Apple Products Are Struggling | Hacker News Reader

Apple Products Are Struggling

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15 pointssamspenc27 comments

Their products are too reliable. My M1 MacBook is still going great after 4 years. My iPad Pro from 2018 is showing its age, but still has another couple of years of life left.

You write as if this was a problem.

Not to the consumers. Won't people think of the shareholders?

I'm using an Asus Laptop from 2014 with an SSD upgrade to do about 80 % of my daily work. It no longer has any letters on the keys, but other than that it just works great and won't die.

I find this interesting. And I do realize that this sentiment is shared by majority of the people.

I have a couple of Apple devices (iPads, M1 Mini, AppleTv, iPod) and especially in the past 2 years, I have decided that I have had enough Apple, won't buy anything from them in the near future: I experience so many bugs in iOS, I just hate to touch my iPad. Constant fight with elementary things, like not fetching my emails in a timely manner, messing up the address bar of Safari, or simply just flooded by "couldn't sync health data" messages, even though all cloud sync is disabled (etc).

I could be just unlucky, but it doesn't "just work" for me since a while, at least software-wise. I have been on the lookout for an Android tablet (hoping that at least it will fetch my emails, if nothing else...)

The OnePlus Pad 2 seems to be a pretty solid Android tablet. I had the Pixel tablet but returned it as it had too much Google stuff baked into the functionality (naturally).

So let me get this right. You're complaining about notifications like "couldn't sync health data", after disabling syncing health data. Ok...

Yes. If you ignore all the other words I wrote, then yes - in this case your summary is 100% correct.

I love my M2 machine but, after a month it had a couple of dead pixels already.

I have an M2 Macbook Air with horrible battery life, 5 hours maybe. The 2014 Intel MBP it replaced had 8-9 hours for about 5 years, then came down to 3-4 hours.

I mean, I have piles of even older PCs that work just fine too. That's hardly specific to Apple. Shit I just had a LAN party this weekend, and the majority of the computers people brought were over 10 years old, because nobody really has any need to upgrade. I was gaming on a Surface Pro 2. Yes we were playing old games, but these were mostly our daily driver systems, which work 100% fine for most daily tasks still to this day.

Outside of the workplace, many of the machines I use on a daily basis are more than 10 years old. All of my machines are older than 5 years. I don't use Apple products.

There is nothing I want or need to do that requires equipment newer than that. The same is true for the vast majority of the people I know.

Apple could start selling again if it just surrendered control.

Let their devices become general computing devices that empowered their users.

It worked well when they relented and went from the more inbred apple powerpc systems to the more interoperable and useful intel systems.

This was the trend which drove me away. I didn't like being effectively forced to "upgrade" to new versions of the OS which changed things around seemingly just for the sake of changing them, pushed me harder toward doing things Apple's way using Apple's services whether I liked it or not, and introduced new limitations on what I could do with a machine that increasingly did not feel like it was actually my computer anymore.

Meanwhile, my clunky old Thinkpad running Linux just kept on getting the job done, enabling me to do whatever I felt like doing... and one day I realized I'd accidentally become a full-time Linux user, because I'd never gotten around to unpacking the Mac after I'd moved.

I don't see "services/subscriptions" in this list of revenue sources. Is it in the "other" bucket?

Because that's been growing steadily, IMHO.

Growing steadily isn't impressive considering the reach that Apple has. As a mature company and not a startup that's valued on potential, Apple will also be looking at their actual margins. Costs a lot to make those TV shows.

"Struggling" may be overstating it, Apple still basically prints money. But they now also have a significant services business, and they are pushing it pretty hard. I pay apple for Music family subscription and $3/mo storage tier. That's $22/mo. Some people pay more for Apple TV, Photos, Arcade and more substantial storage tiers. That's quite a bit of money every month even if your users go 4 years between phone upgrades because their phones don't feel old.

They should copy the Synology Diskstation - "iCloud - your personal cloud"

Not only does it allow you to backup all your files, but it has all sorts of apps that you can install. You can have your own Dropbox, Google Drive, run your own webserver, docker containers etc

I bought one this week and it is very cool. I realise Apple have their own "backup to the cloud" etc, but if they had some guts they could sell soo many of these things and create a whole new app marketplace.

Given the amount of content people create these days we have a big need for storage, and storage in the cloud is too slow - it really doesn't cut it.

If they did something like this, they'd sell a whole heap of hardware, PLUS app store revenue, PLUS more subscriptions to their cloud as an additional backup. It'd probably be relatively easy for them to do as well.

They had this and killed it lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPort_Time_Capsule

Are they? There was a big surge during the pandemic lockdowns, as there was for all kinds of PC stuff. When that ended, sales dropped off, it effectively pulled forward a lot of future demand. Now we all have a lot of still fairly new stuff that's entirely adequate for our needs.

They also have a bog loss leader with the vision. Putting it into the same category as AirPods and services is a bit misleading.

That's not what loss leader means.

I think the author's main point is that it's product revenue is flat (iPhone) or dropping (all other products), in comparison to (I guess) other tech companies that are still growing.

They are no longer viewed as a growth company/stock. Their growth has slowed to around 2%, and they are trading at a PE of 37. New product releases are underwhelming. Berkshire sold most of their Apple holding last year, a good indicator that the growth isn't there at these valuations.

Good current summation:

https://youtu.be/6uUlklRvUsg?si=9vqRYLaMblKx9i5S&t=2175

I did not view the data as indicating a new product was needed. the charts showed a boost due to the M1 chips. I'm happy with my 2015 vintage Mac. But I do have a high end Studio which should last a long time.

Just saying, I'd think about buying their desktop gear if Linux could take advantage of all the hardware.

> They need a new product. Seems like thats’s what they are going on announce on Feb 19.

uhhh lol

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