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Comment by ebbi | Hacker News Reader

Agree. So many people online (not just reviewers) complaining that it's just a spec-bump, demanding a new design. I remember the time people were (rightfully) complaining that the update schedules were slow for Macs, mainly because of Intel's limitations. Now we get yearly refresh, they complain that it looks the same.

I don't think they appreciate the cost of redesigning and retooling. Echo your thoughts and hope Apple doesn't listen to this feedback. Imagine more expensive laptops because some people want more frequent design changes!

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Apple is the company where every new iPhone release is both simultaneously boring, not worth it and a sure sign of their impending collapse and also somehow a vicious treadmill which forces people to upgrade every year, throwing out their old phone and contributing to e-waste. They could announce a cure for cancer tomorrow and within a month people would be back to asking what have they innovated recently. People just like to complain.

Maybe I'm a weird one, but I'm still quite happy on my iPhone 12.

Add me to the group. I’m on iPhone 11 and I couldn’t be happier. I do follow their new launches and then look at what I have. It looks and works like new, have absolutely no complaints. 6+ years and going strong.

iPhone 12 mini here, I replaced the battery last year, and still going strong. Actually, I fear the day I'm forced to upgrade due not having the mini size available anymore...

Replaced 12 mini with 17 pro. Not worth it. Will go back. Too big too heavy

I changed my iPhone 8 about 1 year ago. Now I have a 16, which I will probably be using in 2031

People quickly become accustomed to common occurrences that are not threatening (like extreme weather events). Apollo 8 was the first time humans reached the moon, just orbiting it. Sixteen months later, in a time with much less media and information than we have now, US TV networks chose not to broadcast an en-route feed for Apollo 13 because this was no longer seen as interesting. We often seem spoiled, we often seem prone to complaining, and we often seem more enamored with something new. Yet there are so many remarkable things we take for granted.

That’s because it’s called “the news”, not “the olds”.

When I teach people how to talk to reporters I always emphasize this. If it’s the 10th time something happened, you need to explain it in terms of what’s -new- or your info won’t go beyond the pitch meeting.

Thats why your town’s street fair makes a big deal that it’s the 10th anniversary event. It’s “news” that you’ve hit a round number. That’s why Trump breaks the law in a little way before doing it in a big way… the second time isn’t interesting.

See!? They waste all this time and money curing cancer, which ended up being soo easy in the end, and not a single bit of effort into curing Alzheimer’s. Pricks.

The capitalist class truly are leaches.

> which forces people to upgrade every year

Perhaps it’s just a language slip, how are people forced to upgrade every year? My experience is the opposite: ios 15 is still supported[0] and my 2016 iPhone let me access the World Wide Web.

The force your talking about comes instead from developers (like me) that implements features and systems always more CPU/GPU hungry.

0 security patched last month https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45270108

I think some people see having an older generation iPhone as sending a signal of "I’m poor", a status thing. Pretty ugly thing, but the act of buying iPhones on credit happens too often.

Taking this time to appreciate my social circle NOT being like that.

In certain circles it's assumed that people buy a new phone every year. Then they make 30 minute Youtube videos lambasting Apple about "incremental upgrades" and "zero innovation"

While also not getting that they're NOT the target market.

For the person whose iPhone finally (after half a decade or more) falls out of major version support a 5-6 generation jump on hardware is amazing.

They are the target market.

Certain part of apple customer culture seems to be peculiar, a lot(?) of traditional customers seem to care a lot about "redesigns", partly because they want every time to get the new shiny thing anyway. Having started using anything apple only after apple silicon, it feels weird seeing these takes in forums. For reviewers it makes sense, as they need things to talk about, but I don't get this for other customers, esp since for me and many people "redesigns" for the sake of redesigning are typically hated except if they are actually addressing actual practical or aesthetic issues. Eg the touchpad thing was indeed horrible and many people hate it for a reason, but redesign requests are not limited to actual things people do not like. I don't think I have seen this as much for other companies and I do not get why they care (maybe they are just bored?).

> forces people to upgrade every year

People who upgrade every year don't do it for technical needs. We're long past the times when phones were inadequate and yearly improvements were big leaps that made them less unusable.

Yearly phone upgrades are just to sport the latest model, symbolizes status. Or if there's some deal where you can do it for close to no cost, better than long upgrade cycles, but I don't think "free upgrades" are common.

> So many people online (not just reviewers) complaining that it's just a spec-bump, demanding a new design.

If ever there was a case of "be careful what you wish for" - whether it's the Touch Bar, deleting ports or the butterfly keyboard, a redesign isn't necessarily a positive.

I loved the touch bar once I realized all the first party applications actually had useful customizations for it.

When you used the Terminal app, there was literally a "man" button that would open the relevant man page (for whatever command you currently had typed) in a new window.

Actually an awesome feature if application authors got on board.

Making the power button part of the bar instead of a physical button sucked though.

You know, I would not be mad if the Touch Bar made a return sitting above the function row keys.

If they had done that from the beginning, I think the reception to Touch Bar would have been a lot more positive.

I'd much rather Apple put their energy into performance, battery life, and long-term reliability than chasing novelty for novelty's sake

Intel released new CPUs every year; they shouldn't be blamed when Apple refused to update.

I remember reading about an aging Mac Pro not seeing an update because the Xeon chips it used hadn’t seen an update from Intel.

I’m sure Intel had some releases each year, but did they have the right ones to make it possible for Apple to release an update?

Intel had multiple years of promising that their new next-gen more efficient 10nm CPUs were coming very soon, and then those kept being delayed.

The chips they did release in that time period were mostly minor revisions of the same architecture.

Apple was pretty clearly building chassis designs for the CPUs that Intel was promising to release, and those struggled with thermal management of the chips that Intel actually had on the market. And Apple got tired of waiting for Intel and having their hardware designs out of sync with the available chips.

> and those struggled with thermal management of the chips

An ironic mirror of the PowerPC era when every version of the G5 was struggling with high power consumption and heat generation when operated at any competitive frequency/performance level. The top end models like the 2.5GHz quad-G5 needed water cooling, consumed 250W when idle, and needed a 1kW PSU.

Intel's offering at the time was as revolutionary as the M-series chips.

Yep, it was a very similar situation where Apple wanted to keep their hardware cadence but were beholden to a third party on the chip roadmap.

These days they're still somewhat beholden to TSMC continuing to make progress on nodes etc, but I think they have a closer partnership and a lot more insight into that roadmap so they can keep their hardware plans in sync.

Indeed. There was a significant period where they, er, weren't really better than last year's, though. Remember Broadwell? Followed by Skylake, which took about two years to go from "theoretically available" to "actually usable".

And then Skylake's successors, which were broadly the same as Skylake for about four years.

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