS messages degrade image quality, so they blame Android.
Apple's reputation for reliability mixed with extremely manipulative tactics are a lethal combination.
Google are not a hardware company, they are an advertising broker. They aren't in the least bit interested in anything that doesn't increase money from that core business. They only started making phones so as not to lose control over that advertising space, but they remain mediocre at it at best because that's enough for them.
Apple are a hardware company, that's where their focus is.
Duh. Well, indirectly. The goal of both is to grow, like gray goo, or cancer. Anything else is a secondary concern that can be sacrificed for the goal. No company wants to be the underdog, perpetually struggling for second place.
I’m about to be forced to use windows for the first time in 20 years and I’m seriously dreading it.
At the same time, I’m sick of apples stranglehold on the iPhone. It’s my phone, let me do what I want with it.
I’ve tried using android stuff a bit (bought a Samsung tablet for obd2 stuff), and it left me wanting to scream and throw things.
I miss my 04-08 Mac experience that didn’t suck. And don’t tell me the new stuff is more reliable - the other day I had to power cycle my m1max mbp as the keyboard stopped responding.
It’s not a slow decline of the cult. People still get excited for new iPhone releases. It’s just so prolific now and you can get it from places like Target that no need to camp out anymore.
It’s basically become an appliance.
The passionate Apple 'cult' of geeky superfans existed long before the iPhone, even the before the Mac, and it continued for very long time. What the author is noting is that well over a decade of minor enhancements, rent-seeking, and "innovation shaped objects" like the Vision Pro are finally killing off the this geeky crowd of superfans.
Apple will continue to make tons of money as an upper middle class lifestyle brand, hawking their talismans at Target. But that is irrelevant to the authors point. Apple doesn't need the super enthusiast "cult" anymore, and it's slowly fading away.
I'm probably an Apple fanboy. I switched to Apple in 2012 after I stopped enjoying the whole "tinkering" part which made running Linux so fun. These days, with the ever increasing lock-in (and price hikes on cloud services) I'd like to get out. Further increased by the fact that Apple doesn't make a small phone (I have relatively small hands). The issue is that I don't really want to deal with Google either. I also don't want to deal with not having the Apple or Google stores on my phone because most of the apps I use (like banking, national IDs, healthcare, tickets for public transportation and others) aren't available outside of those. If I'm on iOS it's still easier to just have the smallest MacBook Air, than to bother getting something else and then setting up synchronisation and so on. But I don't think Apple is "cool" anymore.
Not that I disagree with you completely, they were always "evil" but at least they used to make cool stuff.
But I think the Apple "cult" and the increasing lock in to the ecosystem is party if a negative feedback loop: developers often make apps only for Apple, or make it for Apple first, or just half-ass their Android/Windows versions. So the lock in is encouraged by Apple and amplified by developers. But the while time they are paying for the privilege of the wall garden (and before people get confused again, "walled garden" is just a way of saying "pretty prison", it is not meant to imply you are hanging out at a 5-star all-inclusive resort).
Saying statements like this without provide evidence or examples is pointless. E.G., have you read this article, do you disagree with it? https://daringfireball.net/2004/04/spray_on_usability
> But the while time they are paying for the privilege of the wall garden
Again this could use further extrapolation, in vacuum I think we can agree a walled garden is worse for developers than an open platform (for users I'd say that balance is a lot less clear, but if I try to make that argument some folks completely lose it). But we don't live in a vacuum, so I'd say most developers who build for Apple platforms do so because they prefer the toolchain, and that trumps the value of an open platform for them. I used to develop for Apple platforms, and I still think the toolchain is better than anything else I've ever used, and it's not close (I like the debugger integration, the memory tools, and Instruments).
Evidence of an opinion? I don't think you understand how opinions work.
Just rambling here: the navigation paradigms, where the settings are, the animations, cursors, the way the mouse accelerates, the keyboard shortcuts, the icons on windows, maximizing windows, the dock, navigating with Finder creates invisible files directories, the "drag to install" nonsense is one of the dumbest UX paradigms ever (I'm not being facetious).
I hope my random ramblings about things I don't assuages your feeling that I'm being inconsiderate. I'm sure there are people who love everything above and who think its perfect.
Wouldn't this be true if you put anyone in front of an unfamiliar OS?
> Just rambling here: the navigation paradigms, where the settings are, the animations, cursors, the way the mouse accelerates, the keyboard shortcuts, the icons on windows, maximizing windows, the dock, navigating with Finder creates invisible files directories, the "drag to install" nonsense is one of the dumbest UX paradigms ever (I'm not being facetious).
I summarize most of these as "I don't like the feel of it" which is a straightforward matter of opinion, but that's a different statement then what we started with "I don't agree that they write good or intuitive (easiest to use) software, but that's just me." A statement like this would would also mean showing how another platform does it and demonstrating why that's better or more intuitive. But I guess if you had just said "I don't find their software good or intuitive", I wouldn't have bothered asking these questions. But then, per my first comment, I think if you out anyone in front of an unfamiliar OS and asked them to use it, it would literally take years of use before they'd have an opinion that's not biased based on their prior experience. This is why I don't comment much on how Linux or Windows do things, I just don't have the expertise to say whether their approach is better or worse.
One exception is keyboard bindings, because a lot of keyboard bindings come to macOS from Windows especially in the form of cross platform applications, and I've formed the opinion that Windows bindings are worse because of the over reliance on F-keys, which are too far from the homerow and not mmemonic. (This is an example of of what I mean about giving an example, and then a reason I think it's worse).
For the record I appreciate your responses, I'm being super pedantic here and you're putting up with it. I feel like, especially when it comes to Apple on HN, which makes people blood boil, it's so hard to figure what people are even talking about when they make their statements. I really think the model of supporting statements with reasoning makes the statements so much ire useful to read.
Not in the same way, but only since Apple is very popular, so it happens often (and Apple fans like to claim things like "the devices are far superior to competitors" which irks me a little, haha).
Sometimes Apple paradigms are just a little bit different than what I know well, which makes it even harder for me since the similarity can make me operate on autopilot, but my autopilot then steers me wrong. When things are drastically different its just a matter of learning (and probably forgetting, since I don't use Apple quite often enough) the new thing, which I usually find pretty unintuitive.
> I summarize most of these as "I don't like the feel of it"
I'd summarize all of them as "I don't like the feel of it".
> "I don't like the feel of it" which is a straightforward matter of opinion, but that's a different statement then what we started with "I don't agree that they write good or intuitive (easiest to use) software, but that's just me."
I really thought "I don't agree [...] but that's just me" would communicate that it's my straightforward matter of opinion.
> if you had just said "I don't find their software good or intuitive", I wouldn't have bothered asking these questions
You are just rephrasing what I said: "I don't agree that they write good or intuitive (easiest to use) software, but that's just me." is saying the same thing as "I don't find their software good or intuitive". Maybe I should work on my online communication skills.
> I really think the model of supporting statements with reasoning makes the statements so much ire useful to read.
I appreciate this.
On "polarizing" issues (to the HN crowd) like Apple, Rust, Blockchain, etc. I've discovered that supporting statements don't usually accomplish much, other than to bait commenters that want to defend a counterpoint without listening (I probably shouldn't have commented in the first place)
Yeah I'm probably being too pedantic here, but to me "they don't write good or unintuitive software" means they should design their software differently (presuming you assume Apple values these things which I think they do), whereas "I don't find their software good or intuitive" means that you personally found their software difficult to use.
For example, I have over 10000 commits in my dotfiles, like I'm not a typical user, so for me whether I personally find their software good or intuitive isn't something I'd factor in to whether the software is good or intuitive for most users, because I personally am such an outlier from a typical user (which I also assume you, and most HN readers really, also are).
But I agree that an iPod with the click wheel is the pinnacle of human achievement. The iPod Classic was the best device I've ever owned.
> When Apple pushed FCP to the industry pros five or six years ago, they did some hardcore outreach. They brought out Walter Murch, for God’s sake. The man cut Cold Mountain on it for God’s sake. They evangelized by showing what had been done, not by what could be done. But this time out, there is no evangelizing. No Murch. They do a dog and pony with vapid car footage or a Pixar trailer or something. This is meaningless to industry pros who need to know one thing, and it’s a very simple thing: can I edit a _____ on it? You know what I want to know? Can Louie CK edit his show on FCP X? Would he? Would he be happy to do it? Would he speak to a crowd of people about the experience?
I could go on in countless ways the company has changed, this is just one axis.
It's been a great business model, and I'm not in anyway claiming people don't really truly love using their products.
To be fair, the same writing is on the wall for Google (they're just bad at it but will figure it out eventually).
Again these could use evidence/examples.
But there also tangential to examples I was giving, personally I don't factor in lock-in or "feigning superiority", I just care if the platform is great for certain tasks like media creation and editing, and then becoming worse at that is a recent thing.
They make Apple-only software that only work with other Apple devices, like Logic Pro, FCP, GarageBand, XCode, Safari (though it used to work on Windows), etc. Which is all fine and expected, but is part of the lock in.
But then there are the protocols like Handoff, AirDrop, Continuity, iCloud, iMessage, FaceTime, and more. AirTags were a security nightmare for most of the world until they allowed Android some access to the protocol. Then there are the Draconian App Store policies that ended up getting them in "trouble" with the EU.
Quick example for feigning superiority: "Mac vs PC". Before those commercials "PC" just meant any desktop, but their (absolutely genius!) marketing figured out a way to differentiate while dissing Windows.
> the platform is great for certain tasks like media creation and editing
I'm positive there have been and still are really great software experiences and paradigms built by Apple; I just get immensely frustrated trying to navigate them (flip your mouse upside and then try to use it... that is an extreme example of the frustration I experience navigating most Apple software -- it comes down to just not being used to it).
All that to say: we're not really thinking about the same aspects of the company, since I'm really just on the periphery, and you're in the midst of it.
I was just pointing out there are areas they've changed dramatically, and I only gave one example, I could provide a bunch more.
Personally I don't care much about Apples marketing (literally hard to imagine something I could possibly care less about), and don't even care too much about iOS App Store shenanigans (for the most part, I think Apples approach is a decent fit for the type of device mobile devices are).
But I do care a lot about Apple being worse for media creation today, and the neglect of AppKit for example, and the overall direction of macOS, and those are relatively recent changes.
Google doesn't really try to do this - mostly out of sheer incompetence I think.
Look at Google's messaging strategy. They have the most popular web browser in the world by far. They could easily have bundled a decent, lightweight chat client into Chrome and they would have 80% worldwide installed base. Instead their messaging strategy has literally become an industry joke.
I'm far from an Apple fan, but is that really Apple's fault?
So why do they leave the kids getting bullied for green bubbles? Because its good advertising, and it makes kids ask their parents for iPhones.
They could very easily have made all bubbles green, and put a tiny padlock icon either next to the message, or even next to the user profile.
> That's what the colors are actually about, BTW.
No, the green bubbles are intentionally made hard to read with low contrast text, if it was just to show end to end security they could have made the bubbles look pleasing rather than irritating.
Anyway, that is what the colors are indicating. Unless I'm missing something, the white text appears to be the same white in both cases, the text font appears to be the same, and the color saturation and brightness appear to be the same. So I'm not seeing how this was an attempt to make the texts "intentionally" hard to read. If you wanted to make it hard to read, you would have used yellow, not green.
Seems to be a recurring theme these days.
Uhm... No? Apple has had a hard time in the nineties, but now it's been doing just fine for the last 15+ years (and in the last ten years it's been doing awesomely).
Uh, this is why (in my opinion) apple fans are considered part of a cult: they have strong opinions that have no connections to reality.