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Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

I believe the issue is that with Jobs gone, Apple's design team is now apparently unable to continue their job. Instead of developing their own UI paradigm for small screens, they keep copying from Google Pixel both the UI ideas and the screen size. And now that they ran out of useful ideas, they turned everything transparent. Why make the iPhone look more like Apple Vision when people so obviously hate the latter? [1]

My prediction is that the age of AI and LLM assistance will make tiny devices the norm. Like those AI pins. Like Siri inside AirPods. Like Meta's AR glasses. But it seems that Apple is losing the race here. They lost their edge when it comes to developing new user interface paradigms.

EDIT: [1] Bloomberg claims 10-15% return rate, which would be massive: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-02-18/apple-... (for comparison, Galaxus reports 2% as normal for Smartphones and <5% for Meta's Quest)

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>Apple's design team is now apparently unable to continue their job

Honestly id say this is a mix of both Jobs and Ive being gone.

Now under the operational maximalist that is Tim Cook, they just revert to old designs every few years and call it revolutionary. See: edges on the iPhone. First, rounded edges. WOW, revolutionary! Then a few years later, hard edges. WOW, revolutionary! Then a few years later, rounded edges. WOW, revolutionary! Then a few years later, hard edges. WOW, revolutionary!

All the while stripping actual functionality out of the devices and removing useful features like headphone jacks. There hasn't been real product innovation at Apple in over a decade.

But I digress.

> There hasn't been real product innovation at Apple in over a decade.

Everyone says this but forgets that AirPods were released in 2016, Pros in 2020, and they're now the most popular headphones in the world

They also introduced what became the most popular watch in the world.

The most important thing Jobs did (and he mentioned this) is to say No to great ideas. Like this, like iPhone Air, like Apple Vision Pro, etc.. Apple without Jobs is now much like it was before Jobs in the 90s, only this time it has a lot more momentum than it had before. Still though Apple is back to throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.

As someone who's spent a while playing with one (that I didn't buy) and who hasn't picked it up off the shelf in months:

I don't think most users were returning it because they hated the UI or even the device in the usual sense. (There are certainly issues I could detail, but they don't feel like the core problem).

The core problem is just that it just doesn't really....accomplish anything.

Once you get past treating it like an expensive Google Cardboard ("neat tech demo") - it's very hard to figure out what the point of the thing is. What problem does this actually solve for you/what thing is it actually better to use this for than other existing solutions.

Extremely high price tag with no "killer app"/function that makes anyone who tries it "get it" quickly and want one, is a pretty impossible sell.

> Why make the iPhone look more like Apple Vision when people so obviously hate the latter

They are normalizing Apple Vision look so it looks less weird when you switch.

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