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Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>> 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.

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.

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