Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

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Agree they have a huge taste problem, but even besides that Apple has a huge incumbent problem now really.

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.

Apple’s MO, at least in recent decades, is to let others blaze the trail into a new space, then do their own version that gets it right.

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.

You're 100% right, Apple as a fast-follower "getting it right" tech company, and there's nothing to fast follow right now.

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.

This is something I have said for a while. A lot of the fields they are in now are largely 'solved'. Not saying there cannot be improvements but we are well into the diminishing returns phase.

There is absolutely no risk of Apple going under any time in the next few decades but the era of rapid progress is over.

>> They sell a lot of headphones I guess.

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.

You don’t have to do that with non-Apple headphones either.

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).

This doesn't match my experience. Even gen 5 Bluetooth on android is still choc full of gotchas and erratic behavior.

Some non-Apple headphones can pair to more than one device, but there's usually a hard limit, and it's fairly small. And you have to set each up separately.

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.

There is such a mythology around that it's basically religious fervor at this point. Apple stuff isn't any better or more convenient than any other brand. The gold standard is multi-point Bluetooth which Apple doesn't do because they would rather have you locked in their "ecosystem". Joke's on them because even if you are a customer, you can very much get a good experience by avoiding the Apple stuff.

Other way round with GUIs. Apple were first to mass market, and MS were far more successful.

Let's hope eink or any other type of outdoors usable display. That's a new market of hundreds of millions of devices they can sell.

I’ve dabbled in a bunch of those. Kindle. Remarkable. Daylight.

The problem is it’s always a great 3rd or 4th device. Not sure there’s a high margin high volume demand for it.

I think regular LCD/OLED displays will become fully daylight capable before these specialized displays become high volume. We’re almost there today. My phone and laptop are usable outside in most conditions, but not great in direct sunlight. It’s not really the right technology for that environment, but the R&D money being poured into it is immense.

LCD/OLED displays are hardly usable outdoors or in well-lit spaces, unless you live in a very dark place geographically. They need to become at least twice as bright if not more to be pleasant to use, and by that point battery life and heat starts to become a problem.

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?

Apple don't make displays. So they won't manage to make anything of the sort.

Correct. But they can instruct their suppliers to make these displays.

Things like Daylight could be really great if the software was more tailored to the device. And even then, you are right, I don't think it will ever be anything more than niche. It is the kind of product that if it absolutely struck a chord would be 10% of the market absolute tops.

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.

That's like the people saying retina/HiDPI displays would only be niche, or that portable computing devices would only be niche. Good outside usable displays would revolutionize the world – especially in places that get a lot of sun. And Apple is probably the only company which would be able to capitalize on that with a "new" category of product. It's not different than people needing clothes for cold weather and for warm weather. Right now we only have indoor clothes...

Retina/HiDPI are almost entirely better than the alternative without them. The "almost" is just because of increased processing and power needs, which pretty quickly became insignificant. They took over because there's no real compromise. You pick the one that's better in all circumstances.

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.

> A display that's better outdoors and worse indoors is never going to take off.

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 guess I misunderstood "needing clothes for cold weather and for warm weather. Right now we only have indoor clothes..." as suggesting we could have different screens for indoor and outdoor.

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 it's sunny outdoors, I use an E-ink display. My Macbook Air does a maximum of 500 nits, but I don't think even 1600 nits is enough, which is the maximum a Macbook Pro can do with some hacking.

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.

I said “good enough,” which is not quite the same as “good.” They’re usable.

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.

It would be a new category of device in the sense that a significant amount of current device owners will have a very good reason to upgrade and in the case of portable computers and tablets it would change completely how and where they are used. I think that's the main concern of the original question: What next great thing could Apple release to make an additional ton of money again?

What would be awesome is to have a double screen device. OLED on the front, eink on the back. So you could operate in simple mode if you want or use the sharp screen for photos when needed.

I believe the manufacturer Sharp is working right now on displays which will have both modes in the same screen, so no need to flip your device around.

Yotaphone did it in 2013-2015 :

https://www.techradar.com/reviews/phones/mobile-phones/yotap...

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