What's Wrong with Apple? | Hacker News Reader

What's Wrong with Apple?

nytimes.com

24 pointsmarcusschuler19 comments

Maybe it is time for Apple to commit to Laptop/Desktop Privacy like it says it does with the iphone.

For example, change their default browser to block ads, have a vpn type option and sane cookie processes. Somehow ensure people using it are not tracked or spammed.

Plus remove the spyware many people believe exists in OSX. You pay enough for what Apple produces, maybe it is time to get something nice for the extra $.

They seem to already be going in that direction, judging by the changes in Gatekeeper and software signing on macOS in the recent years. Whether that increases privacy and security is debatable, but they do seem to be advertising it that way.

And they do have a VPN-like offer. It’s even better than a VPN, but I don’t have the details on hand (called Private Relay, search it up). Requires an iCloud+ sub though).

>Plus remove the spyware many people believe exists in OSX

Can you elaborate what you're referring to here? I'm a Mac user and not familiar with what you mean in particular (Telemetry can be turned off during install... do you mean some of the anti-malware things like CDHash's and XProtect?)

Perhaps they’re not breaking the ground they did with new products like they did with old ones (iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc), but it’s not as if someone else is doing it, or their products aren’t leaders in their category…it’s like faulting someone for going from ground breaking to “just” best in class

Apple, so far, has completely missed AI. Their writing tools are joke, image playground is joke, Siri still sucks. Notification summaries are humorous at least and I think they are "fine" overall.

I think it's, in part, due to Apple wanting things to be "perfect" (a goal they miss often, I know) and LLMs are just not that. Additionally, their locked-down OS means no one else can compete and show them the path forward. At least in the Cydia days they could steal from the jailbreak community.

I'm hesitant on the EU/DMA but Apple is shooting themselves in the foot by how locked down their products are. The Apple Vision Pro sucked due to software in large part. It was/is just an iPad strapped to your face and iPadOS sucks (good for you if you can get real work done on it).

Not defending Apple which I have my annoyances with, but at some point a company can saturate its area of focus and expertise and do well in it.

Apple is really successful, and so what's the problem exactly? They try some new products that aren't successful? Other companies do too, like Google, Samsung, etc.

I'd say the problem is that the products (or versions thereof) they've been putting out lately seem more unfinished than in the past, particularly on the software front. There's more bugs, inconsistencies, and what seems like a general lack of care from project leaders.

It happens with big corporate hierarchies where the middle managers don't/can't care about the big picture, nor the details. It can be seen by the sheer amount of scenarios in the recent years' macOS releases where things are so obviously broken it's hard to imagine nobody noticed; it's more likely someone did, they just couldn't get the message across to the right people to get it fixed.

The programmers who actually implement things can't voice their concerns directly due to the bureaucracy, the managers overseeing their team leads don't care as it doesn't hurt the bottomline too much.

IBM had the same problem back in the 90s being too big. Apple is in the same stage now.

I agree that them becoming big and successful trends them toward mediocre products and quality, though also enables big jumps like Apple Silicon too.

http://archive.today/ugkoG

Also https://dnyuz.com/2025/04/11/whats-wrong-with-apple/

Surprised in the article there's no mention of the failed Apple car.

Sure! Here's a more polished version:

"A reminder: Apple sells nearly 50 million iPhones(50 billion dollars)in China every year — and there’s no other market as lucrative to offset the loss.

As Jensen Huang aptly put it, the problem with China is that there’s no other China.

India is too poor and dysfunctional to offset loss of Chinese market.

Apple faces lawsuit over Apple Intelligence delays

From March 20th:

Apple has been sued in federal court over what plaintiffs allege is false advertising of several Apple Intelligence features.

Filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, the suit seeks class-action status and damages on behalf of those who purchased Apple Intelligence-capable iPhones and other devices. Plaintiffs claim that device owners haven’t received the Apple Intelligence features they were promised.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43431118

https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/20/apple-faces-lawsuit-over-a...

>At the time, Apple’s data centers had about 50,000 GPUs that were more than five years old — far fewer than the hundreds of thousands of chips being bought at the time by A.I. leaders like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta, these people said.

I think people should give credit to Apple when they only have 50K GPU that were from 2018. I am surprised some of the AI function even worked at all.

I’m so annoyed by these “oh Apple does not innovate anymore” comment! It’s not like every year there should be an innovation! Hell that has literally never ever been the case. And why should it be? It’s not every year the iPhone year, get over it.

Apple began its decline the instant Steve Jobs went on sick leave.

The sorry OS X Lion was the harbinger. From there, it has been one thing after another - FCP X, dongle-gate, rose gold, abandonment of the 4 quadrant system, flat design, yearly release schedule (and associated bugs), touch bar, no Mac Pro, then trash can Mac Pro... so many more.

The business press, and average consumer, hardly noticed the dip in product design. Apple raked in more money than ever, and had plenty of reputation to burn. Apple today is like a once-great movie studio that lives off sequels.

But Apple still has genius when it comes to fixing supply chain problems. They'll pull through this downturn. Even with the Trump tariffs, they'll be fine.

Their awful accessories for one.

Nothing is wrong with Apple.

Reaching most valuable company in history of earth status and then starting to pay out an increasing amount of profits back to investors to be redistributed by the market to other ventures and areas of society that might be growing faster…seems to be what we’d want to happen, no?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com