I like Apple, so I’m really hoping they bring on someone to solve this. Otherwise they’re on track to be the same as every other tasteless tech company.
More on taste and Apple: https://www.readtrung.com/p/steve-jobs-rick-rubin-and-taste
The exact same thing's happening to phones. I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly. Tech hardware as a recurring business model only works when there's perceived significant improvements between generations. Trying to sell a few more pixels, or a fraction of a cm thinner case or whatever just isn't worth it for most people.
So, as typical with corporations in this spot, they start flailing to try to maintain revenue, let alone growth. Microsoft became a 'cloud' company paired with a side gig of spyware marketed as an OS. It'll be interesting to see what Apple transforms into.
What's especially annoying about iphones is that my decade old andriod phones without any os updates work more robustly on the modern web than a 2021 iphone with its original os. You can blame it on chrome dominance. but it's pretty much bullshit if you're a company with Apple's treasure chest and you are no longer able to push out any buy-me features to make up for your outdated build and release cycle.
They support most devices for 5-7 years, and have a strong incentive to do so as there is a pipeline of used devices into developing markets and their branding and segmentation means their devices have strong resale value.
With your old android, you’re either running an open source stack of some sort, which is out of the reach of most users, or operating on an ancient os that Google or your carrier (or both) has long abandoned that leaves you vulnerable to a variety of issues.
That's the bare minimum under the new EU Ecodesign Rules. Also for phones this is long, but for PCs/Notebooks this is rather short.
>With your old android, you’re either running an open source stack of some sort, which is out of the reach of most users, or operating on an ancient os that Google or your carrier (or both) has long abandoned that leaves you vulnerable to a variety of issues.
That completely misses the point that old Android Devices still get updated and recent Apps that work well, while Apple blocks their users from enjoying that. No more iOS Updates on Apple usually means no more App Installs/Updates after a short time
You're not responding to the case I'm specifically talking about. As new major iOS or Android releases have features I could care less about, I primarily only care about critical security releases for the OS I have. Why is it thatI have to install a new OS just to get a updated version of Safari?
Whereas I seem to be able to download usable browsers on older Android phones (with older Android versions installed) from the play store?
These phones are not my primary phones, so I'm less concerned with security and more concerned about them turning into bricks of trash sooner rather than later. A phone that can stay usuable for longer without any os updates versus one that requires os updates to stay usuable should get some points in that category. And it's been my experience that battery life of older phones are negatively affected after os updates anyway, as they are not the targete phones for new OS.
My company had some ancient capital equipment that required windows 2000. We had a contract that supported them up until a few years ago. That contract costed a fortune, but made perfect sense for the use case. Nobody is going to pay to keep an iPhone 4 updated.
Note my comment is that you’re an outlier. That doesn’t mean that your needs are flawed, wrong or anything else. It’s just not consistent with the market’s need and represents an addressable market too small for Apple.
Sometimes companies do serve niche markets by rolling them together. Sonim, for example, made a fully waterproof Android phone that was rugged and marketed to public safety and construction customers. It also solved a problem for small customers like mine who had environments where traditional smartphones could trigger an explosion.
I don’t want a phone with design characteristics the lets it operate in a grain elevator. Likewise, I have no desire to operate a phone for many years, and the market, rightly or wrongly, agrees with me.
Just to be clear your suggesting that your 6 year old iPhone runs a suit of social media apps, full graphics games like Minecraft (or whatever the hell people play these days I don’t know), fitness apps, connects to the latest audio devices like Apple’s AirPods Pro (as an example), works with CarPlay/Android Auto, has wireless charging capability, can place 3D objects in a room to help you plan out a new design, and allows you to use payments features like tap to pay? Plus equivalent camera and video quality?
Because if your phone doesn’t do all of those things and perform as well and have great battery life too, your 6 year old Android phone doesn’t really do what most people use their phones for today.
I use mine to design mines so people underground don't get killed - way more intensive than interior decorating.
If you're talking about charging a phone, the usb-c ecosystem is literally never going to give you even a single instance of annoyance. If you're talking about lightning and laptop sized power delivery then, yes the cables need better labeling, but all of those cables are going to work for charging a phone.
How they managed to convert the simplicity and reliability of 20 years of USB-A into this mess is anyones guess.
If you're buying them in bulk on amazon, usb-c is still more expensive than lightning, but the vast majority of people tend to buy cables when they have either lost, forgotten, or broken their existing cables. Go to a shop at an airport or train station and they'll charge you £20 for a cable, and people but them.
The "apple tax" is irrelevant to the actual amount paid.
My headphones are USB-C and by far the most unreliable. The switch uses USB-C too, but that sits in its dock.
My laptop will use USB-C, but only for some combinations of cables and chargers.
If USB-C was as reliable and dependable as USB-A I wouldn't have a problem.
You can't play the latest games with the same performance and battery life on your iPhone 8 (if at all) as you can on the latest iPhone. You might not care about that but there are lots of people who do. Same with pictures. Do you have cinema mode on your iPhone 8? No you don't. For some that's a reason to upgrade - they really care about the features and quality of the camera.
I don't see what the debate is here. This is very obvious and become more obvious and true the older the iPhone is.
> Just to be clear your suggesting that your 6 year old iPhone runs a suit of social media apps
No, I deleted them all - other than youtube (premium, no adverts). I used to have them 10 years ago though so a 10 year old phone would run them.
> full graphics games like Minecraft (or whatever the hell people play these days I don’t know)
I have a few games to pass the time in some cases, but a touchscreen is rubbish for proper gaming. Sadly some games I had (monkey island rings a bell) seem to have been removed.
> fitness apps
Alas I'm not particularly fit, however I do recall a fitness tracker on windows 3.1, so I imagine that the supercomputer in my pocket can keep track of my heart-rate with the right sensor. I am fairly sure these were all the rage when covid hit 5 years ago so it's a fair bet they'll work now.
> connects to the latest audio devices like Apple’s AirPods Pro (as an example)
Headphones? My 25 year old phone will do that. Bluetooth? I'm fairly sure my 3GS did that. Sadly modern phones don't do wired headphones any more, so have regressed on that metric.
> works with CarPlay/Android Auto
Yes, I had carplay in my 2016 car so any iphone since then will do carplay.
> has wireless charging capability
My 4 year old iphone does that, although I rarely use it. It came out 5 years ago.
> can place 3D objects in a room to help you plan out a new design
I have to admit I have never even considered doing that
> and allows you to use payments features like tap to pay?
Yes. It's face recognition so less convenient than the older phone it replaced which was a touch sensor and also did tap-to-pay, more like "double click, stare at phone, wait, then pay". Apple Pay came out over 10 years ago.
> Plus equivalent camera and video quality?
Equivalent to what? A decade ago Apple were doing big advertising spreads about how good iphones were. I assume phones released 4 years later were at least as good.
Nothing on your list is a feature a phone from about 2016 didn't have, other than magnetic charging, and the 2020 era iphone 12 had that.
For example, when you write:
> Headphones? My 25 year old phone will do that. Bluetooth? I'm fairly sure my 3GS did that. Sadly modern phones don't do wired headphones any more, so have regressed on that metric.
You're already showing me how you don't understand what people are buying or why they are buying it. You're referencing wired headphones as if anyone besides a tiny group of people wants wired headphones anymore. People are buying AirPods and AirPods Pro - they want them connected to their Apple Watch so they can go for a run with them, and they want new health features that continue to be released for such devices.
Reading these responses reminds me of the "inverse Reddit stock pics". If I were to take these responses seriously, and I don't because they are nonsense, Apple and others would be out of business tomorrow because any old Joe just wants to use their wired headphones and their 10 year old iPhone is JuST aS G00d. It's rubbish.
Here's a good example haha:
> Alas I'm not particularly fit, however I do recall a fitness tracker on windows 3.1
Yea man. That feature existed on Windows 3.1, ergo nobody should or would want to buy the next iPhone. Give me a break. Even so you yourself said you're not particularly fit. What makes you think you know the first thing about why people are buying new phones or new devices as it relates to fitness activities or apps?
You haven't really made a strong argument for why a user might upgrade specifically and immediately for those features, besides that they exist. Certainly the average person is upgrading over time as components break or fail, but why is it that you think the average person is still upgrading regularly for any of the things you listed?
> I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly.
They made the claim, you should ask them for evidence instead.
Given that Apple continues to create new features that are only available on certain iPhones and market those functions and features heavily, we can guess that people buy new iPhones at least in part for those features.
We also know that not all features available on an iPhone today are available on all iPhones. For example, the original iPhone doesn't have the chipset required to do tap-to-pay transactions. The iPhone 11 (I'm guessing it's 6 years old and the one OP was referring to) can't play whatever the latest games are with the same performance with respect to graphics and battery life, as another example. While I don't care, many people do and spend quite a lot of money gaming on their iPhones. Think about all the new accessories that people use as well.
I don't want to suggest that I necessarily find those things valuable or that they are a reason to upgrade, but it seems very weak to suggest that other people don't value those things.
Are you saying that modern airpods don't do bluetooth? And aren't supported on the iphone 11? People have used bluetooth headphones for 20 years. Why would apply regress?
> Yea man. That feature existed on Windows 3.1, ergo nobody should or would want to buy the next iPhone.
The point is it's software, which will run just as fine on a supercomputer from 2 years ago as it will on today. What features does an iphone 15 (14? 16? whatever) have that an 11 doesn't have to allow these features?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdxrv97djw9o
> The tech spec of every new handset camera is usually an improvement on the previous generation. But even this isn’t a guaranteed sales generator any more.
> “What is definitely happening is that people are holding on to their phones for longer. Back in 2013 there were 30 million phones sold annually,” adds Mr Wood. “This year it will be around 13.5 million.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/latest-smartphone-iphone-...
> Nearly nine in 10 adults think buying the latest smartphone is a “waste of money”. Research polling 2,000 Britons revealed more than half are “bored” of trying to keep up-to-date with the latest tech. And three in four are no longer willing to pay a fortune to get it. As a result, almost a third intend to spend less on smartphones and other gadgets over the next two years.
Ok, well now you know one. I buy new phones even when they work just fine.
> Are you saying that modern airpods don't do bluetooth? And aren't supported on the iphone 11? People have used bluetooth headphones for 20 years. Why would apply regress?
You're not familiar with the products, are you? Folks buy products like AirPods Pro (https://www.apple.com/airpods-pro/) because they have features that they want which aren't necessarily compatible with older phones, for a variety of reasons.
> > Nearly nine in 10 adults think buying the latest smartphone is a “waste of money”. Research polling 2,000 Britons revealed more than half are “bored” of trying to keep up-to-date with the latest tech. And three in four are no longer willing to pay a fortune to get it. As a result, almost a third intend to spend less on smartphones and other gadgets over the next two years.
Most people say the same thing about social media but can't be bothered to delete the accounts that they supposedly never use. I don't think this is relevant to the main point I made which was that people do in fact use their phones for more than "the basics" and they (not me) justify the purchase of a new phone for new features. Your iPhone 11 isn't the same phone as an iPhone 16. The iPhone 16 has a better camera, has different chips, different and better features, etc. and many folks take advantage of those features.
> The point is it's software, which will run just as fine on a supercomputer from 2 years ago as it will on today. What features does an iphone 15 (14? 16? whatever) have that an 11 doesn't have to allow these features?
If you don't know what the difference is between an iPhone 11 and an iPhone 16, then why are you commenting here? You're basically saying "I don't know anything about these phones, but I am sure that people don't need the new one because it's no different, but I also can't tell you the difference or anything about them". Do you not see how asinine that is?
Well, yes, I guess it would be safer to delete them, but I presume most people just forget about having them once they stop using it (like you just reminded me that I do have several Facebook accounts).
Lol, this is a terrible example. Have you *seen* Minecraft ?!? (A game that came out 16 years ago and could already run on cheap hardware back then.)
> or whatever the hell people play these days I don’t know
Well, better, but then this will still be mostly simple 2D games like Candy Crush or Balatro :
Especially since in 2015 that likely still meant FullHD in SDR, while in 2025 high end would be UHD-1 with HDR.
They have had to replace the fans on the graphics card a few times and a repaste but other than that they are chugging away.
Also solid lol on "frame generation". Marketing fluff/features like that only exists but because they have run out of real generational performance gains to sell cards with.
Smartphones ate the world, and they ate the majority of profit in the space. We are now 20 years on and the software is no longer driving the urgency of the hardware upgrade cycle it used to. Apple gets the majority of its revenue from iPhones and related services. Note that services category includes all sorts of App Store extortion payment stuff that they are slowly losing court cases over.
iPhones are so big for them, no other product category created since is even in the same order of magnitude. Partially I think thats on Apple, but I look across the consumer electronics space and don't really see anything new categories they aren't already dominating anyway (tablet, smart watches, etc).
One "moat" they probably do have is that in the US at least, theres not a lot of other physical retailers to go try out consumer electronics. 20+ years ago Apple Store were filled with 3rd party products, now its all Apple everything.
Smartphones were a big deal before the iPhone. People would talk about how they were addicted to checking email on their “crackberries.” But they were niche. You could see that they were going to be big, but they weren’t there yet. Then the iPhone catapulted smartphones from a popular niche to a ubiquitous product.
Before the iPhone, they did the same thing with portable music players. Afterwards, it was the same story for tables and smart watches, although not with the same degree of ubiquity. Arguably it was the same for PCs (“personal computers,” not IBM-compatible machines, of course) and GUIs, way back when.
What big upcoming thing would they do this with now? As you say, there really isn’t anything. Maybe VR/AR, but that isn’t even in the “popular niche” stage yet, the technology isn’t there yet, and it’s far from certain that it will ever be more than a tiny niche. Otherwise, what? Self-driving cars? That’s not a new market, that’s a product feature in an existing large, mature market. AI? That’s also looking like a feature rather than a new product category.
IoT/smarthome has been a niche/fad going nowhere since day 1.
Smart speakers are commodities.
They dabbled in an EV project, canned it.
They've dabbled in AR with the VisionPro but really it's too early, if it will ever work.
AI is software not hardware.
Apple smartphones/tablets/watches have essentially killed 10x more hardware categories than have come into existence since.
They sell a lot of headphones I guess.
The only consumer electronics I buy now outside Apple are basically higher end niche hobbyist stuff in for example music or photography. Nothing that would ever sell at the price levels ($200-1000) or volumes (billions) to move the needle for Apple.
There is absolutely no risk of Apple going under any time in the next few decades but the era of rapid progress is over.
If you are still using bluetooth headphones as they existed 10+ years ago, and haven't tried using apple headphones with an apple computer/phone, you are missing a massive quality of life upgrade in terms of basically never having to do the pairing dance again after your initial purchase.
The bigger problem with Bluetooth headphones is that the batteries are non-replaceable, so consumers are incentivized to throw them out every few years (just like smartphones).
Apple headphones will roam between all Apple devices that you own, and it pretty much "just works".
Of course, as soon as you step out of their ecosystem, not only you have to pair manually again, but it can only be paired to a single non-Apple device at a time.
The problem is it’s always a great 3rd or 4th device. Not sure there’s a high margin high volume demand for it.
But if they are able to make it, I'm all the happier. If Apple manages to make a fully daylight compatible device (whichever display technology), then they will have unlocked sales of hundreds of millions of devices. Because who doesn't want to get out of the cave?
Nothing wrong with that though. It is good to be a part of stable but solid market rather than trying to dominate it and fail.
A display that's better outdoors and worse indoors is never going to take off. Approximately nobody wants to carry two phones just so that they can see the screen a little better while they're waiting for the bus. Current screens are good enough for outdoor use, even if not great.
That's not what I'm suggesting. We already have those displays. What I'm saying is that once they have the technology to make a great outdoors display without too many compromises on the other parts, then they have an entirely new category of device to replace the old, and to sell hundreds of millions of units.
> Approximately nobody wants to carry two phones just so that they can see the screen a little better while they're waiting for the bus.
You're arguing like you live a limited life, which I'm sure is not the case, you're just arguing in that way in the quote above. People want to be outdoors much more than just to wait for the bus. And approximately 100% of the people who work with computers would prefer to do it in a well-lit environment. Offices and living rooms are currently constructed to shield from light, to let people see their computer or TV screens better.
Not to forget the people who actually work outdoors and need to check blueprints, take orders, or whatever. Bring your laptop to the park on a sunny day and try to use it. It won't be pleasant for your eyes even in the shadow.
> see the screen a little better
It's not a little, it's a lot. Try comparing your phone screen out in the sun with a sheet of paper with something written or printed. The paper is much brighter.
> Current screens are good enough for outdoor use, even if not great.
They are absolutely awful, and you need to compare in real life with better screens or paper to get a feel for it.
This is why I originally wrote that Apple is the right company to bring this kind of technology to the masses. They understand that the general public will buy products that are great to use, not products which are capable of being used if the user suffers all the time.
I often work outside in the middle latitudes when it's nice out, which usually means sunny. My laptop's display is fine in the shade. If I was desperate, I could use one of those third-party apps that enables HDR mode for all content to get it brighter than 100%, but so far I haven't needed it.
Which screens are you using outdoors? There's a pretty wide range of maximum brightness out there, so your experience will vary considerably depending on your specific hardware. A Dell Pro 16 laptop (picked arbitrarily from dell.com, I know nothing about it otherwise) display does 300 nits. My laptop does 1,000 nits, 1,600 with an HDR hack. An iPhone from the past few years will do 2,000. This is a wide range of usability.
If you look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkEa1ZttTxg
It's usable if you really need to, but it's far from good. What's needed is "great" if Apple wants to bring a new category of device to mass market (new as in how iPhone with retina display was new).
> An iPhone from the past few years will do 2,000. This is a wide range of usability.
Billions of people use their phones outside every day, so there's no doubt it's usable. But it's a very very bad experience when the weather is sunny. Just look around you at the people squinting and shading their display with their free hand.
I have a friend who also insisted that modern OLED phones are good for outdoor use, and we tried putting his phone with max brightness next to a Kindle and a white sheet of paper. The difference is night and day. LCD/OLED displays are pathetic next to reflective displays outdoors. And much harder to read.
People say their Acer touchpad is good until they try a Macbook touchpad. They said that lo-DPI displays were good until they saw a Retina/hi-DPI display. They said 1,5 hours of battery was good until Apple started selling 8 hour battery life laptops. Or that entering a passcode was good until Apple introduced Touch ID. Etc etc.
Screen visibility outdoors is a real pain-point with modern electronics, and I think many people would like to pay for a good solution to this problem if it was offered, rather than suffer a bad experience for little reason.
Better outdoor usability is demonstrably a selling point. That’s why newer iPhones have such a high max brightness. And people will certainly like even more. But they’re not going to pay a large amount for it, or accept any loss of indoor capability. It’s not going to be a new category of device, just the same stuff except better in very bright light.
https://www.techradar.com/reviews/phones/mobile-phones/yotap...
Sent from my iPhone 13 mini. It it breaks, I’ll replace it with a refurbished 13 mini or SE 3.
(My smartphone replacement budget is $1200.)
We are in a forum were more than once I have seen people deriding mature companies as "mediocre" because of "moderate profits".
This idea that line must eternally go up and growth must be infinite is pervasive, no matter how destructive it is.
The result is this unholy abomination of a union of hustle-culture and rent-seeking.
iPhone sales aren’t plummeting at all:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-ipho...
Growth is either from an expanding market or an expanding market share, since it’s not an expanding market that leaves the market share.
I would image there is some substitution, with iPhones lasting longer on average it becomes more cost effective to switch to iPhones so they capture more market share. But if the general market doesn’t expand then it’s a fairly safe assumption that the new converts are going to wait before upgrading meaning that a decrease in sales is already partially baked in.
My anecdotal datapoint is 4 iPhones in 16 years which makes them rather cheap on an annual basis.
Edit: I had assumed that parent was correct, but as the peer pointed out iPhone sales have declined
Well, no, it shows:
2021 < 2023
2022 < 2021
2023 > 2021
2024 ??
We can see the bar for 2021 is longer than 2023!
We can see the table value for 2021 is > 2023!
Screenshots, for sales, from 2nd link, i.e. what we are told to look to see 2021 < 2023: https://imgur.com/a/CpGWbWM
(although, my comment makes a hash of the whole thing and says 2021 is both < and > than 2023. Sigh.)
(n.b. not trying to be aggressive, or disagree, or make a statement about the overall premise that sales are declining. Just mildly amused by the confusion in the thread)
(my $0.02 would be that we're seeing the same general stasis that was presumed after the iPhone 6 release, but really, we just need more data (2021 was COVID stimmy high))
(but my $0.02 should be that "yeah stuff plateaued, or at least no more hypergrowth, post-2018" because this is what we were shown on the Pixel team at Google, and a little birdy told me that's how Apple thinks about it)
Note that what was being claimed was that “Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point, and smartphone sales are plummeting”. Whether iPhone sales are growing, bounced around a bit, or have plateaued is irrelevant. It’s pretty clear they are not plummeting.
Note that I'm not saying that's true! I didn't say anything about any of that! :)
That said, doing some searches for newer information (e.g., https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/) suggests that iPhone sales aren't plummeting but are instead rather stable. (Although I wonder how much of that is services attributed to iPhone as opposed to solely the sales revenue from iPhone, the source doesn't make that clear).
“Apple generated $390.8 billion revenue in 2024, 51% came from iPhone sales
Apple Services is the second largest division, responsible for 24% of revenue in 2024”
Back to iPhones, this [2] page shows their stats by units sold (about half way down). iPhone is essentially treading water if those data are correct (with a peak in 2015 overcome twice since, but by ~1% each time), but I strongly suspect that that's showing units shipped and not units sold, as iPhone sales declining has been universally reported.
As it is, I bought my car new and is 20 years old in great condition. Partner … I mean, who wouldn’t want to trade in for a new model if it weren’t for the social concerns? (I kiiiid I kiiid)
I have bought two phones since 2010
I agree with you. Hand me downs aren’t coming as fast as they used to.
Maybe a direct pay model doesn't have enough reach for a big company in which case hopefully we'll get a Kagi-style paid phone OS from someone.
The cash brought in by ads is concrete, quantifiable, and can be attributed to specific people. The lost sales and eroded brand trust are almost impossible to measure or attribute. This means it's very easy for businesses to (inadvertently) incentivise managers to destroy brand trust in pursuit of profit.
Nobody's every gotten a bonus for their restrained and tasteful decision not to put ads into something.
There's a reason advertisers salivate at that (and why Google gives Apple billions to default to Google search).
It is also what is happening all over the western world in general as “growth” sacrifices the indigenous cultures and people at the altar of money for the executives, ie aristocrats, and anyone resisting or even just objecting is silenced, including here, because resistance to growth at all costs is futile.
humans want to improve their (material) conditions, it's pretty much the thing we do at this point (that other species don't really)
the issue that was a bit of an inconvenience, a mere side-effect of our culture is nowadays burning down the whole shebang
we overvalue short-term gains (thus we have serious agent-principal and integrity issues), we have a laundry list of cognitive biases, and we managed to invent the weaponized cognitive-bias-exploitor and immediately tried it out on ourselves, and ... since the good old days of pamphlets and religious wars we are engaged in all kinds psyops.
we are both great and terrible at "winning hearts and minds" (that's why it works, but unfortunately it works much better at turning people into crazy self-destructive antisocial trolls than courageous prosocial reformers)
Agree and would even make the argument that Chinas rise in some is a response to short term with patience.
China is willing to move mountains and allow western corporations 8-10 years of ridiculous low labor costs and promote incredible profits. They then learn the process and the tech and now companies like TP-link, Huawei, BYD, tencent, and so forth are all legit and make good products. This approach can even be seen in their military. With all the talk of China invading Taiwan… the reality is it just won’t happen. China will patiently build the largest Navy and infiltrate the political landscape of Taiwan until they just peacefully transfer back into the fold.
Not sure what the answer is here but perhaps we could learn something back ?
I think it will pass like every other empire/business: ruined by future generations who did not toil for it and who will trade it for short term gain.
But I think long-term thinking requires a unified people in a democracy, or a non-democratic system. Democracy in a divided society makes long-term stuff basically impossible when the next guy who comes in will just undo it to spite you. And long-term visions often come with short-term costs without anything yet to show for it, which can then be weaponized against you. Oh and the best trick of all is doing something with short term benefit and mid-term costs, and then blame the consequences of your own actions on the next guy in office. Excessive printing of money is an obvious and extremely common example of this.
I don't think this would work, they can't manipulate a sophisticated Western political system without actual sovereignty over the land. Western soft power is just that good.
If China had a playbook that could accomplish that, they would have used that instead for assimilating Hong Kong instead of what they ended up doing. They tried, but HK resisted Chinese influence HARD. So China stopped offering carrots and brought out the stick.
China is building soft power. We have Chinese funded teaching in British universities, lecturers moved from teaching a course because they upset Chinese students (who supported the regime), open apologists at places like Jesus College, Cambridge, agents building influence with MPs....
I agree Taiwan is unlikely to easily agree to be taken over by China, but that is because they know what living under Chinese rule will be like, not because of the soft power of the west.
Where the West's soft power essentially comes from in is in being the alternative to authoritarianism and it really doesn't have to be any more than that. The West will operate its own authoritarian regimes, like Puerto Rico, and Hawaii before it became a state, and the Phillipines, and these folks are perhaps the most oppressed of all. The West knows authoritarianism extremely well and is far better at the carrot / stick game of manipulating people.
When your carrots consist of patently self-serving deals to other autocrats at the expense of the public, the public eventually gets wise and puts pressure on the autocrat. The West can offer much more lucrative arrangements for all around, like that of building Taiwan's semiconductor industry. It's become a source of national pride for them and has created middle classes, a necessity for a modern political system.
All of which is great news for China, and a great victory for their ‘do nothing: win’ policy.
Populism is notoriously brittle, and almost every European populist party has eventually fallen once they gained actual power, because it turns out governing is complicated and can’t be done effectively while maintaining that beautiful, simple, enticing narrative that brought you into power.
But the Chinese government is not populist in the same sense, often quite the contrary. Their legitimacy seems to be derived from the fact that they have achieved real results for their population, which means they will eventually hit a different road block.
In general the trends of the past were largely a product of globalism, and globalism is dying. So I expect we'll enter more into a historical zones of influence global status quo. For instance anybody who doesn't think Chinese soft power is growing exponentially should visit basically anywhere in Asia now a days. A decade ago China had relatively minimal influence, now it's everywhere driven in large part by just absolutely massive numbers of Chinese tourists as well as expats. A rapidly expanding middle class in a country of 1.4 billion has an impact that's basically impossible to overstate.
see Tblisi or Belgrade :(
What Apple may be guilty of here is focusing on short term growth at the expense of the long term. If you make an extra buck today, at the expense of losing user loyalty, that's not what any shareholder wants.
This could be a case of short term growth being rewarded inside the company. It could also be any number of other reasons.
Wall St growthbros do not draw these sorts of distinctions. If the focus on short-term growth ends up tanking a company, there will simply be another company to project its growth obssession on. It could be Apple services, or Peloton bikes or Subway sandwiches, they could not care less. Those companies aren't their customers; the investment houses, short sellers, market makers and pension funds are.
The empirically existing stock market does quite well long term. Apple itself is over half a century old, as are many other big companies.
Decoupling was coined by Americans and enthusiastically embraced by the CCP.
This right here. The perverse incentives integral to public companies are at the core of so much that is wrong with the world.
And statistics show that the average person buys a new phone every 3 years. Apple’s laptop sales are also stagnate and not declining.
Most people use laptops - not desktops. There is no six year old laptop that has the combination of speed, battery life, quietness and lack of heat that a modern M series Mac has.
Not entirely correct. Apple is a software sales platform.
Apple have stated that even older phones and iPads and macs will get the new OS26.
Apple realised a long time ago that, as you said, consumers don't have a need to upgrade.
So rather than taking the approach of others, which is to stop OS updates and then also security updates, which would result in compatibility issues. Apple are trying to maintain the largest possible user base.
So they can sell to all of them.
The problem Google has is that they’re dependent on phone OEMs to release OS updates, but OEMs mostly don’t make money off software.
They ‘solved’ this by pushing a lot of security and OS features into Google Play Services, so they can update them independently of the OS. Today, you can get new apps and OS features even on older Android versions.
I remember distinctly, because after trying patiently for months then years to get rid of it through official channels, I rage-quit iTunes when that whiny man’s voice started playing again the moment I connected my phone in a rental car. I still won’t touch Apple Music to this day.
For that matter, it still comes back from time to time all these years later:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/13kc29l/...
Apparently, since they have taken down their dedicated removal tool from 11 years ago [0], your remaining recourse is to contact Apple Support and persist through upsell attempts to paid support.
Apple had enjoyed having world-leading crisis communications embodied within Steve and didn’t immediately know what to do when he was gone.
Perhaps, but there probably would have been more thought over it than just shoving it onto everybody's phone. The problem, I think, is that Apple is *mostly* run by white men over 50 - a demographic that sees U2 as the pinnacle of the rock band. They probably don't even realize that rock bands aren't "cool" anymore. I remember when Apple Music was first announced and Eddy Cue spent far too long "demonstrating" his music library and it fell flat even to the press in his age range. Usually you're best off demonstrating with "timeless" music as music tastes are so personal.
"You're holding it wrong" was about the worst case of "handling the fall out" that I can remember in computing history. Jobs was an absolute laughing stock after he said that.
I do wonder that with Job's bowing out when he did may have been the best thing that could happen to Apples. The visionary made way for the logistic guys to let the next 20 years or so boom.
Job's departed just as most technology fields were starting to move into a more mature state, not entirely there but definitely past peak innovation. This is why I think the Apple Watch is the only thing that I think Job's would have absolutely loved out of Apple over the last decade or so. Would have thought Apple TV+ is very cool but risky, and be disappointed in the lack of progress on iPhone and might have down right hated the Apple Vision due to the hardware limits (bulk).
Otherwise you get generic slop, eventually.
You are not supposed to find joy in work. Work is something that you do so you can afford to find joy elsewhere.
Try to find a job that is tolerable and devote your free time to things that make you happy - family, friends, hobbies, etc
What @surgical_fire is describing is the "minimum viable product" for a career. It's the thing that serves the basics on Maslow's Hierarchy.
What @hshshshshsh is describing is anything past that. We briefly exist sandwiched between two eternities -- shouldn't we care about the quality of our time during the thing that takes up the largest quantity of our time?
The problem is that, the issue that @hshshshshsh is pointing out is precisely what makes the minimum @surgical_fire is describing damn near impossible to find.
Because no one gives a shit about users, values, mission, etc, the company suffers and turns into a shit-show, incentivizing people to become more selfish so that they don't get sucked into the vortex of shit.
In order to reach the minimum of a "tolerable" job that doesn't suck up all your free time or make your time there a living hell, the company _must_ engage with at least some of what @hshshshshsh is describing.
This requires some amount of good faith from the majority involved. This is a tricky and fragile thing. It's easy to lose. And thus the cycle begins anew.
Ultimately, we need more people thinking like @hshshshshsh so that we can get what @surgical_fire is describing.
Why on earth would you discourage someone from finding joy in their work? It's possible.
For the same reason I discourage people believing in Santa Claus or in the Easter Bunny
Finding joy in their work is a cute idea. But it is cute and false, believing in it will lead to nothing but frustration and lower income.
Like, are you reading "find joy" as "find a job doing what you already love"? Those are different things.
This affectation of weary cynicism is so easy and popular. I'm over it.
Absolutely not.
Work with what you love, and you will never love anything again.
My recollection is that Eddy Cue got the most critiques, Phil Schiller the least and the rest were in between. Eddy would push back and still get shut down.
When Steve left the last time, it was knives out between these guys with Scott Forstall taking a fall as Tim Cook got ultimatums from everyone including Jony. I imagine loud voices with bad taste are pushing Tim hard. Apple can be an investor darling but Tim has needed to consider an exit and find a strong successor that knows what made Apple great in other ways.
Rings a bell.
>Tim Cook asserted his control over the company, putting his own personnel in place, and now his authority is absolute. Even those few others who remain from the Jobs era, such as “Apple Fellow” Phil Schiller, are overridden by Cook
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/5/6.html by way of https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/05/23/apple-turnaround/
Was it common for lower-level employees to take part in C-suite meetings and arguments?
To directly address your question, the answer was yes in that if you developed a feature, a demo, or anything Steve wanted to see, you would end up in a forum with a bunch a various levels of employees.
Thinking of C suite meetings happening when Steve was around cracks me up. Steve was always on the move, making edicts, rejecting things, walking into offices, having lunch with people, etc. There was no Jira, Confluence, Agile or any of that. It was a fight to ship by an imposed date or die trying.
That would be ok, because competition, except these days the moat is huge: it is very difficult for a new entrant to compete.
Tacky things under Jobs were failed experiments. Modern Apple doesn't believe in either experiments or failed experiments.
Now Apple is a multi trillion dollar company and they can’t take as much risk.
As for vision pro though and I guess even to a little extent the car exploration, it's sort of "safe" and derivative conceptually.
Steve's experiments were often seemingly directly at odds with profitability. Like, one day he may have looked at the extensive lineup with the "Pro Max" etc, and made the call to cut back down to one iPhone model. Or he would, you know, do something ridiculous like make the next Imac's screen round or something.
It's decisions like that which primarily profit driven mega corporations just can't do.
They are either turbo sensible or doing silly things like Titan/Vision.
And this has been the only design style they have been going for for 15 years at least: it's now thinner. There are almost no other considerations.
Historically Apple refines something common that already exists and makes it cool. The last big thing they made cool was the smartphone, followed by the AirPod pros. I think AirPods really pushed headphones ahead. Do you remember how bad wireless headphones used to be?
So I guess I want that sort of Apple experience. If Apple turned ordinary hardware experiences into premium, that would be nice. AR googles are not ordinary experiences. Smartphones were.
That’s just my opinion though.
Apple Vision Pro qualifies here.
Cook needs to stop listening to investors, like Warren Buffett, because he's letting them wreck Apple's integrity for the sake of making a buck. Apple just isnt user focused like they used to be and it's crappy.
Lighting doesnt strike twice imho.
Here’s him announcing and talking about ads in WWDC: https://youtu.be/eY3BZzzLaaM?si=Dttc5eJJ1B7Zf3sB
iAd was something that happened right at the end of his life because devs were putting ads in apple apps anyway and he wanted to control how that was done.
this is meant to add context to what bluedevilzn said, btw. it is not a refutation.
Thats why the F1 wallet add is such a bad move. It’s disrespectful and intrusive.
iAD was supposed to be about innovative, informative, well designed high quality adverts. It never really worked out though.
He also "hated" the small tablets Samsung were making, saying in a keynote that you'd have to file your finger down to use it. He said this knowing full well Apple were launching the iPad Mini in 12 months' time.
I really hope one day Jobs' marketer-speak soundbites stop being repeated like like biblical pronouncements. The App Store, Apple News, Stocks and other properties are filled with hideous Google-like ads today, and Jobs likely wouldn't bat an eye, because they brought in money.
Sorry, having seen the sappy photo of Ive & Altman I cannot trust his taste.
https://in.mashable.com/tech/94502/sam-altman-taps-worlds-gr...
I realized it was official as I read your comment.
Truth is Apple was always like that, but Apple in particular has a lot of fans willing to play the white knight in its name.
Apple remains on the edge with hardware though. I guess the show is still ran by the engineers at this department.
Whether they'll do anything about it is a different question.
The old adage of "vote with your (physical?) wallet" holds double here.
This is a toaster, it makes toast. This is Apple TV, it plays TV. This is Apple Wallet, it does what your wallet does.
And that was the magic! Of course the simplicity masked kaleidoscopic technical, commercial, and functional complexity—that’s not new!
This weird cross-promotion is the latest, most crass, symptom; but it almost reads as the metastasis of a deeper disease—namely this urge to cross-pollute between little functional fiefdoms from inside the megacorp, instead of prioritizing the perspective of one user on one tool for one purpose at a time.
Ive famously wanted the Apple Watch to be a standalone luxury product.
> Jony Ive envisioned the future of the Apple Watch as a luxury product. Not only did he want to build a $25 million lavish white tent to promote the first Watch, but he “regarded a rave from Vogue as more important than any tech reviewer’s opinion.” According to Mickle, “the tent was critical to making the event as glamorous as a high-end fashion show.”
Meanwhile Jobs always seemed to have an obsession with cubes (NeXTcube, Power Mac G4 Cube), no fans and nobody touching his products (the original iPhone “SDK” announcement was a badly received joke).
Apple's main user base is not like HN users - not even like the Apple users/advocates here. I have come across many who are too deeply convinced that Apple is hugely ahead of other OSes (often because they assume other OSes capabilities are what they were years ago), and they do not want to adjust to anything that is different from what they are familiar with. They will stay will Apple almost whatever Apple do. Some examples of things Apple users I know have said were advantages of their products:
1. I can copy and paste between my phone and my desktop!
2. There is a terminal app that is so amazing you will want to buy a Mac just to use it. It was roughly similar to terminal apps I have used over many years.
3. If you buy a ticket on your laptop instead of your phone you will have to bring your laptop out to scan at the gate. When I explained my phone syncs selected folders with my laptop the reply was "that is so complicated".
Only the first comment came from a person who is not comfortable with technology - obviously in the case of the second comment!
I am not sure either of these people have anything to do with ads on Apple Wallet. Or even Apple Wallet…
Do you hear yourself?
Yes
To most of us, the appeal of Apple has always been primarily that it does what it does well.
I don't think Apple themselves thinks their appeal depends on exclusivity, but rather on a premium experience.
What are you basing this on, the total number of iPhones sold since 2007? If so, it doesn't account for the users that have bought multiple iPhones.
I don’t know what I’ll do when I need a new personal machine.
I much prefer being able to use third-party displays and not having to get rid of perfectly good screens when getting a new computer.
Ok you haven’t but what about Ive?
The only difference is that now they are decades away to ever worry about insolvency, yet the lack of direction and management entitlement as being the best, feels quite similar.
With Jobs gone, it still has a taste but it someone else’s taste.
That said, I think some people have developed their own original taste but some people’s tastes are just an amalgamation of the people around them.
Without the huge hold of the cloud and business markets Microsoft enjoys they only have hardware.
And besides their excellent laptops you can forget of the existence of any other of their products.
But Jony Ive was part of the problem. His "taste level" resulted in the embarrassing emoji bar forced on "pro" users, a grossly defective keyboard that crippled Apple computers for five years, a computer with no available ports on it, regressive UI that made products less useful with every revision, battery life so poor that people were crouching in the corners of cafes next to outlets before lunch, the removal of headphone jacks from the best-selling music players... Ive is pompous hack with no ideas for the advancement of products.
Meanwhile, lazy and ignorant pundits have incorrectly lumped Apple into "big tech" with Google, Amazon, and Meta because they can't be bothered to inform themselves (or even think) about the fact that those companies are all gatekeepers to huge swaths of the Internet; Apple is not. And their continual whining about Apple being "behind on AI" further testifies to their laziness and lack of critical thinking.
Nonetheless, Apple has forfeited the high road. They're now another asshole in the club, inviting scrutiny and crackdowns that threaten the value of the company. What are the owners going to do about it?