It does feel like Apple innovation is either stagnating or small, incremental gains. Certainly not huge leaps like iPhone or Apple Watch. Vision Pro hadn’t really taken off yet.
It's the single-core scores that are really impressive, but as time goes on, the performance gap is closing and not widening. It's been said many times before, but it was Apple's TSMC alliance that mattered more than their core design or ISA choice at the time.
I don't think anyone would ever argue this based on performance alone, which is why I think your geekbench link is irrelevant, and I think a fair reading of parent's comment talking about "efficiency and performance" would mean these two aspects taken together, not independently.
That is, nobody is surprised a beefy server chip has more computing power than an M3, and nobody is considering an Nvidia H100 a competitor to an M3 in any sense.
Compare the M2 Ultra's 5nm GPU performance-per-watt to a product like Nvidia's RTX A5000 laptop GPU on Samsung 8nm. The M2 Ultra is rated to pull over 290w at load, compared to the A5000's maximum TDP of 165w. Apple's desktop-grade iGPUs are less power-efficient than Nvidia's last-generation laptop GPUs, even when they have a definitive node advantage and higher TDPs.
You don't have to just look at the server chips. Compare like-for-like and you'll quickly find that Apple's GPU designs are pretty lacking across the board. The M3 Max barely swaps spit with Nvidia's 2000-series in performance-per-watt. When you pull out the 4000-series hardware and compare the efficiency of those cards, it's just plainly unfair. The $300 RTX 4060 outperforms Apple's $3000 desktop GPUs in performance and efficiency.
Plus; say we did include all of the dGPUs that Apple officially supports. Not even the W6800X gets more performance-per-watt than an Nvidia laptop chip. It only highlights the fact that Apple goes out of their way to prevent Nvidia from providing GPU support on Mac.
BTW. Apple Vision is not taking off anytime soon. At that price point it's going nowhere.
Really, I'm an Apple fan but MacBooks and iPhones are the only devices I'm genuinely attached to. I haven't replaced a broken old iPad (at least not yet) and my Apple Watch is something I basically use for hiking.
Even if they're skeptical, probably makes sense for them to be playing with (even very visibly). But I'm not sure I see a general use case at this point.
For example, I think the iPhone was a revolutionary, innovative device at the time, but the need was obvious: it was pretty clear even back then that things like separate mp3 players, phones, and mobile browsers would converge - Apple was just the one that did it best early on.
Even with Apple Watch, while a smart watch form factor was pretty obvious, in the early days the "reason for existence" wasn't as clear until Apple Watch (and pretty much all smart watches) started laser focusing on being fitness trackers and providing health monitoring functionality.
So now we're at a point where you have either things like Vision Pro, which is an amazing piece of tech but which solves problems nobody really has, or you have ideas ("I want a robotic housekeeper!") that are eons from being technically feasible. So for anyone saying "Apple isn't innovating", I'd challenge you to think of areas where it could even begin to innovate in the first place (and where people would actually pay money for whatever they built). The answer to that question isn't as obvious as it was in 2007.
Final thought, I think Apple has been doing a ton of innovation. Their chips are now state of the art leaders, and take a look at just Airpod revenue alone compared to total revenue of other major companies: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/15z558o/oc...
I know their pathway is to shrink it down to glasses size so we are basically wearing our iPhones on our face. Yet as Ray Ban smart glass enthusiast (use almost daily since Oct '23) im fine with vocally asking my glasses what time it is & getting an audible response. Some visuals in my face only upon summoning them maybe via a ring on my finger or a watch or some natural non-intrusive gesture would be helpful.
Now I don't think smart glasses will replace smart phones as you cannot take selfies with them.
I definitely have an interest, but there's always something wrong with the existing headsets, so I never adopt. The Oculus is close, but the mandatory Meta integration is a no-go for me.
Been wearing my Ray Ban smartglasses while playing pickleball lately and they are too heavy for playing sports. Im always pushing them up on my face so they dont fall off.
heck, after growing tired of having one more thing with a rechargeable battery, I went back to an analog watch
I loved my $30 EBay Apple Watch as a cheap running watch with GPS before the battery got so weak it wouldn’t even do my 1.5 hour runs anymore. Apple wasn’t helpful about a battery replacement and encouraged me to buy a new one (starting at $249) and said they couldn’t replace the battery since it was so old, when I met a Genius at the Apple Store. That soured me quite a bit on the whole thing.
I have an Apple Watch Ultra and, honestly, hiking is pretty much the only thing I use it for.
I don’t think Apple cares whether you activate the watch on cellular or not. The product doesn’t really need it.
Apple would much rather sell you both an iPhone and a watch. Untethering them from each other destroys that upsell.
I don’t think Apple ever claimed in “the marketing” that you didn’t need an iPhone to use your watch. Just that you can leave it at home if you’re going out for a run or something like that.
Whether you and I think that’s consumer-friendly is a completely different story. I certainly don’t think it is. But it’s been an extremely good business model for Apple.
But also, think about the kind of customer who believes their cellular bill costs too much and goes with an MVNO instead to save money. For that kind of customer there is no price that will make a smart watch cellular activation worth the money.
I think all the hardware companies know that smartwatch cellular plans are somewhat of a niche product that isn’t really a “killer app” for the smartwatch experience. Almost nobody is willing to leave their phone at home and I think the futuristic idea that the smartwatch could replace the phone is dying or dead. The whole industry seems to know it. Hell, Google gives smartwatch data away for free on their MVNO and that’s because they want to make money selling Pixel Watch hardware. They know that they won’t get anyone to pay $5 or $10 a month for smartwatch connectivity because, why bother, my phone is right there.
Apple really doesn’t really give a hoot about 4 million lower spend GiffGaff customers who use MVNOs instead of big carriers. Someone who is too frugal to spend on a big name carrier plan probably doesn’t want to spend $400+ on a cellular Apple Watch in the first place, they’re going tog get the Apple Watch SE or maybe something WearOS in the $200 range.
It’s important to remember that in capitalism, not all customers have the same value. Apple traditionally hasn’t fought hard for the bottom 50% customers who simply have less disposable money to give to them.
Overall, the Apple watch is less distracting because you can quickly glance and ignore most notifications, or filter notifications based on who it is, time, etc.
But if I had to think harder … another reason I love the Apple Watch is getting stripe sales notifications. Someone halfway around the world buys a thing of yours and you get a tap on the wrist as a reward. I’m not sure I’ll ever turn that off.
> It does feel like Apple innovation is either stagnating or small, incremental gains. Certainly not huge leaps like iPhone or iPad. Apple Watch hasn’t really taken off yet.