I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers
morrick.me
morrick.me
When OS X debuted there was a daytime radio talk show in my area called “The Computer Guys.” They capably covered all sorts of computing topics, but were clearly long-time Apple dudes. And they spent weeks complaining about what a disaster OS X was. The Dock was useless and violated Apple’s HIG. The Finder made all the same mistakes as Windows did. And a text terminal? Like DOS?? Who the hell is ever going to want to use that on a Mac?
Going even farther back, it was long-time dedicated Apple users who booed when Jobs announced the deal with Microsoft.
Being a long-time dedicated Apple user is a shitty job. You don’t get paid, have no input, and are constantly disappointed. And Apple does not care about you.
I strongly suggest people should throw this notion away. It does not matter how long you’ve bought from a big company, they owe you nothing. If the latest product seems good, buy it. If not, don’t. Any more emotional investment than that is going to cause pointless unhappiness.
Save your customer loyalty energy for businesses where you can actually establish a connection, like a restaurant you like, or a local handyman.
Me. I have to use a Mac at work, and I use the text terminal more than anything else on the computer. It doesn't help that Mac's don't have a good UI, everything is hidden behind extra key-presses, and switching between windows is a PAIN.
On a mac every window for an app is considered the same, so there's no concept of switching between windows (except with special hidden key presses).
When a window is in the background it doesn't receive clicks, so you have to click on it twice.
The menubar of a non-active window doesn't exist, so you need an extra click, first to activate the window, then to go find its menubar and do an action.
It's just a bad UI.
I get hit by this all the time. I have multiple monitors and I can scroll in a window without the window having focus. The scrolling leads you believe it has focus so when you hit cmd-w to close the window the window with actual focus closes instead.
Is Cmd+` the hidden key press? Alternatively you can go to "Window" at the menubar if you prefer to click
In the UK, for instance, it's immediately above the option key so to hit it requires clawing together your thumb and little finger. It's surprisingly awkward to switch between that and Cmd+Tab.
GNOME does this much better - window switching is done using Super+<whatever the key above Tab is>. In the US, that remains ` but elsewhere it's so much better than on MacOS.
I’d rather focus on Apple refusal to support standard dpi displays (hat tip betterdisplay), basically broken .0 releases, gimped docker implementation, useless window management and broken multi screen windows.
This is sort of true but the full truth is less straight forward.
On unfocused apps you can still send through scrolling and (mostly) perform single clicks with command + click... you can also without focus send single clicks to certain controls the developer has ad hoc allowed 'click through' on...
For mouse oriented users I'd recommend trying a focus follows mouse experience like AutoRaise [1]. But I mean, it's not like this solution existing absolves Apple of the broader criticism here about what they prioritize and deprioritize for the default user interface experience.
Had they never used MPW?
With Android, I can use Samsung one generation, switch to Pixel the next, and give Motorola/some other smaller company a chance later. I can choose a phone that has the exact features I want - better battery life? great camera? best performance? great display? cheap price? smaller display? larger display? There's a phone for each of those.
A year ago someone on HN said “I can confirm that iMessage is extremely common in Australia. WhatsApp is very uncommon, outside of people with European (and maybe South American?) friends or family to keep in touch with.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39365562
My guess is you’re both expressing truths of your individual social circles but making unjustified extrapolations to an entire nation.
The issue with iMessage outside the US is the branding, it's branded as an SMS app and SMS being dead (outside of ads and delivery drivers) doesn't help for adoption.
This has more to do with the way the iPhone was launched, and the American desire to own the most expensive product, than any technical merits.
If you have an iCloud subscription, you can do this directly with a browser, just click upload and wait for it to happen. There's also a Windows client for iCloud, but I've never tried it.
Google photos is definitely easier to export and backup to my windows PC although Apple does provide a half decent iCloud client now for windows. It's a bit janky and took awhile for me to get a proper pipeline (you can accidently delete your cloud copy by doing the wrong thing).
One thing I really miss about Android was the ability to just plug in via USB-C to any computer and backup all the photos (and then remove them from the local phone). Google Photos would retain its full quality copy this way and I would free up phone space and have a full quality copy on my local machine (plus local external drive). Try this on an iPhone and it's slow as hell (even though it has USB-C), often fails partway through a large copy, and when you delete the photos locally I believe iCloud deletes their copy as well (even if you have plenty of cloud storage). I understand it's a "sync" tool technically but there's really no reason for it to be restricted in this way.
It's not just about migrating the phone, if you own an Apple Watch, AirPods, one of their laptops, their online services, etc. all that stuff works best within the Apple ecosystem. If you move they don't work as well (if at all) and you may need to replace them. If you are deeply bought in to Apple products, it really isn't that easy to move.
The same can be said of employers. The company does not care about you no matter how many years you’ve been there. If you’re not c-suite, you're just a cog.
I found this article quite weird. It would be one thing if it were (yet another) "Company X has lost its way..." kind of article. But this post seemed more along the lines of "Apple built these things that I don't care about."
Umm, so??? Obviously some people do, and this article struck me as someone complaining that Apple isn't building exactly what he wants. Furthermore, his analysis seems way off base to me: "Relying on legacy and unquestioning fanpeople, for whom everything Apple does is good and awesome and there’s nothing wrong with it, can only go so far." Apple stopped relying on "legacy and unquestioning fan people" a long time ago, ever since they basically became "the iPhone company" to a majority of their userbase.
If you are a customer you most assuredly have an actual relationship with the company. Your options when dissatisfied with that relationship is to end it, send your complaints to the company, or decide the dissatisfaction is overcome by the value you receive.
Before Apple’s success with the iPhone, Apple was essentially the Macintosh company. Its fortunes were tied to the Mac, and Apple seemed to be attuned to the needs of Mac users. In return, there was quite a strong Mac fandom. The Mac was more than just a tool or just a platform. The Mac was a philosophy, and what attracted people to the Mac was the philosophy of the Mac and its ecosystem.
Ever since the iPhone became a major hit, and especially since the passing of Jobs, it became apparent to me that my best interests as a computer user and Apple’s interests as a company no longer align. Apple no longer needed to cater to “the Mac faithful” to survive. In fact, Apple is one of the biggest companies in the world thanks to the iPhone. It also seems that macOS is losing its distinctiveness.
The unfortunate thing, and I think this is where some Mac users get emotional and disappointed, is that there’s nothing else out there in the personal computing landscape that is like the glory days of the Mac. Windows is an inconsistent mess filled with annoyances, and the bazaar of the Linux ecosystem is nothing like the polished cathedral of the Mac. Everything is a step down from older Macs, even modern Macs.
However, while thankfully we can enjoy retrocomputing for hobbyist use, many of us still need to use up-to-date platforms to browse the Web and to get our work done, and so clinging on to, say, Snow Leopard is not an option outside of hobbyist activities. Hence, why I use Windows. It’s not Snow Leopard but it gets the job done for now.
The beauty about software, though, is that we don’t have to resign ourselves to accepting whatever Apple, Microsoft, and Google releases. Many of us reading this forum have the ability to write our own software. FOSS projects such as Linux have shown that it’s possible for user communities to write their own software that fit their needs without needing to be concerned about business matters such as market dominance.
So, yes, this is a hard lesson for many longtime Mac users about being loyal to a company; companies change. But this lesson also creates opportunities. I think if enough disaffected longtime Mac users got together and pooled their resources together, we could create a FOSS alternative that is community-driven, one where the evolution of Mac-like personal computing is driven by the community, not by Apple or any other corporation.
Me too. I liked opinionated software when my opinions aligned with Apple's. But I found i hated it when they didn't. Around mavericks or Sierra or so I started getting more and more annoyed with all the things being changed for the worse (in my opinion). Then during the pandemic I had plenty of free time to dig deep into my computing future and I moved to KDE. Heavily customised just the way I love it. It's a breath of fresh air not having someone else make choices on how I should use my computer. Haven't looked back since.
I had already left iOS because it's so locked down and the hardware too expensive for the specs. That already broke a ton of the "just works" of course.
They already got rid of servers and the workstation market, apparently losing those customers to Windows/Linux wasn't seen as something to worry about.
Just stick with the KDE no matter what distro, and you will have basically no major day to day usability problems on Linux.
what a disaster OS X was
Currently OSX/iOS gets worse with each version.
Agreed 100%. If you're writing 2,000+ word blog posts out of anger and exasperation, you should take it as a moment of self reflection that just maybe you're too invested in a corporation.
I think the vast majority of people manage not to care at all, so that emotional investment isn't as essential as you may believe.
There is another aspect to this though. As a user of an ecosystem, you're committed in many ways. As Apple or Microsoft or Google releases a new version of their operating system you're going to run that on hardware you already own. You're going to run software that you already own on that the OS. And you're doing to use skills and knowledge of that software to accomplish something useful.
In some ways it doesn't matter if the product is good or bad -- you're pretty committed. You're going to be willing to suffer some pain because the alternative is too difficult and too expensive. The only thing you really can do is complain.
I found every single time that it just wasn't worth it. There was always some critical failure that was either completely underlooked or a 20 year old bug/shortcoming that had every patch to fix it rejected. I genuinely don't understand how people tolerate the dogshit being forcefed to you on all of these controlled platforms. People say that everything is getting worse, and it's true, but it's also true that you're actively choosing to use the things that are getting worse.
I've eventually settled on NixOS and XFCE so I can tweak things to my particular needs while also benefiting from an army of unpaid labor continually improving nixpkgs and other flakes. This setup isn't perfect, but I've optimized for maximal comfort & utility while exerting minimal effort & time. Things really only break when they're self-updating under the hood, which thankfully is rather rare in nixpkgs.
Everybody has different needs and something you don't care about on Windows or Mac or Gnome might be critically important for someone else.
> a horrible mishmash of apps and programs and nothing integrates really well long term (story of life on a Linux desktop, really)
I used to use Macs at work and while I never really loved the experience (and certainly not that of fiddling with kernel drivers) and write keenly felt the metaphorical guards watching from the towers, it really did feel like a thought-through experience for a normal computer user.
I think Google and Android is worse in this way. The backup Android I had years ago forced me to login with my Gmail or I couldn’t use it. My old iPhone happily runs without being logged in. I just lose the cloud features. Whatever.
Throw it in the bin?
I can use an iPhone without an Apple account. I cannot use an Android phone without a Google account unless they changed that in the last few years.
I haven't "signed in" to Android phone in 10 years.
Good luck doing that with iOS. I'm an iPhone user since the very first one and I think the control they have on app install/management is completely bonkers. The app store even sucks for keeping track of what your purchased/care about efficiently.
I just switched to iPhone and saw EU has forced apple to allow third party app stores. No such luck for those elsewhere.
When I get the phone and update the stock OS before wiping it, I don't need to sign into a Google account then, either, and I don't recall it being signed into someone else's, so I don't think regular Android requires it either, though my exposure is minimal so I can't guarantee it. It will try to have you sign in during the setup wizard, but I believe you can hit skip. You may need to skip connecting to the internet first to skip the account thing, I don't know. Maybe best done before you put the SIM in on top of that.
I have twenty years of iPhone data, eg messages, apps, etc. I can't easily move to some other phone.
A desktop, maybe, but I'd still have to repurchase or find alternates to a bunch of software. It is far, far better if the existing system _stays useful_.
I doubt anyone is arguing the opposite. The point of the parent is that the system staying useful and not turning hostile on your usecase is not under your control or something you can personally prevent, and until that magically changes it's best to structure your use case to be least affected by things not in your control.
I have phone that's from Samsung, earplugs from Sennheiser, thinking about buying watch from Garmin (Fenix 8 pro), have chargers and powerbanks from Anker, laptop from Dell.
Bluetooth, USBC and other standards. Its beyond good enough for me, and I can switch each component for a better one from another company if I want (apart from those Sennheisers, no company makes better sounding earplugs and they integrate flawlessly for my needs).
And it's lighter
When you're a long time user, you know how to do everything with what you're using - whether that's an operating system, a programming language, or something else.
The latest product isn't good and your suggestion is "don't buy it." OK, what do I do instead? Buy a Windows or Linux laptop where I have to re-learn a decade's worth of knowing-how-everything-works? Build up my natural flow in a new OS? Find whatever are the Windows alternatives for all the little things that I do on my Mac?
I'm not saying that companies owe things to their customers, but I think it's really simplistic to say that it's just an emotional investment and misplaced loyalty. People have a tool and then a company makes that tool worse. There are other tools, but it takes time to learn them, figure out their differences and how to get everything done with them, etc. Pretending that there's zero cost to switching is disingenuous.
For example: if you're a software engineer and someone made your main programming language bad, there's a high cost to switching to a new language. Even if you're excellent at learning new languages, you don't know which libraries are good, you don't know what various functions are named, you don't know what warts are in the build system (and how to avoid them), etc.
It's not just some emotional response or misplaced loyalty. It's that you've built up skills over many years that are tied to that thing.
There is a long list of companies which have done themselves serious financial harm, or even slit their own throats by failing to understand how Customer World works.
No one is too big to fail. Especially in computing. There's also a long list of companies which looked like permanent fixtures for a while and were dead a few years later.
As for Apple - I have a busy lock screen, and I can no longer read the time because the big numbers are too thin and the refraction effect makes them impossible to read.
Rookie, stupid error. Just embarrassing.
In the hardware side they can set price how they see fit because you are literally trapped. They only optimise what they think is their revenue maximizing position. For this reason, they keep coming up with software that impacts hardware in a big way and forces you to spend more than you would elsewhere. And often they don't even bother supporting or making the hardware that you may want/need.
On the software side they have a rather short obsolescence window for OSs that is very much compounded by the requirement of much of their software (and often 3rd party too, via libraries/frameworks churn) to only be backward compatible a few versions at best.
This creates an environment where you are extremely dependent on whatever Apple decides to do. Not only does this create anxiety it also instills a sensation of powerlessness where whatever you want really doesn't matter at all. It's not surprising to me because I believe Apple is the personification of an abusive authoritarian narcistic asshole.
As long as Apple keeps doing stuff that seems aligned with your needs, the requirements/constraints don't feel that bad but the moment they drift off too far it becomes a major and constant annoyance. In order to make more money Apple has increased its potential target consumer to be almost anyone. This creates tension because they can't focus on a particular set of needs/users.
Which is why I believe Apple stuff is becoming increasingly pointless. They don't focus enough on particular use cases (or type of person or lifestyle) which makes their stuff just another option among others, just more expensive and way more locked down.
This is what those people feel. After having invested so much more money than would have been necessary elsewhere, spent so much time learning the stuff, often spent as much time evangelizing the stuff for free and many other compromises; Apple gives zero shit and just keep chasing increasing amounts of money without delivering a whole lot of value in return. Of course, it was previsible, but it's not something that you can necessarily understand/intuit when you are younger and once you have made your choice/investment you are kind of trapped for reasons mentioned before.
I didn't feel betrayed by Apple, I just decided not to buy a new MacBook until they fixed their keyboard issues. I switched to Linux for a couple of years, and switched back once they released the M1 MacBook Pro. I'm perfectly happy with my Macs (I have 3) now.
I actually really like the current era of Apple where their motto seems to be give people what they want. MacBook Pros with HDMI ports and SD card readers. iPads finally getting viable multi-tasking support and a real mouse cursor (although iPadOS still sucks IMO). The iPhone 17 Pro is slightly thicker than the 16 Pro to allow for a bigger battery. Their storage and memory upgrade prices are still ridiculous, but at least Macs come with a usable 16 GB memory minimum now, and iPhones start with an honestly better-than-I-expected 256 GB storage.
It's not all perfect - especially on the software side. The settings menu on iOS is kind of a cluster. Apple Music has a terrible UX, as does the recent update to Photos. And I haven't tried Tahoe and Liquid Glass yet - but I'm definitely a little concerned.
Couldn't agree more. But I'd add that some (smaller?) businesses, where you still can't really establish a connection, can be worth your loyalty if they have a mission that resonates with you, and they are actually true to that mission. Of course, be prepared for the day when they get too successful and start acting in ways against the principles they were founded upon.
But yeah... I think the best place to use our energy is by evangelizing people first and foremost, not businesses. Send people to your favorite restaurant because the owner is always there, chats with customers, and seems to love what they do. Recommend the person who regularly cuts your hair and cares enough to remember you and ask about your life. Refer that great handyman to others, who you trust to be a straight-shooter, pride themselves on the quality of their work, and not gouge you on cost.
It's not about loyalty, it's about Apple's own coherence and vision as a creative-technology company, and a bunch of sophisticated users offering a critique of it over time. Read it that way and it makes a lot more sense.
Beneath the Apple "fandom" or any fandom there are valid reasons why they came to be (the quality of the product), and we ought to elevate that than call customers naive for not adopting the very corporate cynicism that is a result of anticompetitive economics.
Tbf, the Finder is still crap (if only it would be nearly as good as Windows Explorer was in its heyday I would probably use it more), and the UNIX terminal is pretty much needed to make a Mac usable in the first place - which is fine though, because the UNIX-ness was exactly why I switched to Mac ;)
I have the exact opposite opinion. I loathe Windows Explorer, and relatively simply stuff like presenting a tree view is apparently some weird magic trick that only Apple has figured out how to do.
Browsing SMB shares (or any other networked storage) is one shortcut away (cmd+k), and I don't need to visit control panel to enable weird subsystems that expose services on my machine to connect to other machines.
I use the terminal a lot, also for simple file operations, but that is because of proficiency, not out of need.
Finder shows them in the sidebar and you just click on it.
Apple OS (both classic and NeXTStep) are not keyboard driven but mouse driven.
Try to browse any network directory with a non-trivial amount of files and see the whole Finder window just beach-ball or freeze.
I can browse my NAS faster via a browser and copyparty[0] than with Finder and SMB or NFS...
On my Linux laptop, Nautilus (Gnome) displays exactly the last files in the right order, and it's incredibly useful.
There are countless annoyances like this on MacOS; window focus and placement always surprises and annoys me, even if Rectangle helps somewhat. I find it so much less usable and useful than Gnome.
Are those created/updated with the current date when they sync, or with the date they have on the host system?
Why can't i paste a path and just go to it like I can in Windows or KDE, why can't I cut and paste files? Why do i have to open 2 separate windows and drag the files between them?
Who decided that it is somehow useful to leave an applocation running when you close its window?
There are so many silly and stupid small things wrong with os x
Copy current path: Option + Command + C [1] Cut & paste: Alt + Command + Move (actually moves the file)
It's just bad that these simple things are very much hidden.
[1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/47216/copying-the-...
Alt + Command + G should do the trick (Go to Path)
"Why can't i paste a path and just go to it like I can in Windows or KDE?"
Apple has always been a bit crazy about removing anything that could appear complex to its user, because it thinks they are fools and idiotic. So, you have to use a stupid shortcut instead of having generally available UI. The funny thing is that they still have an option to display path as breadcrumbs, so you basically get to display the same thing without the functionality.
There are some things I really like in the Finder (like Miller Columns) there are a lot of stupid decisions (that have increased over the years) in an attempt to make it "simpler". But it ends up being mostly good for looks and a pain in the ass for actually getting shit done.
I think Apple has drifted too much to the "common man" (at least the representation they have of it) because of the iPhone. This has made them try to "simplify" everything when their niche market previously was "power users" (the only ones crazy enough to spend that much on their computers).
It's a bad bet because the "common man" just goes with the flow and buy what's popular, looks good and give status. They can go from hero to zero very fast, just like Nokia did, I think they are too arrogant to realize that.
Is this a joke? This has to be a joke. Finder is so lame compared to Explorer that I'm reading it as a joke.
>Browsing SMB shares (or any other networked storage) is one shortcut away (cmd+k), and I don't need to visit control panel to enable weird subsystems that expose services on my machine to connect to other machines.
Uh... MacOS is nowhere near easier with SMB shares than Windows. You are dead wrong about all of this. SMB works out-of-the-box with Windows, you open Explorer and the "Network" is there, which will show available network shares. You could make it an icon on the desktop if you wanted to and then just click to open (not how I would do it, but you could). Or you can type \\servername in the Explorer address bar and get a list of all its shares, and there are probably many other ways for different use cases too.
MacOS has been difficult with SMB shares for us, especially with Finder - when we mount an SMB share in Finder they just stop responding eventually for no reason, there's no error - they just can't be reached anymore, requiring us to re-mount the share. But on Windows they always just work, no exception, no problem, 100% of the time - and no, that is not an exaggeration. There's very few things in tech that I would say works 100% of the time for me, but SMB on Windows is one of them.
Other issues:
- the fact that you cannot cut and paste files
- dragging files from one folder to another can be unreliable/error-prone, particularly in tree view
Back in time I also complained about this, but do you know that if you copy (CMD+C) then do CMD+ALT+V, then copy&paste becomes cut&paste ?
You can also click on the title to get a list view of the current folder and its parents.
(It's Shift+Cmd+G of course)
(I'm not on a desktop right now, so I can't be precise.)
It’s theoretically a small annoyance, but it gets me a few times a week since I had muscle memory for the old, correct way. I’ve filed several radars over the years and never heard back. It’s one of those things that makes me want to get a job at Apple, fix the bug, and quit.
Incidentally, this was one of the nice little things that made me switch to the Mac many years ago. There wasn’t any way to my knowledge that you could switch to a path in windows by typing it out from inside explorer.
Finder has its problems. But the overarching problem is that Apple has done a poor job of discoverability and letting people know how to do things.
It's counterintuitive, because in most of Apple's macOS programs there are multiple ways to do the same thing.
For example, there are close to a dozen ways to eject/unmount a disk/volume, but I still run into people who say they can't figure out how to do it.
First thing I do on all of them is have it only search local stuff. If I want to do a damn web search I'll open my browser of choice and use Kagi. On iOS I restrict it even further to only show local apps and settings. Massively improves the speed, latency, etc etc.
The "Recents" doesn't contain files I've recently interacted with, and I'm still not sure what qualifies a file to be listed in Recents.
Try Alfred :)
It's tree/table view is superior to the Details view in Explorer. Explorer regularly hangs when opening folders with more than a couple videos in it. QuickLook (spacebar to preview an item) is so useful.
The right-click context menu of a folder has 15 items! Most of them I've never used! Colors, tags, quick actions, compress, make alias? But no "New Folder"?
But I moved to the mac, in 2005, because of the unix terminal. I had been using Cygwin for years, but an OS that had it included, natively? On good hardware? Yes, please.
I'm never moving back to Windows (ads in the OS??). To switch to linux it would take great hardware with 100% support. Not holding my breath, but it might happen one day.
Thank you for saying this
now if I want to stay secured I got to regularly update the phone and eventually get iOS 26, which will make the phone horrendous.
What choice do I have ?
To be fair, I find despite the various foibles, Apple has always looked out for me when it comes to accessibility -- where none of the competitors bother. Maybe I shouldn't act out of loyalty, but they will keep getting my business as they keep it up (despite Liquid Arse stuffing up accessibility quite a bit).
> Apple has always looked out for me when it comes to accessibility
Why complain about something you don't need to use if you don't want to?
What's great about the commandline? Scriptability, automation, configurability, composability, the easy re-running of complex commands with a small tweak, access Unix commandline tools that have been fined tuned over decades.
And to compare the terminal to DOS is not to understand the gulf in quality between them.
> Who the hell is ever going to want to use that on a Mac?
Developers & scientists. They are people too :-)
> When OS X debuted there was a daytime radio talk show in my area called “The Computer Guys.” They capably covered all sorts of computing topics, but were clearly long-time Apple dudes. And they spent weeks complaining about what a disaster OS X was. The Dock was useless and violated Apple’s HIG. The Finder made all the same mistakes as Windows did. And a text terminal? Like DOS?? Who the hell is ever going to want to use that on a Mac?
I kind of see it differently. That is, Apple did in fact lose the alignment with the Classic MacOS fans but Apple did it on purpose. Objectively, by 2001 standards MacOS sucked and you wouldn't want to align with people who think otherwise. As the result Apple broke out of a small stagnating niche and won a big market.
This is different from today's situation where it feels like Apple breaks the alignment not on purpose and not by innovation but rather just slowly drifts out.
There's a theory in the comments that they want to align with "people who want the best camera array and have money to burn". This could be true but even then it doesn't look like a good strategy to win a big market long-term. More like a retreat back into a small niche that may stagnate in the future, like "people who want the best publishing software and have money to burn".
I see, so like "Don't think different"?
The NeXTSTEP on the other hand was quite different. Different from MacOS, from DOS/Windows and from proprietary UNIXes. I would argue that switching to NeXTSTEP was more aligned with the original spirit of "think different" than getting stuck in the old ways.
That says that Sherlock's mission wasn't to help the user do user activities, but to get the user out of the way of Sherlock's activities, while keeping the user informed about the magnificence of Sherlock. This attitude became really popular with every OS that was competing to be innovative, and we're still stuck with it today. Shut up user, pay attention, look at my features!
https://archive.org/details/inside-macintosh-1992-1994/1992-...
WaitNextEvent (hmm, a Windows call has the same name, but functions differently I think).
I agree with you and this theory sounds like moving goalposts.
First people claimed that the free market will always give the consumer what they want.
Then this turned out to be not true (we even have a term, enshittification), and now people come up with a more "refined" theory. Why would it be true this time?
Enshittification does give consumers what they want: free stuff. People will deny it up and down and claim they would pay for non-enshittified Facebook, for example. But how many people actually would pay a subscription to use a Facebook style service? Enough to build sustain a company of Meta's size? Probably not. How many people pay for Kagi?
Nope. Enshittifition happens to paid stuff just as well, including stuff you pay more (including when inflation adjusted) from what you paid before.
It's about futher increasing the profit margins, whether it's a paid product or not, not about affording to give something for free.
This is the problem - I'd argue we shouldn't have companies the size of Meta (or Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft, etc.). It's that these companies are nation-state level huge, and operate in a system that continues to demand more growth still, that causes problems like enshitification.
Would enough people pay for Facebook to support a company of Meta's size? No, but that's OK - enough people would pay for it to support a much smaller, customer-focused company, and that would be a really good thing across all of tech.
What's so wrong about just sustaining a certain size/user base instead of endlessly growing bigger and bigger?
That was maybe true at the time of Adam Smith for something like chocolates or bags of cheaper rice, or shirts and socks and bricks.
For things that take tens of billions to design, code for, build, and support, like smartphones and their OSes, there are just a few players (only two that mater for smartphone OSes), and there are huge barriers to entry even ignoring any rules and regulations you have to adhere to, but even more so with those in mind too.
So you get what the players give you, and that's it.
Where it was great was in the simplicity to the user. If you wanted to install or uninstall a driver or functionality, all you had to do is move an extension file in or out of the extension folder and reboot. That simplicity was lost in MacOS X. That made simple users dumber. (and iOS went back to the simplicity)
Simple exactly does mean less features. That is what you are buying into. Less features, easy to find, no 'ambiguity'.
If you want a ton of feature and flexibility, you go elsewhere.
But don't criticize Apple for being locked down, when that is exactly what they are selling.
Technically, the last “classic” Mac OS had memory protection and a fully preemptive scheduler.
The very serious caveat was that all “classic” Mac OS applications ran in a single process, and, within it, were scheduled cooperatively.
It was possible to create fully preemptively scheduled threads from within such applications, but they couldn’t write to the screen. I don’t remember whether they could do file I/O.
Thing is, the Human Interface Guidelines were a sort of contract with the user, and the same goes for the ethos or culture or principles a big company has, if any. So in a sense they do have a connection with customers, via "community", if they choose to do so (and choose to be sincere about it instead of faking). I mean a business can be bigger than a local handyman and still go down the friendly path, for years potentially, until it decides that the friendly strategy was wasteful and streamlines it away.
I feel like modernity has brought about an identity for people as consumers. Much like a pro sports team who you have no relationship with beyond proximity, brands have slowly gained the same kind of consumptive identity associations. I see it by for the most in golf, where people literally wear caps repping their favorite club and ball manufacturers, rather than athletes.
For me, I’m prefer to associate with brands that have some kind of editorial voice that align with my own. Like media outlets, university, or individuals.
And of course in 2025, all applications icons are some variant of the same red green blue yellow colors so nothing stands out of the dock because it doesn’t show anything else than the icon.
Yup, I hate the dock :)
Well, they have done a good job with lock in. If you've bought a bunch on Apple Music, you need an apple device laying around to get it. Maybe some people just keep there old phone around just for this. But it can be a hard transition.
Really, 'lock in', is the key to a lot of technology these days, so be aware.
Also aligns in spirit with "company is not your family" idea.
The original post reads like an aggregation of complaints. I have some too! In particular stating that the Apple Watch is too complicated to use resonates. I have/use regularly but I am never pleased w/the interface.
AirPods on the other hand - a gem. They just work. Sure, they sometimes awkwardly disconnect/connect to other devices (when I have more than 1 vying for attention) but they're rock solid for me thus far.
Oh, the atrocities of "simplification" made during Ive's later years of leadership are so numerous that they beggar belief. Many aspects of iOS and macOS no longer conform to even the basic principles of UI affordances.
In my younger years I was pretty big on graphic design, still big on video editing. People used to always say "Mac is better for design". I would ask, where did you get this from? Adobe runs on both platforms and updates often come out for Windows before they are ported to Apple (Adobe updates). And my Windows machines had powerful graphics cards, unlike macs.
However. A couple years ago I built myself an insanely expensive computer build with the best parts I've ever put into a machine. It died 2 years later.
I decided I just couldn't go through that anymore. I'm done building computers. I'm done with the little problems they always get. I'm done fixing my machine more than using it.
Since the $500 Mac mini, Apple has started looking interesting. Finally I bought the Mac Studio M3 Ultra.
So far so good. I wish I could play more games, but I could be looking into things like Crossover. There are a few old bespoke programs for old versions of Windows I also wish I could run once in a while but nothing too major.
And best of all, Apple Care +. I'm not dealing with a broken machine again. I'll be buying warranties for it until I'm done with it. Bought 2 years for I think about $200, and my understanding is I should be able to renew that service/warranty at the end of the two years. After that, we'll see.
1. Build quality of Apple laptops was higher than anything else available at the time. Having a metal laptop meant you got a MacBook or a Toughbook. I got tired of plastic breaking, hinges loosening, etc. Their introduction of retina screens really sealed the deal.
2. The iPhone was first to solve seamless cloud backups.
3. AppleCare. I was traveling and had my phone on a restaurant table when a waiter dropped a salt shaker on it. He was horrified that he shattered my screen. I got it replaced when I got back to the states for like $10. Android phones at the time did not have this option.
4. Apple sold devices directly to you. Most other phones you had to buy through the wireless carrier with annoying fee structures and deceptive pricing.
5. I could use a decent photo editor ok macOS vs GIMP in Linux. I love what GIMP is trying to be but it is a mess UI-wise. Same with Lightroom vs Darktable.
6. iPhone more or less solved offloading files to the cloud. It is still bad and broken but it was at the time I switched workable vs what Android had.
7. Apple devices mostly got out of my way whereas with Android I had to tinker. I would still use desktop Linux if macOS wasn’t needed for my work, but at this point the difference is minimal.
8. They are not an advertising company. Google phones feel like devices designed to spy on you. “Personal data please!” Apple is not ideal here but at least their primary point isn’t to sell you car insurance.
This isn’t to say that Apple stuff doesn’t have warts. They cram way too much stuff in their systems. Their hardware is expensive. They often are behind the curve on performance. Their cloud offloading just does not work right for iMessage. Their protocols are closed and that is annoying. But at this point their stuff works well enough for me that I don’t see a reason to switch.
Or when USB Type A ports disappeared in favor of USB-C ports.
Or when the iPhone dropped the headphone jack. People still seethe about this decision even though Apple sells an excellent DAC for $9.99 that rates extremely well when tested by the audiophile obsessives and is easy to leave permanently attached to your headphones.
There are two types of long-term Apple users: Those who can go with the flow and shrug off the changes, and those who are deeply pained whenever anything changes. The latter group mostly comes around after a couple years and the issues are forgotten.
Not any changes, but those that force me to change from solutions that worker perfectly well (like 3.5 jack, or USB-A, or RJ45, or HDMI) to shitty tech that rarely work well, like dongles, bluetooth audio, or usb-hdmi converters (gosh I hate them, they're all crap).
Just before you mention them, CDs and floppy disks were never good tech, nobody misses them.
Gee, I wonder why people are still mad that a change obviously intended to milk the users due money means they have to pay more money. Must be just because they hate change.
Apple essentially has a monopoly on iOS so just because people have adapted to their decisions doesn't make their decisions correct, or at the very least, painless.
If a headphone jack existed people would still be using it.
The USB-C example is particularly ironic given that it was Apple that was fighting switching over to USB-C on the iPhone until forced to do so by the EU. For years you could carry an Android and Macbook with a single charger, but needed 2 chargers for a Macbook and an iPhone. When Apple dropped USB-A completely it was painful for years, and people still have trouble with it. Most competitors still include at least 1 USB-A port.
Which wasn't the case for the CDRom or the floppy drive examples, showing that those decisions were correct in a way the USB-A removal one wasnt.
Further, even when Apple dropped the CD-Rom, it was a phased removal starting with teh Macbook Air, which made complete sense. People who bought the MacBook Pro still had CD Roms (except for 1 of the cheapest models). That was the correct way to approach this. Remove it from a device where it made sense to remove it, while keeping it for the Pros who needed it, but also signaling that it was going away giving people time to transition their workflows.
The USB-A port was signaled for 1 year at best (and even then it really wasn't signaled...it was simply removed from the cheapest model, which could have been seen as cost cutting more than anything else), and then a year later all the PRO laptops lost their USB-A ports completely. This was the opposite of the kind of transition they did earlier (such as keeping Firewire on the Pro laptops for years after they were removed from their no Pro versions).
There isn’t a single business in existence that cares about you. Even companies in the business of keeping you alive will only do so while doing so makes them a profit.
I say this as the example of the local handyman is one where you will matter more. It’s a human relationship with a real person not a fake relationship with one person and a spreadsheet
Restaurant owner friend transferred his company to new ownership, and I would never ask for the kinds of goodies the previous owner gave me. Because it was the owner, not the company, with which I had a relationship.
Reading aye…
I'll go in the other direction. With a few exceptions, it is unfortunately true that "a business" isn't just "a way to make money," it's VERY OFTEN "the only reasonable way to accomplish a big-ish goal involving multiple people."
I say this as someone who started a business incidentally, my father had a big project that he and I loved the idea of, and I knew I could put together a good team to do the web part of it, and so I did. Money was NOT the primary motivator.
Edit: worker owned coops don’t have this issue because they are definitionally managed from the bottom up.
Additional edit: the “you” in my post is doing heavy lifting I mean both the post I replied to and the one directly above it.
The motivation for starting a project/business is very rarely going to be the priority for said business’s survival if it reaches a large enough audience.
That’s just an inevitability of scale — the larger the audience, the harder to focus on one member of said audience and the less any one single member of said audience matters.
Maybe loyalty is the wrong word - if they really go to left field, I would abandon them.
But I have a lot of faith in their design decisions and overall vision. Their software works, continues to work, and has always worked amazingly for me.
I also feel the same way about Firefox but donating to Firefox isn't like donating to thunderbird.
> The Finder made all the same mistakes as Windows did
Aren't these basically true, even now? If I could easily, completely remove the Dock and Finder, I would.
Launching apps via search (e.g., Spotlight) is quicker and easier than hunting for icons visually (especially given the amount of clutter on the Dock by default), and so is switching apps via search (e.g., Contexts, Witch, etc.).
Finder is the least capable file manager I've ever used since the Windows 3 days. If I could replace it wholesale with CyberDuck or something, I would.
I mean, the dock was actually quite nice in the NeXTSTEP days but OSX munged it together with the Shelf and aspects of the Win95 taskbar (actually, I think this might have started with the final OpenStep release, but I never got to use that).
These days when using a Mac, I tend to make it as small as possible and set it to auto-hide. I never actually use it for anything, but I don't think there's any way to turn it off altogether - so now it's just an annoyance, popping up with a distracting animation every time the pointer touches the bottom few pixels of the screen.
I never got along with the Miller columns in FileViewer / OSX Finder, but my impression is that it has also continued to get worse over time with features coming (and, just as often, going!) every few years without much in the way to help you discover them. TBH, I use the cli for file management by preference.
I think the windows model with menus integrated into the software windows and the taskbar for general multitasking management is just better. It was also much more future proof for multi-display use.
The global menu bar just feels dumb nowadays, especially with the notch on laptops, where they take even more space from a place where everything was already crowded.
Overall, I feel that Windows model of computing is just more solid and allows for more complexity/expansions. And I say that as a Mac user since before I'm 10 years old.
OS X had some solid technical base that made it very worth it. But nowadays it feels all locked down and there are fewer leftovers.
The UI is increasingly focused on looking good at the expense of everything, they have abandoned many of the good ideas in favor of oversimplification and unification with iOS.
"don't like it? buy the competition!" is easier said than done.
> People who have no use for all these pro video recording features shouldn’t waste their money on it. Unless they want a big chunky iPhone with the best camera array and/or have money to burn.
I feel like people who “want the best camera array and have money to burn” probably describes a significant percentage of HN readers.
I’m honestly pretty excited that they’ve finally put the larger, high res sensor in all three iPhone cameras - which should result in pretty decent image quality across the entire 13 - 200 mm equivalent range. It’s a nice upgrade from my current iPhone which uses smaller 12 MP sensors for the ultra-wide and telephoto cameras - resulting in images that are noticeably soft and noisy.
I personally don’t consider the iPhone 17 Pro to be too big or chunky. I’m generally happy to sacrifice an extra millimeter of thickness for better battery life, and enjoy the usability of larger screen sizes. I know that a lot of people really want smaller phones, though, and I think it’s unfortunate that Apple cancelled the mini (and the smaller SE design). I guess it just wasn’t selling that well.
And finally, I’m at a point in my life where spending $1100 on a new iPhone every few years isn’t going to break the bank. And I also am able to give my current iPhone to family members, who should be able to enjoy it for many more years to come.
Sent from my iPhone 13 mini, which is also Too Damn Big.
I’m got above average size human hands, which are too small even for the mini.
We've got about three years left before these things are unsupported. Three years of hope for them to release _something_ a little smaller than "uncomfortably large."
However if Apple released a new iPhone mini model every fourth year, I'd wager these would be like a McRib-style smash hit sales event, compressing the comparatively small mini-enthusiast audience into a time-limited buying window. It would also trigger FOMO at a time when many people are increasingly willing to delay upgrades for 5+ years.
The physical aspect I can’t give up is I can hold the phone with my thumb on the bottom and my middle finger on the top and scroll with my index finger to read. Wish I could buy that capability on a new iPhone, maybe one even slightly smaller.
Time to go find out if there’s even a way to downgrade, oof this is slow.
As someone with small hands, I kind of regret my iPhone 13 mini. I really want something smaller, but if I have to have a phone I can't hold well in one hand, I might as well have a bigger screen.
The Max version may have room for a bigger battery, but it needs to drive a bigger screen so it’s a double-edged sword. I’m not sure if you end up ahead or not.
If battery life is an issue you can turn off some the more gimmicky «pro» features like the always on screen.
I have a «regular» 15 pro and I think battery life is good. I haven’t had a single day where overrun out of battery so far.
The difference in people's opinions about this are interesting. I've got larger than average hands (e.g. XL rubber gloves are a tight fit) and don't understand how normal people can handle large phones. I just moved from a 6.7" to a 6.2" phone and can't overstate how much more comfortable it is to handle the smaller phone.
It is unfortunate that phone manufacturers make the same phones as each other and that there is practically no variability on the market.
>I’m at a point in my life where spending $1100 on a new iPhone every few years isn’t going to break the bank
I hate this statement. I don't care if I can afford an expensive device if it doesn't provide the value over the lifetime of the product. Why do phones that only last 2-3 years cost as much as my laptop that can last longer than that and do so much more?
Hate is a strong word. Why should my opinions on iPhone upgrades provoke feelings of hatred in you?
I also disagree with the premise. My current phone is 4 years old, and as I mentioned I plan to give it to someone who will probably use it for another 3+ years. Or I could have traded it in or resold it to a someone else who can use it. So I wouldn't say modern phones last 2-3 years, more like 7+ years. The iPhone 6s, which was released 10 years ago, just got a security update from Apple this month - so someone must still be using it.
I also disagree that laptops can do more than smartphones. Smartphones have different hardware like GPS, cellular radios, and more advanced cameras. They are also more portable (and miniaturization is expensive). And recently smartphone hardware is just as powerful as can be found in many laptops. Apple is even rumored to be making a low-cost laptop powered by the same A-series chips that they use in iPhones. A smartphone is not necessarily any better or worse than a laptop, it's just a computer in a different form factor that excels in different use cases.
> it doesn't provide the value over the lifetime of the product
It does provide value to me. As a photography hobbyist, I'm primarily interested in the camera updates (side note: if you compare iPhone prices to standalone camera prices like the recently-released Fujifilm X Half at $849, I think the iPhone 17 Pro is actually a pretty good value when judged solely on its merits as a tool for taking photos and video). But there are a bunch of other nice-to-have updates (wifi 7, bigger battery, brighter screen, etc). If there were no value to me in upgrading, then I wouldn't upgrade. I'm not saying that people should upgrade every few years even if there is no compelling reason, but rather that the financial burden of upgrading every few years is minimal for lots of people.
I'd also point out that the iPhone Pro line is a premium device, and very few people need one (myself included). Apple sells other iPhone models starting at $599 (iPhone 16e) and going up from there. Or you can buy a refurb iPhone 14 on Amazon for $330, and probably get several years of use out of it at least. Or you can go with Samsung or Motorola and get a brand new, totally functional smartphone for under $200 (though these budget phones will probably turn into e-waste a lot sooner than a new iPhone). If you don't see any value in shelling out $1100 for the latest and greatest iPhone, then there's no need to. When it comes time to buy a new smartphone, I'm sure there will be something out there with a price and feature set that makes sense for you.
Value is very subjective depending on personal preferences/needs and budget. I don't see any point in hating that fact.
The “Air” one is probably a test if they could stop those camera scams and simplify the phone maybe focusing on some other things. It barely even matters, one lens is enough, if you need more you’ll want a proper camera anyway.
This year I’d say the phone itself looks like some joke. From orange colors — probably some “diversity” team though it would be funny, because they don’t like the president — to overall cheap looking design, which looks like some unfinished AI generated, 3D printed prototype. You can tell Ive is gone and nobody replaced him.
At least they still have some engineers who scored big with the M chips back in 2020, but barely anyone cares about the chips anymore, they’re all good enough today and competition somewhat caught up.
For sure, anything orange is obviously a reference to the U.S. president. I’m hearing that liberals are planning a mass protest of carving scary faces into pumpkins in about 6 weeks.
I guess the proper claim would be to say that it has three prime lenses at 13mm, 24mm, and 100mm equivalents. The larger sensors in the 13mm and 100mm cameras, along with improvements in processing, should make for a significant upgrade over my current iPhone.
I agree that Apple's "optical quality" claims are BS. I was actually so confused initially by the claim that I had to do some research to figure out if they are doing anything special to claim "optical quality" zoom on a fixed lens. There is some computational photography going on that may muddy the waters a bit, but I'd definitely still call it a digital zoom.
That being said, the 48MP sensors do provide some latitude for cropping that wasn't available in the older 12 MP sensors. A very charitable reading would be that this "8 pro lenses in one" claim, all of which match the "optical quality" of the previous generation of sensors is the simplest way that Apple's marketing team could describe the increased versality to regular users without resorting to jargon that only photographers would understand. But still... it feels like false advertising to me.
Regarding the design - I actually view the orange color as being a nod to the Apple Watch Ultra and its orange accents. My impression is that they are going with a more rugged, masculine look with the iPhone 17 Pro. The "PRO" lettering almost feels like something you'd see in an ad for a pickup truck. This is in contrast to the more elegant, feminine look for the iPhone Air. I think this differentiation could actually be a successful strategy for Apple, and I also think that one reason that most of the tech reviewers and commenters on HN don't see the point of the Air is because that demographic tends to be largely male.
People arguing about photo quality on phones (and particularly iPhones who always have smaller sensors to begin with) is just proper nonsense. No matter what garbage AI processing they come up for the picture, they still take pretty bad photos that only look good when they are viewed on device with their small size and embellishing displays.
But there are always a bunch of idiots who want to show off instead of shutting up and actually taking worthwhile photos with proper hardware.
To me they are like the housewives who can't stop arguing about their trashy cooking robot that are supposed to do everything but can't do a single thing right. If they could just shut up and just learn the skills, their cooking would be infinitely better.
Then I installed iOS 26.
I think I hate it. It might be the last straw.
I’m seriously considering taking the plunge and switching from iOS, which I’ve used since the iPhone 3G, to GrapheneOS on a Pixel 9 Pro.
It’s not just iOS (which is all three of worse, buggier, and slower) but also the direction of travel for Apple as a whole.
The only thing I disagree with here is about the Air. I think Apple's strategy with the Air is to split the Pro line. Previously the Pro phones were for people who wanted a premium feeling and who wanted premium features, but those are often in tension, and might hold each other back. Now the Air is for those who want premium feel (you might call it flashy, looks great, feels great, but has trade-offs), and now the Pro is an uncompromising set of features, at the expense of being bigger and having a comical camera ~bump~ ~plateau~ continent. This is the same as the Watch, where you have the stainless steel models for the premium feel, and the Ultra for the premium features.
I suspect many on HN may not differentiate between the premium features and feel as much – I know it's not what I jump to – because "design is how it works" and many here aren't as fashion conscious, but a lot of folks buy new phones based on the colour, or how thin it feels, or other details that are easily written off when you know more about the hardware. I think the Air might be a big hit, while getting very little of the enthusiast market.
I've changed phones since then and at some time found red "too much", so I went with a black case because I thought I needed to look more serious. Should revisit that thought, especially when talking about phone cases... :-D
When "you can't use it outside anyhow" expands to phones, which are only useful because you can take them outside.
If you're one of those people who goes "why can't they make the phone thicker and heavier with more battery life", you should be overjoyed at the Air, because now that those buyers are peeled off to a different SKU, the product line for you doesn't need to find a happy medium with them.
Apple is a hardware company that makes lifestyle products. Why isn't their hardware appealing to me? Why can't it be?
In a competitive economy, phrases like this should a last resort, used to describe only the most decrepit and unjustifiable businesses. If nothing they can announce will interest me, then what are they even selling? A religion? A service? Certainly not a commodity, apparently nothing I need.
The post dismisses airpods, yet they are one of the most popular products in the US, with like 75% of young people owning a pair, great quality, features, and battery life. I dont think a swappable battery is even a good feature, the parts would be tiny and break easily given their size not to mention how often they could get lost
Even phones and laptops I’m willing to give a pass on, ever since USB-C got “good enough” and the battery life long enough.
If I had one complaint it’d be that they should sell one fat phone with no camera hump (because it has more battery).
Edit: I should have clarified as AirPods Pro are the ones I have experience with; no idea how the original AirPods are. But the Pros are phenomenal.
Also, I think the white is ugly. But kids seem to love it.
Also, they don’t have decent passive noise cancellation, so they’re not appropriate for mowing the lawn, etc.
My Sennheiser ear buds solve all these problems for a much lower price, and their sound quality is much better than the last pair of AirPods I tried.
To each their own, I guess.
An old groundskeepers trick for having music and ear protection is to get those big over ear protectors and put your buds on with that over them, just being mindful of volume of course.
With the big over ear hearing protectors that works much better than either in isolation.
Sadly, you usually have to find third party tests to find out what the passive noise isolation rating is for different brands. Manufacturers are terrible at marketing it.
Bluetooth honestly feels like a non-deterministic stack sometimes, it even took Apple 4 years to support it on the iPhone, how they have the AirPods working is close to magic.
They control the entire ecosystem and keep the variants and with it, the testing complexity, down as far as possible. That's how Apple stuff works so damn seamlessly.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world has to contend with dozens if not hundreds of Bluetooth chipsets, driver combinations, OS stacks... and each of these has their own quirks, and even if a bug gets fixed in a Bluetooth driver or controller firmware, good luck getting that distributed to users...
But you can buy much cheaper headphones with the H1 chip for fast switching between devices by buying one of the Beats headphones. I love my $60 Beats Fiex with the double flange ear tips for traveling.
I don't know what the h1 chip has to do with the fast switching—surely this is a bluetooth protocol detail, yea?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_noise_control
> I don't know what the h1 chip has to do with the fast switching—surely this is a bluetooth protocol detail, yea?
A detail apparently no-one else bothers to deal with. The amount of hardware out there that does bluetooth the worst way possible is horrendous, and I will gladly pay extra to not have those in my life.
But, a sucker is born every minute, and it seems most of them find their way into control of our anti trust laws.
What exactly should be “free”? The hardware? It is very much worth the extra $40 for the Beat Flex to have seamless integration between all five of my devices. Let alone the much better ANC of the AirPods Pro (or the AirPods with ANC).
The ones you have are bulkier on top of that, the AirPods Pro have heart rate monitoring when I exercise.
I don't doubt the Airpods Pro is better. But not "pay an extra $200 better".[1] My ANC is pretty decent. Sound quality's quite good. Adjusts to my hearing frequencies. Etc.
(The A40 has a much better battery life).
[1] Unless you need a hearing aid. Then it's a steal.
I’m always surprised to see people who are willing to cheap out on things they will use often over the course of years. The sound quality of my AirPods and the seamless switching between my Mac, iPhone, iPad, AppleTV and Watch make it more than worth $249.
I still think the price of battery replacements is way too high from apple. It's $150 AUD here which feels far and beyond the cost of the part cost itself.
So much for their carbon neutrality.
From searched / online numbers, Apple has shipped 150 million AirPods since 2016. The AirPods 3 weigh 5.5g. The gross weight of a basic Tesla model 3 is 1760Kg. I picked a Tesla because it has plastic, metals, magnets, copper, lithium - similar materials.
In the ~10 years Apple has been making AirPods the materials used (by weight) is ~ 470 Tesla cars. So, per year (avg, not really good for this), resources consumed is about 47 Teslas (by weight).
Apple claims 40% of AirPods 3 are from recycled materials, so ~ 290 crashed / discarded Teslas could provide part of these materials - on average 29 per year.
I did the above because it perceptually relates to "real things". Teslas are NOT carbon neutral, very much carbon negative.
The reality / HORROR of waste is far, far worse. Any single plastic bag used to dispose of weekly waste likely weighs more than a pair of AirPods. Any can, made of steel or aluminum, could likely could make a lot of AirPods. The toy or product you bought that had a flap that you could lift up - there was likely a magnet under there. Any disposed single use battery might have zinc, if it was a CR2032 or "watch" battery, lithium (or silver).
Yes, AirPods might be disposable. Do they improve the qualify of life of the humans that purchase them? What is the real cost in perspective - with everything else taken into consideration? If the AirPods are used to listen to music or entertainment, then the positive mental health aspects are likely significant in a positive value direction.
- Your model neglects the charging case with its own battery and microcontroller.
- A Trsla is more likely to be recycled properly than the same amount of earbuds. Itbis also more recycleable because ofnthe high amount of steel and other bulk materials in it.
- The ratio of semiconductor electronics to total weight is extremely different between the two products. And semiconductor manufacturing is extremely resource intensive. All we typically see is squeaky clean neon lit clean rooms, which belie the use of high amounts of aggressive and toxic chemicals that have to be produced somewhere and generate waste that is never talked about.
The car recycling v.s. electronics recycling question is interesting. I once had a very interesting conversation with an electronics recycler on a plane trip - phones could not be recycled like other electronics because of some of the metals content - in particular beryllium copper content (used in spring contacts). He described it as a lot of electronics is ground up and a chemical processes used to extract the valuable elements. With phones the grinding up was the toxic / dangerous prohibited part.
I think the semiconductor numbers are more subtle though. It is sq. mm in the product and yield that are factors. A single power switching element in a Tesla will likely exceed the total silicon sq. mm usage in an AirPod. There is a lot of electronics in a Tesla. Some of the Tesla circuitry is more exotic, Silicon Carbide or GaN. I need to look into how much recovery / reprocessing silicon mfg is using for the reagents. The waste produced isn't as bad as it was in the Silicon Valley heyday where every original mfg site is now a superfund site with very large plumes of toxic waste in the subsoil.
My phone spends a surprising amount of time on a charger. Most of the day while I'm at home, it's on a charger. I used to keep one at the office on my desk. The car has a charger too, and CarPlay so you might as well plug it in.
I'm not sure if it's a coping mechanism for poor battery life or just convenience.
For long days outdoors, I've also got a booster pack in the car with USB ports and an inverter (120V) that gets some use.
It can charge my MacBook Aur M2 once or my iPhone 16 Pro Max 3-4x. The iPhone itself can easily last flying and layovers all day.
I'm not sure how many times it would charge our phones. One day I think we did 4 different ones without issue.
When you're standing around at a BMX track, the functionality here actually made a lot of sense. It's not travel friendly in the same sense.
We have named ours "the cube".
Phone dead? Grab the cube. Tires soft? Grab the cube. Left the lights on in the car? You got it, the cube.
Why would I buy a secondary battery for a single device when I could buy a backup battery that would charge my:
- Phone
- Watch
- Laptop (x2)
- Steam Deck
- Tire inflator
- Etc
I have a few friends that bought every inexpensive alternative to AirPods, had a poor experience with all of them, finally relented and bought AirPods. Now they won’t use anything else. They spent more money avoiding AirPods than buying them.
Apple did a really good job with the AirPods.
The poster himself admits that after a meandering 2000 words...
> I found a lot of reactions to these products to be weirdly optimistic. Either I’m becoming more cynical with age and general tech fatigue, or certain people are easily impressed.
/me shakes fist at cloud
For video conferencing only, it's pretty okay. It's that it's terrible for instant messaging and group chats and everything else that it gets used for that makes it an exercise in getting papercut to death.
Meet is a lot friendlier about not having to download a client and just use a web browser, so that's nice for clients. It's not great for messaging and group chats either though.
The problem with Zoom is that a lot of people use it for personal use, but aren't tech savvy enough, so occasionally you'll get PantsPooper69 joining a business meeting until they change it right after joining, if they notice.
Then never tried noise canceling this week while on the plane. I was like ... what happened? Now I am actively looking forward to it.
I also used to hate airpods for their disconnects but they have become more reliable, especially if you tell them to remain connected to the last device you manually connected to.
Meetings / video chats are an anti-pattern for sure. There is so much communication loss because of other factors - someone forgot to mute, someone forgot to mute, plus what not. You want your side of the communication to be pristine, and even if airpods flake out 1/20 times, it is not good. I agree with you on that.
I personally use a Plantronics DECT headset which is ~12 years old and on its third battery, but otherwise an excellent workhorse. If I couldn't get another one of these headsets, I'd probably move to Airpods.
It's harder to get Airpods to sound great because the mic must be located inside the ear.
I do find that wireless earbuds actually last much longer than the wired variety, despite the non-replaceable batteries. Back in the day I went through one or two sets of earbuds a year because the wire failed internally, whereas I've only had two TWS pairs in ~six years (admittedly, it was the battery that became a problem in the first set). There's undoubtedly a lot more e-waste gubbins in each though.
Does anyone actually make wired headphones with ANC?
No ANC but they already isolate sound very well.
A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it? That would be a sellout.
A convertible Macbook Air with a touch screen? It would be sold out.
Neckband-style airpods with all-day battery life? Might not sell out, but would be popular.
A best-in-class TV powered by Apple TV? Would probably sell well.
But all of these products would cannibalize sales of some other expensive iDevice.
The number of people who might actually like this is very tiny. Most of them do product reviews. But their audience is not going to care. Think about your older uncle. Your niece in her 20s who loves to paint and read but doesn't want to replace hardware. That's what most people are like.
Those are the people who Jobs focused on impressing and enabling to do things they wouldn't do otherwise. That is the focus that has been lost without Jobs, IMHO, and it's the focus that makes the products better for people who want to get the most out of their products per unit of time invested in learning how to use it.
In particular, I'm thinking that I (a person of reasonable technical skill) would love to help them out by changing the designed-to-be-swapped screen on the phone they dropped instead of them paying someone else to conduct surgery on it.
I see a lot of issues here personally.
I have changed the battery on two iPhones on my own, and replaced one screen on my own. I've also once had one of those little shops do it, quickly and cheaply. I only did it on my own because I wanted to see how difficult it was. The savings in money and extra time was completely wasted other than for the entertainment value of changing it.
The slice of people who get entertainment value out of changing their screens, yet does not have the skills to do it on a current iPhone, must be quite small. Surely less than 10% of the population, for a "feature" that has easy alternatives of paying somebody $20-$30.
Those are two very different topics. Sure, cars don't advertise their ability to be maintained without special tools. But I also know a lot of people who do in fact want to change the oil in their own car (because it's not hard, and much cheaper once you have the tools).
If changing the screen of a phone were as simple as changing the oil in a Honda is, then none of this conversation would have to happen.
Big bonus points for making spare parts available without all the BS strings attached that apple currently has.
Even if the majority of people are unable to do these part-replacements themselves, it is still a massive improvement to make them easy to perform. The reduction in expertise required to perform these replacements would significantly reduce the cost of these operations while simultaneously reducing e-waste.
And probably a regression on the waterproofing efforts they've made over the last decade. If you're gonna make it thicker, just put a bigger battery in.
Go the other way. Hermetically sealed, no connectors, inductive charging, rugged, with a solid state battery that will outlive the rest of the phone. Solid state batteries are more expensive, but that's a cost issue for car-sized batteries, not phone-sized batteries for US$1000 phones.
Samsung expects to have 20-year battery life in 2026.
Definitely not! This would be an inferior product in almost every respect for 95% of customers.
This is a false choice. There are thinner phones that have replacable batteries already.
All of your solutions are bulky and difficult to manufacture compared to current products though.
2. "Current Apple Product" + "My own personal tweak" isn't a product strategy. "A convertible Macbook Air with a touch screen?" wouldn't move the needle sales wise, and would just be a headache for developers. If, for some strange reason, you need a 19inch touch screen, the iPad pro already exists and has better developer support.
Most Apple products are locally maximized. The last great new Apple product was the AirPods in 2016. Neither the Apple Watch or Apple Vision Pro seems like they will define a new product space.
A TV is bulky, race to the bottom commodity that is only replaced every 5-8 years.
> Neckband-style airpods with all-day battery life? Might not sell out, but would be popular.
I don’t think Apple has any issue selling AirPods. But honestly, I do like my $70 Beat Flex for traveling. I don’t have to worry about them falling out of my ears and between the seats on flights and the double flange ear tips block noise better than AirPods Pro.
I’ve had touch screen convertible Dells. I never used the touch screen. They are bulky, the screen ratio is off either way compared to an iPad. On the other hand, my wife now uses an iPad Air 13 inch with a regular old cheap Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and she loves it. Her x86 MacBook Air was getting long in the tooth.
This is before the newest OS with real windows.
[1] or more relevant to the HN crowd “For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”
True but, can't you kind of say the same about phones? My sister buys Moto-G's. They cost her $120. Apple charges more. They make their own market. I don't know how much I'd be willing the pay but I feel like I'd pay for an 65" Apple TV. Sony, LG, Samsung, Roku, TCL, all make crap TVs that want to spy on you. They are almost universally underpowered for their apps and OS and are all jank AF. i have an AppleTV plugged into my Sony and a few times a month I bump the bad remote and it switched to Google TV and tries to get me to sign in so it can serve ads at me.
The market for an apple branded TV might not be the same size as phones but I suspect it's big enough to become 5% of their profit.
Who would have guess headphones would do so well before they did so well?
No, at least not at the flagship $1k+ market Apple competes in. Maybe for $120 motos, but apple is competing in an entirely different market segment. They're absolutely not commodities - apple charges a premium with strong margins and a differentiated product. They have regulars who upgrade (bi-)yearly, regardless of the features and price and necessity. They literally have a subscription program for iPhones.
> The market for an apple branded TV...
They already have the most profitable part of the TV market. They sell an expensive add-on to TVs that offer over-the-top subscriptions and software services. The remaining panel is sold nearly at-cost on the assumption that the underpowered processor inside will serve you ads instead. They're expensive to ship, tough to stock, and high-end ones worth selling are a niche market.
Apple sells computer monitors, which are pretty close to TVs in terms of "commodity" status, and the products are like 2x the cost of their closest competitor spec wise. That should be a clear indicator on the potential and costs for even bigger screens.
> Who would have guess headphones would do so well before they did so well?
Well, they bought beats who certainly helped prove the market for headphones expensive headphones from a recognizable brand (to say nothing of Bose, Sony, etc who had sold headphones for a generation prior).
Same applies to everything else electronic that I own.
While the Apple Remote natively uses Bluetooth to communicate with the AppleTV, it does have IR to control TVs that don’t support CEC.
An iPhone doesn't need replaceable battery or an easier to replace screen, there are other phones that have these features and anyone is very welcome to buy them. Moreover, the screen is really not that hard to replace and you can charge any phone off a powerbank, you can even have a special magsafe powerbank that you carry in a bag. A 3rd gen SE (relatively crappy for an iPhone) can charge up to 50% in half an hour if your wall block outputs more than 20w. The point of an iPhone is that it's powerful enough to do pretty much anything that anyone needs and has software that's good enough to the point that it doesn't need some shitty skin over it. It's also supposed to be consistent with your other apple devices and supported for absurd amounts of time in comparison to the competition.
Touchscreen on laptops is shit, I'm not interested in fatiguing my shoulders while I work for a 0.01% usability benefit in some niche scenarios. It's a gimmick, nobody actually needs it. My current gen MBAir lasts literally days on battery. If you want a touchscreen Apple product with a keyboard then iPads are right there. They exist. The trackpad on any macbook virtually eliminates the need for a touchscreen and that's why they're the best trackpads on any laptop.
Airpods are the breakthrough product that they are because they aren't neckband style, they're literally the seashells that Ray Bradbury describes in Farenheit 451. For better or worse. They've been around for a long time now and we've forgotten that nothing like them existed in. the mainstream before they did. All the initial criticisms about them have evaporated, they have become normal as has their form factor. No neckbands or wires, the charge case juices them up and the battery on them definitely lasts all day, I've tried. If they had wires or a neckband then they simply wouldn't be what they are. If you want neckband style earbuds like you've descriibed there are plenty of options out there that existed before AirPods did.
Why would Apple make a TV when Samsung has that market fully cornered? In every way. What would be the point of competing with the company that makes the actual display panels that literally everyone uses? Apple can offer it's excellent software and they've done that, you can plug an Apple TV into any TV or, if your TV is 'smart' like all TVs nowadays, you can use the Apple TV app on your best in class TV. As well as the Youtube App, or the Netflix app, or the Prime app, or pretty much any service you want has a smart TV app really. What would anyone gain from Apple making a best in class TV?
None of these devices would cannibalize sales of any of Apple's products because they're all a terrible idea. If you want non-apple products then just buy them. They exist. All that stuff exists, just not made by Apple because those are inherently non-Apple ideas. Apple makes their devices for people who want their devices and everything that comes with their devices.
They product they won't make ... the $400 iPhone.
A $600 plastic MacBook air with 4x usb-c.
A $300 cross between the Mac Mini and an Apple TV
A fairly priced computer monitor.
iPhone SE was around for ages
The same was said about a smaller iPhone. They made it and sales were lacklustre. I know a few people that lament it, but sale's don't lie...
I didn’t know that it was exactly what I needed.
LiDAR was cool.
They could buy Oura and let you write apps with programmable micro LEDs, and that would’ve been cool.
If iPhones had Star Wars style holographic projector, that’d be cool.
They could just be content with keeping the lights on without unnecessary UX changes that literally no one asked for, and that would be cool.
I’m still happy with Apple, but the problem is that they now perceive staying relevant is wasting battery on visuals and making the phone thinner. Those are recycled old-ass ideas. They need to find the new Jony Ives.
That's a lot of hyped, flashy events between anything really Earth shattering.
Maybe we miss when Apple was boring and new machines just rolled out with little more than a press release and a spread in MacWorld magazine.
Special and distinctive to whom?
Apple is a mass market consumer brand. They are half of the mobile phone duopoly.
Most consumers buy "oh shiny", they buy status symbols. They do not read HN. They do not think about UI. They do not really care about technological or design innovation. They stick with brands (especially in technology) rather than compare alternatives when they make a new purchase.
Apple is well aligned with them, that is why Apple is successful
Rolex was originally a rugged, waterproof watch for people who needed such a watch. Pilots, divers, mariners, and military officers wore the things. Rolex had the accuracy of a marine chronometer in a small package. The Rolex Submariner was introduced in 1953 at $150. That would be $1,820 today. But the base price for a Rolex Submariner today, the same watch, is around $9,200, plus a few thousand dollars of "additional dealer profit". As the CEO of Rolex once said, "We are not in the watch business. We are in the luxury business." The people who need a rugged, accurate watch today get a G-Shock.
That may be Apple's path - to fashion themselves as a niche luxury brand.
Being a "lifestyle brand" works great, right up until it doesn't.
You can't have a niche product when you have 55% market share (iPhone in US).
Apple Employees are "lifestyle employees". They can't imagine why someone wouldn't just buy the $5,000 spec of a laptop if they want a modest quantity of storage or memory, and then get another one in a few months time when that one gets old. They are too rich, too comfortable and too out of touch with the common person - and in many cases what people actually use their products for.
At the same time they try and squeeze every drop of money out of developers the can, Apple is owed for making their market available to others.
Holy hyperbole. I am willing to bet the laptop capabilities that 80% of the population’s needs are available in a $1,000 to $1,500 Macbook Air, and 95% of the population’s needs are available in a $2,000 to $2,500 Macbook Pro. And they will not need a new laptop for at least 5 years.
I usually try and sit out those initial waves of time where all the emotioning happens.. but I have to admit, I'm pretty unhappy with Liquid Glass. Too many "daily use" features are now hidden beyond secondary UI elements (iOS Safari tabs). I don't really care that watch faces are now hidden beyond a link in the Watch iOS app, because I only use them occasionally. But I use Safari tabs all day long.
Same thing when they got rid of the swipe for watch faces. There was enough of an outcry that they returned it as an option.
Apple isn't following their own HIG. They seem to have relied on telemetry that tells them a lot of users don't use browser tabs so they decided they can make it an additional tap away.
My Ubuntu Gnome machine has a more consistent, simple, and pleasing interface than my updated Macbook Pro (though why does Linux still have copy-and-paste issues in 2025..? I'm losing focus here..)
Makes me consider dumping my Apple Watch for Coros, dumping me Windows desktop for Linux, and dumping my iPhone for a Pixel (well, not really, I can't warm up to the Android issues). I don't know what laptop hardware I'd switch to, though. I don't really want to have one company disappointing me across my major platforms again and again. They're sinking the platform advantage -- they need new software leadersip.
It does take up two lines, where in iOS 18 it accomplished that feat in one line. At least it reduces when you scroll down. I can live with that.
The other behavior I really can't stand is the search icon behavior in Apple Music. You click on it and it swipes into a search bar that you can't use, then swipes up on top of the keyboard. It's very jarring.
Nothing says intuitive like hidden gestures!
I'll concede that all this Safari tab stuff, with the workarounds, is less problematic to me than the Apple Watch face swiping thing when it arose. They conceded that too, but it took a .1 release to do it.
What issues are there with android phones, compared to iphones?
...seem worse than iOS UI issues.
You don't need to care about Apple's (or Google's, or Samsung's) "philosophy" about literally anything.
The key distinction is it's built to be extended with third-party plugins (think Obsidian). I stopped using uBar because it had features I needed, but it's not actively adding features anymore last I checked. And of course, this will be fully open source.
This solves a lot of problems I have feeling productive in any not-MATE UI. More here: https://progress.compose.sh/about
It's in active alpha development but has all the core features you'd expect: taskbar works great, but only a basic system tray and start menu. And it'd be very much an alpha that needs feedback :-)
I won’t defend HomePods much, but skipping the other three misses a lot of the ecosystem value less technical consumers are getting. Turn your lights off with your TV remote. Go to a run with just your watch and headphones and take a call at mile 3. Approve a payment (or a sudo!) by double tapping your watch. Start a channel on your TV from Siri. And so on.
I’m not sure if Liquid Glass (that iOS 26 just insisted on capitalizing) is going to be worth anything, and definitely doesn’t merit the marquee. But the some of the design thinking is still there, beneath the surface, in the delightful interactions between parts of their ecosystem.
1. It’s primarily for the people at Apple and their partner manufacturers to realize and be reminded of the value of the work that they do.
2. It’s a message to the broader tech community that if you’re going to copy most of what we do, here’s a few that actually save lives.
Now will it sell more watches… probably. Is it a net positive? I think so.
The first MacBook Airs were wildly impractical and expensive.
The first iPad suffered from the same issues.
Various iterations of the iPod nano were functionally kneecapped.
I see a lot of cherrypicking and not a lot of reasoning in this essay.
But a phone even thinner that what we already have? It's completely pointless.
I'm sure people said this about the Macbook Air. I personally find value in having a less obtrusive object in my pockets and I look forward to the iPhone Air. I checked my own personal stats and I rarely use the other pro lenses on the camera system, and the battery life is the same as my existing pro. For me, there's nothing exciting to upgrade for except for having a better in-hand feel, which the Air offers.
The author, like lots of people in this thread are really triggered by the headline "awe dropping", and sure, whatever, but what did you expect? If they launched a foldable phone, the blog post would be all about how foldable phones don't make sense or that another brand already did it.
Then the author just skips over the new AirPods, a huge part of Apple's profits (but it's the products he "cares about the least", so nevermind, I guess) which are probably the best Apple has ever created with cutting edge improvements to sound and noise canceling, who cares about that, right?
Then he whines about the Apple Watch doing too much. He just wants it to be a heart rate monitor. Turn everything else off, dammit! Too many features! Yeah, this is the guy complaining about the lack of awe.
Then he goes on to say that it's tacky that Apple includes a segment about it saving lives (oh the horror). That's why I bought one for my parents! It's a primary use case for many. Why wouldn't you advertise that? Because sans-serif font blog guy says it's tacky? No, I'd say that's awesome – technology is saving the lives of my family.
Then he goes on to having some difficulty understanding why people would want a thinner, lighter iPhone. Yes, and where's the damn serial port, am I right? Yes, sure, the Mini was great, but apparently people want the Air, but the blog guy doesn't so I guess Apple is doomed?
Then there's some paragraphs about the declining software quality, and, yes, again, sure, while there's plenty of annoyances... have you tried using Windows? Android? If you like the Apple experience – and yes, it's its own thing, it's not for everyone – you'd be hard pressed to enjoy the alternatives in their current state.
So, summing up: Apple lacks awe but there's too many features. I don't understand why they create new products, but they're not innovative. They're doomed because there's some bugs in the software.
I get that some people don't like using them for whatever reason, but this is just a completely insane thing to say. AirPods are a technology marvel, there's a reason why they're so popular.
I get that not everyone is an audiophile, but this is just a completely insane thing to say. Bluetooth headphones aren't a technology marvel. Nor are true-wireless headphones, open-back earbuds, the AAC codec or wireless charging cases. Apple's greatest claim-to-fame is the pairing mechanism, but they refuse to let competitors even use that.
You're right: there is a reason they're so popular. They are the only headphones allowed to use all of iOS' features.
iOS 26 actually has a lot of great features and convergence with the rest of the ecosystem (e.g. preview is awesome). But it lacks the polish that Apple has a reputation for; unfortunately 50% worse polish for Apple is still significantly better than Android and Windows. There just aren’t greener pastures to move to.
The products have matured. Comparing to last year's product makes no sense because most people don't buy new products every year
A lot of people buying the 17 are coming from the 12 or earlier, and it is a significant upgrade.
I strongly agree. Many tech people who I know personally strongly agree. I feel like St Steve Jobs would have strongly agreed. I really, really want a new iPhone with iPhone 5 dimensions.
Apple's problem is it's own success. Unless each product brings in sales rivalling the GDP of countries, it gets cut.
I'm not a apple fan (been windows most of my life till moving to a new company that is Mac only, and have been on android for about 13 years at this point) but the airpods pro are maybe apples greatest product in a while (other then the M1 macbooks).
The audio quality+noise cancellation+transparency quality made them a super easy buy and I would buy the app3 as soon as my app2 die that's how much I love them as a android user. This is coming from someone who owns multiple iems and very expensive over the ears.
From everything reported so far, the app3 look like a solid spec bump at the same price, there isn't many products that keep that formula.
Edit: I am disappointed that the OP didn't talk about how all the iPhones now have "pro-motion" aka high refresh rate screens.
This is (personally) one of the biggest step up in quality, I would never buy a baseline iPhone because 60 Hz just looks gross to me now, it's immediately noticeable.
CostCo had a $850 deal for an M3 Air, and as soon as I picked it up the sales clerk was printing my purchase ticket. It is so light, and the feet actually seem like they'll last a few years (unlike the solid-body designs since 2009).
Keyboard is fantastic. Battery life is unreal. Screen is beautiful.
I have been a full-time Macintosh user since 1991 (I remember fully 68k->PPC->x86->Silicon), and only recently set up my first Linux machine (because the modern OEM OS's are increasingly too invasive with AI'ification), a re-purposed MacPro5,1 #4evr
First time I actually managed to see some LC in person, I was already attending the university, and there were only used in two places, a single room on the computer lab building, and the administrative assistants on the IT department, no one else across the whole campus had them.
I got to use and learn NeXTSTEP, because my thesis was to port a visualization software away from it into Windows, as my supervisor was the only owner of one, and they were getting rid of it, as NeXT wasn't having a great future on those years, already having pivoted to software only.
So the turn around with OS X felt interesting, and kind of revigorating, given how close Apple and NeXT were to be gone.
That Apple is long gone.
It's okay not to like something. To go "hey, I don't think this is useful or good." But the chicken little attitude of "Apple has lost its way" or "Apple has abandoned its long term customers" grabs headlines and will be forgotten in 3-4 months when most people either embrace the current market or reject it and go somewhere else.
“This widening gap between their hardware and software … is going to be really damaging if the course isn’t corrected. The tight integration between hardware and software has always been what made Apple platforms stand out.”
This alignment with the user, offering a well integrated experience as "the product", is the very thing Apple's competitors are funding lobbyists to get regulator help to tear down, and Apple is indeed having to make compromises to accommodate.
Living in Spain, the author should write to EU governance if the author cares about this.
Also, to which aspects are you referencing exactly, that “Apple’s competitors are funding lobbyists to get regulator help to tear down”?
I think it's both. There's a loud cadre of Apple fans who will always fawn over whatever comes out of Cupertino, no matter what. That group shifts its membership over time, but they're always there, and they're, well, always loud. Maybe some of us have been a part of that group in the past, or at least perhaps looking at things with less of a critical eye than we do now. But it's normal to shift your attitudes on things, and normal for those rose-colored glasses to fog up after a while.
Yeah, the trauma porn in Apple events has become quite annoying. We get it - if you don't have an Apple watch you're going to die.
All the best to the folks who where saved by any device, but given the large volume of devices sold - one has to assume there is a flip side to this coin, too.
These entities do what needs to be done to make money.
To most, criticizing a company or product implies in criticizing their buying decision and by consequence, their intellect.
At least in tech circles.
I've been hearing that since before Slashdot dubbed the iPod lame. So I just kinda tune it out and wait to see whether people buy it or not.
For one, M4 Max is awesome. For two, every other OS is now more annoying to me. Linux is more inconsistent, and the changes being made by major distros make little sense. Windows is a dumpster fire. The BSDs don’t work on anything I own, and the M4 is better anyway. Finally… pricing. For the price of my M4 Mac, there is no PC with as good a spec considering the price of GPUs. RAM and SSD? Yeah, Apple is nearly criminal… but the price of an NVIDIA GPU? Actually kinda criminal.
This has of course changed over the past 20 years as all the OS limitations with the Mac were lifted and all PCs have kind of matured and you don't have massive increases in speed every year. So Apple's better quality, closer price parity, and better software support started to look better and better to actual tech people.
A child born on the day the first iPhone launched is old enough to vote now.
Many of those posts are being written by people who have been along for that ride, too, so it’s going to be hard to recapture that excitement after experiencing past hot products not changing your life. It’s like a middle aged American buying a new car - yeah, it’s nice but fundamentally nothing changes in your life and you’re never reclaiming the excitement of being 18 and going from marooned in a boring suburb to being able to travel, which is a transformative change even if it was in a clunky old hand-me-down.
To change Apple's behavior, consumers need to change theirs.
Given the lines out the door at China at Apple stores today, I don't see Apple changing their behavior anytime soon.
When OS X debuted there was a daytime radio talk show in my area called “The Computer Guys.” They capably covered all sorts of computing topics, but were clearly long-time Apple dudes. And they spent weeks complaining about what a disaster OS X was. The Dock was useless and violated Apple’s HIG. The Finder made all the same mistakes as Windows did. And a text terminal? Like DOS?? Who the hell is ever going to want to use that on a Mac?
Going even farther back, it was long-time dedicated Apple users who booed when Jobs announced the deal with Microsoft.
Being a long-time dedicated Apple user is a shitty job. You don’t get paid, have no input, and are constantly disappointed. And Apple does not care about you.
I strongly suggest people should throw this notion away. It does not matter how long you’ve bought from a big company, they owe you nothing. If the latest product seems good, buy it. If not, don’t. Any more emotional investment than that is going to cause pointless unhappiness.
Save your customer loyalty energy for businesses where you can actually establish a connection, like a restaurant you like, or a local handyman.
The rest of the article I found full of non-sequitur, for me personally.
I think the Apple Silicon laptops are just about right. About the only thing that would fill an itch: I angsted for years after the discontinuation of the 17” models. Since what was 15 can now be 16, I’d put cash down for an 18” model.
I’m not much of a power photographer, but I really like the orange of the pro, and the trickle of feature improvements between my 14 and this one are enough to get enthused about.
My Pro ‘Pods (2) are going strong after a few washes, and I look forward to replacing them with 3s when they give out.
Here’s the thing for me I guess. I develop/maintain native apps on both platforms for my employer. I test with a couple of Samsung devices (why Samsung? Because 85% of our Android customers in ang tech are using Samsungs). And I just hate the experience. The hardware is ok, at times. We use them for testing (so not much daily driving) , and the failure rate is worse than the iOS devices. But the Ux is the worst. Apple will have to turn liquid glass into muddied frosted glass in a storm before the hodgepodge that is material, ui one, and the weirdest apps, make me want to switch.
(Meanwhile Mac Studio refactored Apple's desktop lineup, perhaps echoing the G4 Cube, and the iPad Pro M4 was a milestone product that leapfrogged Mac laptop hardware by including an OLED display and next-gen SoC. We may see something similar with an iPad Pro M5.)
I think AirTags also transformed their category. Vision Pro was a new product line for Apple but has not been a success so far.
I got an AVP for work (long story), and was blown away. No VR sickness. I can work from anywhere with my laptop while enjoying a massive, wrap-around high resolution (virtual) display. I can relive vacation photos in full 3D. I can watch For All Mankind projected on a drive-in movie theatre screen in a lunar crater, while laying in my bed.
I think I'd have to go back to the original iPhone to think of a product that is so innovative and visionary that you just KNOW from first use that it will completely transform the way we interact with computers.
But at $3,500? Nobody can afford that, and only a small subset of the 1% would even consider buying one.
Reduce weight by 1/3 and same thing for the price, and I will likely buy it.
Getting a correctly sized light shield helps a lot as it balances the weight over your whole face. Also helpful is having the strap ride a lot higher on the back than you would think is right -- it always feels way too high, but is held in place better when I do this, and feels lighter (as some of the strain is taken off the face).
Or using the alternative over-head strap. This is one case where I think Apple went too far with form over function. There are much better strap designs, but they just aren't aesthetically pleasing I guess?
Finally, I generally use it laying down in bed or on a couch, which makes the weight less of an issue.
I agree in principle that a lighter device would be vastly better. I don't know how they will get there without drastic improvements in the underlying technology though.
The C1, while slower, was a little more energy efficient. Signal Reception seems to be ok too. I am expecting the C1X to be even better.
Combined with A19 Pro, C1X, N1. I would expect Air to be more efficient than 16 Pro. So with that in mind,
The Air ~3100 mah, the 16 Pro ~3600 mach should have similar battery life, or may be just slightly less than 16 Pro, a little bit better than iPhone 15 Pro with 3274mah.
If that is the case I say Air is actually not bad. And we can look forward into the future for even more energy efficiency OLED, SoC and newer Battery Tech. That would make Air perfect.
Not to mention iPhone Air is a required training for foldable iPhone. Their competitors are already making foldable phone with one side at less than 5mm. And is currently being held back by USB-C port. Apple needs at least one or two generation of learning to move in that direction. And iPhone Air is exactly that.
I am really looking forward to al the iPhone review this year. It has been a long long time since the iPhone produce range was exciting.
List of iPhone Battery Capacity.
Model/Battery Life Battery Capacity (mAh)
iPhone 17 Pro Max: 5088 mAh (100%)
iPhone 16 Plus: 4,674 mAh
iPhone 15 Plus: 4,383 mAh
iPhone 17 Pro: 4252 mAh (84%)
iPhone 17: 3692 mAh (73%)
iPhone 16e: 4,005 mAh
iPhone 16 Pro: 3,582 mAh
iPhone 16: 3,561 mAh
iPhone 15 Pro: 3,274 mAh
iPhone 15: 3,349 mAh
iPhone 14 Pro: 3,200 mAh
iPhone Air: 3149 mAh (62%)
The iPhone Air tests none of those things.
They did something similar when they transitioned the product line to aluminum.
(As a product, it’s the opposite of what I’d want — worse battery, bigger screen, worse camera, but they’ll certainly sell enough to debug the assembly lines.)
I don’t disagree that it has something to do with supply chain, but it’s not the titanium cases.
I've also seen speculation that it's an engineering experiment to see if they can squeeze all the essential components of a high-powered computer into a space the size of the camera plateau. Which may eventually lead to viable AR Glasses (or a cheaper Vision).
I don't think the Air is merely a precursor to the foldable, however. It's rather that the technological evolution that allowed for the 5mm thin iPad Pro last year allows for the Air this year and helps with the foldable next year (and thinner MacBooks are rumored as well). But the Air is probably there to stay as a separate form factor, assuming that it doesn't flop in terms of sales. The foldable will be much heavier and bulkier, more resembling a Pro Max.
I have been forced, for professional reasons, to use Apple laptops for close to 10 years of my professional career, about half of which was actually spent being a full time employee of Apple itself (and absolutely not by choice, M&A + golden handcuffs type situation).
They never, ever, did care about their customers other than ensuring that all of their products had an inescapable vendor lock-in built-in (and that is both and insider view and that of someone who had no choice but to be a user because my next employer after Apple was an effing osx-only shop)
They are most excellent at pretending that they care though, I'll give them that.
Almost no features from last 2 years in available here. Not even Genmoji toys (because iPhone language has to be set to English). Siri still doesn't support Polish and it cannot even discern between Polish and English - it cannot read text messages at all, even though it's possible if done manually, still worthless in CarPlay/airpods.
And come on, this is low hanging branch. Local models can do speech to text easily and most of the voice fronts can keep fluid conversation.
Lately I've been considering Linux laptop for work (since I live in Emacs anyway and I still yearn for the trackpoint) and just skip over generations iPhone/iPad generations until I'm ready to migrate my family's photo library elsewhere.
I can understand lack of novelty (outside of revolting, in my opinion, new look), but I'm really starting to feel like a completely neglected customer.
You can't compare macOS with Windows or Linux. These are entirely different games they are playing.
I'm a power user, I would say. I have a Windows workstation at home just because I need to use 2 apps for 3D printing that only exist on Windows.
I have a Raspberry Pi 5 with 2 displays plugged in for monitoring my systems.
I have a Ubuntu server at OVH.
And 2 MacBooks that I use for everything else (running my business). My primary reason is that there are about 10 apps crucial to my business, and they do not exist on other platforms, such as Vellum for book publishing. Yes, there are alternatives on other platforms, but nothing comes close to the simplicity and speed of work we can achieve using that app. And this is, unfortunately, consistent among many niche apps.
It was that they had gone from feeling like they were the professional catered for at the top of the Apple consumer offering (MacBook Pro, a nice phone, the big iPad) to being unable to justify the iPhone upgrade cycle, the Pro/Max line, or the top laptop or the best of the iPads. I supposed that going from a special segment of the cool gang to somewhere in the middle of the pack just didn't feel special.
I'm hoping that the iPhone Air will make them prioritise eSIM support!
- lack of eSIM support
- invoice/statement layout hard to read
- businesses can use the residential NBN plans but they don't display correctly on their Carbon business portal
- some advanced mobile service control codes to configure message bank, call forwarding, etc, don't seem to work
Everything else about them has been perfect. Great service, reasonable prices, perfect reliability (zero downtime AFAIK!), and Australian-owned.
(Gonna chuck my AussieBroaband referral code here in case this convinces someone to switch! 13610811)
I’m not sure what the issue is though, could it be a standards issue? Government tracking phone users? Someone being cut out of the money?
Answers please on a postcard.
Aren't the batteries the most wasteful, least recyclable/reusable part of the airpods? They're so small I can't imagine that still throwing the battery away and putting in a new one nets to much gain.
I would guess that the old wired airbuds was responsible for more waste than airpods. So much more disposable and less durable.
Apple may have decided that the user of yesterday is not their future market, focusing more on users coming of age now. They don't have to really care what older people think and how they use phones, because those people will eventually go away, and they need to be prepared for this future customer.
The only thing I agree with is the disappointment they won't make an macbook air smaller than 13"
https://nebula.tv/videos/realengineering-the-hidden-design-o...
There isn’t any way that you could have replaceable batteries and still make them as lightweight and comfortable in your ear without other tradeoffs. We can argue about the case - maybe.
The AppleTV is by far the most responsive set top box and the least slimy as far as privacy and invasive ads [1].
If you like classical watches, the Apple Watch isn’t for you. But there are enough people that disagree that they sell like crazy.
The iPhone Air is probably going to sell like crazy in places with low iPhone adoption where it’s only affordable by the wealthy minority like China where it will be seen as a status symbol. Ben Thompson of Stratechery has been documenting for a decade about the biggest driver of iPhone sells is models that look new.
But if you already have an iPhone 16, Apple doesn’t expect many to upgrade. The replacement cycle has been around 3 years for awhile now.
[1] yes I realize the default Home Screen of the AppleTV has Apple’s apps in the top navigation bar and when you are on the icons it is advertising for Apple services. But you can put any apps up there and those apps control the hero image when you on them. They usually show what you have been watching
I don't get the rant. Apple is just a random big tech company. It doesn't care about users more than any other company does and it optimizes for profit like most businesses do. It doesn't have anything magic, and I don't get why people get sentimental when they talk about Apple.
Apple doesn't owe users more than they are required by laws and users don't owe Apple anything. It's a business relationship, not a romantic one.
If you like the products and find them useful, buy them. If you don't, you have alternatives.
Would this make me go back to windows? Hell No
Needing to use Adobe CS keeps me from switching to Linux. Makes me wonder if MS or Apple is paying Adobe to keep them from releasing a Linux version of CS.
My AirPods Pro that I bought five years ago are still going strong, the only issue I have is that the right AirPod got some water ingress and now every time I insert it, I'm greeted with about 5 seconds worth of white noise.
> that are, once again, intuitive, discoverable, easy to use, and that both look and work well.
Never was this the case! All these past OSes had a lot of the same fundamental flaws along all of those dimensions, from basic search ("discoverable/easy") fails in both iOS and macOS.
Otherwise maybe it's indeed closer to
> I’m becoming more cynical with age and general tech fatigue
Well, to be fair, my Airpods Pro show no noticeable signs of battery degradation after 3 years of use. If they get to 5 years, that will be longer than most headphones last, not because of batteries, but because of overall wear and abuse. I think the above is a knee-jerk reaction.
People can tell when I’m texting by voice because it reads like I’m drunk.
Siri is neither awe inspiring nor delightful.
How technically possible and commercially feasible would it be to make these huge lenses and camera components removable? For example, imagine if Apple made a phone with no built-in camera, where the camera is instead a separate magnetic component that you attach to the phone only when you want to use it.
We have had modular phones already, and I wish I bought one for posterity. Time travel back to 2016 and get yourself an LG G5. There was also Google's 'Project Ara'.
Whilst you are in your time machine, pick up one of Amazon's smartphones with a 3D display and stereo cameras (or did they have four?).
It all made sense in theory, but we went the other way, to make it so that not even the battery could be swapped out.
I am no Apple fan boy, however, my hunch is that they know their customers and that the iPhone Air is perfect for people that want to show how high status they are primarily by taking photos that are exclusively of themselves. Programmers in basements are not the customer for these gadgets.
A particularly genius move of the new iPhones is the square image sensor, which is what you want if your life has to be documented on Instagram.
Image, and status, is never about practicality, it is all about peacocking, and there is nothing wrong with taking money from those that want to peacock.
There _is_ something wrong with using that money to buy up supply chains and thereby undermining the viability of alternatives for more sensical people.
Its copy was once great. Now we get "Awe-dropping", the latest example of marketing professionals coming up with the most basic rhyming wordplay that fits in a three word sentence. Smack a big period on it so it looks like a fact, then head to the bar.
What you're using is NeXT.
NeXTStep, NeXTSTATION, etc.
Apple machines ended when Steve Jobs re-joined Apple. After he did that, he rebranded NeXT as Apple. Jobs took the policy, target audience, configurability, whole company culture from NeXT.
If it wasn't for this, Apple would probably go bankrupt, so it's not like there was some other choice.
It is what it is.
The AirPods Pro 3 or really any of the recent AirPods are magical products. They’re the rare modern Apple product that Steve Jobs is smiling down upon.
Not only are they great for music but they are absolutely killer conferencing and phone call earbuds.
From early reviews it sounds like the Pro 3 has astounding microphone quality on top of the wide versatility and portability that the product already has.
The e-waste stuff, honestly, is nonsense. Maybe they’re a waste of money to need to be replaced somewhat frequently, but when you throw out AirPods you’re throwing out mere grams of total material. A replaceable battery would barely help that impact, it would mostly save you money to not buy the product all over again. And if you’re like me spending hours a day in meetings, AirPods are downright cheap for the utility they provide.
The average person is throwing out a pair of AirPods’ worth of fuel weight and carbon emissions every time they drive 10 minutes down the road or buy one hamburger with all that packaging from McDonald’s. Throwing out a pair of headphones smaller than a deck of cards every 4 years is basically nothing compared to typical consumer waste. Much lower hanging fruit to pick.
iPhone 17 is $799 in US, but 950e in Spain (=$1130) ie 40% more expensive.
average wage is 80k in US and 35k in Spain.
So clearly it's not the same investment...
Which feels suspiciously rigged in itself but ok whatever
> skipping 6 generations
Nice. Haven’t ever managed more than 5
Case in point, iPads don't have headphone jacks. While these devices are very capable of audio production, that's a joke while using Bluetooth.
But that's not Apple's concern. Airpods sell billions of dollars worth every year.
Every other phone manufacturer said ooh, cool and instead of getting pro level audio in my 1000$ Android phone I have to settle for Bluetooth which still hasn't caught up.
Airpods, and there cheaper friends are , as the article mentions, e-waste. Maybe you get 2 years out of them.
My analog headphones, with some light maintenance ( and a detachable cable) may last decades.
At this point Apple could come out with a 2000$ Audiophile line of phones with the jack and I'd buy one. But they won't.
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MDV84AM/A/usb-c-to-35-mm-...
I didn't know about that, I'll think about it
The number of people who care about an analog headphone jack in 2025 is minimal. The other argument use to be that you can’t charge and use the USB C jack at the same time. Bud you can use a MagSafe cord for charging.
When I read articles like this, it's hard for me to get what the actual problem is. Apparently "the very introduction of the iPhone Air proves that Jobs’s words are falling on deaf ears on the hardware front ..". So I guess it's bad in some way? There's been months of criticism about Liquid Glass too it seems. I don't really follow any Apple-focused media, so I've never heard them at all (battery life concerns make sense, sure).
Even the Brownlee quote seems to answer its own doubt about iPhone Air: "it is surrounded by other iPhones that are better than it in basically every way, other than being super thin and light". What is wrong with making a new class of phone that prioritizes thinness and lightness?
To me, Apple is just as despicable as they've always been. Their "developer program" is as draconian as always. And lately is seems they're possibly more hypocritical than usual (e.g. super tight notification restrictions on app devs, then using notifications for their own marketing). Every time someone joins a Google Meet and can't talk, I know they're a Mac user because it seems they have to restart the entire browser (Chrome) to allow mic access.
Anyway, per the above paragraph, I have plenty of complaints about Apple myself. But it seems my complaints and the author's complaints are completely non-overlapping, which I found a bit surprising. It seems there's some emotional thing going on with long-time Mac users. In general I kinda get it. Most great things seem to teeter off after awhile of greatness.
it is hard for them of course, Steve is gone, but machine is whirring and wants to eat every day
not very inspiring that's for sure
AirPods becoming e-waste? Seriously? Pick a better idea to make your point, because pretty much everyone I know has had their AirPods for 2-3+ years, and even if that was _when_ they decided to move onto another, that's an _incredibly_ long amount of time to have wireless earbuds of those quality at that price point.
And as for disabling features on the Apple Watch - again, seriously? Most techie, HN'y complaint ever. There's a reason the Apple Watch and AirPods sell as well as they do - people love them.
As for awe at new features - AirPods live translation, standard iPhones being ProMotion, one of the thinnest phones ever created?
This is just a terrible opinion piece.
But people love to rage and be enraged on the internet. So anyone pointing the vacuity of the enraged is downvoted and cast aside.
My brother Apple is a $3.5 trillion dollar company, and has been in this league for multiple decades now. I don't know why so many communities of people online have convinced themselves to buy into them like they are a scrappy group of hackers/tinkerers fighting "the man" or even some religious movement.
Apple's target audience is rich people buying the latest iPhones and Macs every year.
Whatever you think of him he was clearly an strong leader who was able to make a bunch of otherwise unruly geniuses cooperate towards a common goal. He also overruled any other ego in the hierarchy so the goals that were worked on actually shipped.
This is rare, and made Apple different from other corporations, for a while.
Without a person like that at the top, corporations are money-making machines that will gravitate towards bland and predictable. Egos will battle for resources for no purpose other than being the boss of the most resources, geniuses will be increasingly bored and disillusioned and whatever special sauce there was will go stale.
Corporations can exist in that state for a long time and sometimes still make nice products of course.
It could even be a bit thicker for TWO DAY battery life.
I have near perfect vision, btw.
¹ similar to https://jessicaotis.com/academia/never-use-white-text-on-a-b...
1- that Jobs would somehow be the hero of a mythical arab/syrian culture and diversity politics who would have behaved differently than Cook towards Trump.
If anything, Jobs cherished the white working suburban middle class of the west coast that has been destroyed in the last generations. He _never_ behaved as a white knight and nobody knows what he would have done (and nobody knows how hard Cook's political equation is)
2- that Apple is due for perfect, idealized products that fill 100% of people's void. This guy explains that iPhones make too many compromise and the OS is just "good enough".
Would be curious to hear of _one single_ previous or current OS platform or hardware at that scale that matches Apple's 2026 line up.
where was there any mention in the OP of Jobs about diversity or his Syrian background?
It’s like anyone here with good taste and some experience leading teams could step into the product owner role for iOS at Apple and get them fixed in a couple of weeks.
Siri may take longer but doesn’t look like it would be too difficult to fix either.
Most of the issues are not constrained by anything but poor taste and dumb design.
Give me a copy/paste functionality that works. How can this be so hard to do?
When I go for a run and listen to a podcast, if I accidentally close the podcast view why do I enter the podcast app? And why do I need to go back to my apps, find my workout app, open it just to find again my podcast view then I need to swipe to go back to my workout view.
Uh, huh?
You would alienate so many customers by being political.
Jobs’ Apple was not political except in narrow issues. It sold a product for everybody, not just one party.
Cook leaned into the least political possible way to handle this very delicate situation: made in the USA is positive for everyone (in the US) without alienating any group directly.
And if he really screwed the pooch and got worse tariff outcomes, I definitely think his job could be on the line. You know their stock lost $300b in value when tariffs were announced right? That was the entire market cap of Apple when jobs died.
I agree it looks very pathetic, but honestly it’s a tough situation too
the MacBook line of hardware is the best it's ever been
the phones continue to improve year over year incrementally sure but they're solid -- I'm very keen to see what the rumored folding iphone gets us
AirPods I can't live without
idk -- macOS26's spotlight just stole a lot of good things from things like Alfred and other launchers -- it continues to become a more useful OS
nothing I need to do for my day to day as a data engineer is hindered by being on a Mac -- linux and containers are useful and solved now (hello Colima)
maybe I am just a lost fanboy but im very happy currently
Only after 5 years of the worst it's ever been, something triggered a complete change of course and it's easy to forget how utterly awful the butterfly era was.
A lot of the rest of Apple feels like butterfly era thinking.
"How do you know its bad it isn't even out yet" is how things just get worse and worse
The "issue" is probably more like smartphones are yesterday's technology. They're no longer the shiny new toys they were a decade ago, and the amount of innovation you can realistically do with them, as a physical device, is more or less limited.
That doesn't mean Apple isn't innovating, but most innovation right now is happening behind the scenes.
New chips for connectivity. I remember a time before the H1 chip (AirPods). I remember keeping my phone in my left front pocket, and for some reason most wireless headphones at the time had the receiver in the right side, and I remember sound clipping every time I moved. Enter AirPods and the H1 chip, and I could suddenly leave my phone at my desk and go get coffee, and I would still have perfect sound. Before the H1 chip, having Class 1 bluetooth in a wireless headset was thought of as if not impossible, then at least impractical due to the power requirements, and then Apple proved everybody wrong. They're currently doing the same with chips for mobile and desktop usage, where their CPU power to Watt ratio continues to be the benchmark to beat.
While things right now feels like a "standstill" I have no doubt we're in for an interesting ride in 3-5 years. All signs point to mobile and desktops converging, meaning in a relatively short time your phone could become your desktop also.
Apple has been working on unifying apps across platforms, with iPadOS being the latest development. iPadOS 26 apps have menus, and window controls (traffic lights) like desktop apps, and yet can still run as legacy iPad apps, and most of them will also run on iPhones.
The major hurdle to making a "single device for mobile/desktop" is not technology. We have the technology, and the A19 Pro processor has as much power as an Apple M2 chip, which is certainly no slouch. The major hurdle is that nobody wants to use "desktop apps" on their phone, and nobody wants to use "mobile apps" on their desktop.
So, Apple may not innovate in a way that "you" like it, but it doesn't mean they're not innovating. As always, nobody is forcing anybody to buy products, so vote with your wallet. Apple is still a "for profit" company, and they will go where the money is.
companies like Valve & Panic! remind me that focusing on producing high quality, enjoyable software/hardware experiences is not only still doable, but highly desired.
it's a beautiful art form - the exploration of human computer interaction. we're only really touching the surface, even still. it's exciting.
i thought tech companies were exciting? that they cared about this future? when did Apple & co start becoming IBM? when did the shareholders that Jobs despised win?
So they can shit on their 38 years of UI guidelines because what are the alternatives?
At least so far. I'm sure they can iOS ify Mac OS enough to piss off developers completely if they try.
Got to think of the shareholders, bro! Disgusting.
Then when OSX (-> Mac OS) started becoming really great in the 2000s I think they complained about stuff changing but then felt recognized when developers started flocking over to the Mac. But then you've got all these average people jumping on buying iPhones and iPads and Watches and AirPods and now they don't feel special.
It is pretty hard for me to get worked up about it. Some of the glory days were nowhere near as great as they remember, it's just they were a special club back in the day and now they're not really. The rest of us will just keep getting our jobs done using Macs.
One other aspect is a lot of these people were not particularly technical and as such were pretty inflexible in their thinking. They often seem to have built up extremely rigid and complicated ways of wanting to organize everything on their system because they are the kind of people who are used to following an exact set of steps to do everything on the computer, and they perhaps learned that at great pain. So they become extremely sensitive to UI changes as they perceive any change they have to get used to as wrecking their perfectly tuned productivity.
As an example they get super upset about the finder. They seem to have frequently built up some really complicated way of using the finder and then will get really upset, whereas an even more technical user will just go update their script/macros/whatever in 5 minutes if something changes and not get up particularly bent out of shape. The guy (and I've only ever met guys in this camp) who gets upset is probably not building a script that would have saved 100x more time over the years.
... ok. I can stop reading.
Come on. These are all minor improvements on existing products. Yawn.
I too have experienced this. I expect that i have been too direct in my dislike of apple in this post.
You have to come at the problem sideways. To allow for any real hope of not being down voted the crowd.
I dont know what the root cause is.. if Cupertino corp has a really expensive pr team or apple devices are laced with some kind of mind altering drug.. the effect is the same.
I’m kind of indifferent to it so far but I can see what someone might have been thinking.
The updated applications which Just clearly copy Android are nice however.