Apple's iPhone overhaul will reduce its reliance on annual fall spectacle | Hacker News Reader

Apple's iPhone overhaul will reduce its reliance on annual fall spectacle

bloomberg.com

25 pointsdoener59 comments

One of my favorite questions to muse about is when will be the first year where Apple does not release any new product branded as an “iPhone”.

Everything must end after all; but I get wildly different answers when I ask that question to people around me. Some think it’ll happen in <10 years as other platforms like glasses take over, others will say it’s gotta be many decades away given how much the iPhone is a cash cow for Apple and they’ll milk it as long as they can.

FWIW, the first year without a new iPod introduced was 2011, and the product line was discontinued altogether in 2022.

I think iPods are a bit different because they completely dominated the market. Being the latest drop wasn’t needed to compete with other players. This is the case with iPads now and to a lesser extent macbooks, but apple never managed the same in the smartphone market.

As long as Samsung, pixels, and potentially global attempts by Xiaomi in the near future are able to compete, they’ll need to stay current.

That was 4 years after the launch of the product that was also an iPod —namely the iPhone. I still don’t see the iPhone’s iPhone anywhere on the horizon

I suppose a lot of people who like to try and predict the next big thing would try and guess what the precursors are. For example where would you be looking now for the equivalent of a camera OS that would end up being Android years later? That was at the tail end of the period where consumer compact cameras were a big thing (before they were bundled into phones), so it could be that there's a path of evolution from smartphones to the next big thing, but I wouldn't want to place bets especially if you're trying to judge whether there's an audience for it.

I think no product comes close to the penetration of the iPhone, though. How would you compare that to what an iPod used to do? That's the fundamental difference with previous cycles. I think the smartphone in general is such a universal device, and nothing comes close to how much it can cover thousands of digital needs. Take the AI pin style devices: what are the incentives in going from a perfected device like the iPhone to something that limits you to a single type of interaction, that technically the smartphone can already cover?

I'm not sure if I would really call it a discontinuation of the iPod, given that the iPhone is basically an upgraded iPod Touch.

The iPod touch was released after the iPhone (by a couple of months).

iPhone was released before iPod touch

The first macintosh was released in 1984, and they're still selling them (ok, sure it's "mac" not "macintosh" now).

I suspect the iPhone will be more like the Mac than the iPod.

I don't see that going away

In the same way that Macbooks are not going away for the time being (I mean, unless they get a CEO that's even more of a bean counter – but I digress)

> when will be the first year where Apple does not release any new product branded as an “iPhone”.

Will never happen while Tim Cook is CEO.

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/11/15/report-tim-cook-to-step...

I’m aware, but so far that’s only just a rumour, and I’d have given the same answer a decade ago.

The iPod comparison is a bit apples vs oranges.

the iPhone is just the current name for the iPod

Steve Jobs:

  - iPod
  - Phone
  - internet communicator

In a few decades maybe

https://archive.is/OweSR

Increasingly phones are being obsoleted by software and not the hardware which is still technically capable of running n+7 yearly OS. 10 years would be a good target for software support.

Manufacturers will look to price the OS support into the product. Customers will see an overpriced phone because it has ten years of support or a cheaper one with five years support and will think "I'd rather buy a new one in five years, I need a battery replacement anyway". I'd be very curious to see how the market responds to this, but I suspect manufacturers will set prices in such a way as to lead the customer towards a predetermined choice.

Reminds me of college where a MBP was $1k but a bargain bin windows laptop was $300-400. I knew many people who scoffed at the price of a MBP and then proceeded to buy 2-4 new laptops over the course of 4 years due to their laptops (sometimes literally) falling apart or otherwise breaking down. It was lost on them that they ended up paying close to or more for their laptops while having a subpar experience.

To be fair, a nicer, more expensive, more reliable windows laptop would also have been an option.

Didn't those people also get much newer hardware each time they upgraded? People who chose the expensive one will be dealing with the sunk cost fallacy.

That already happened. Phones used to be $600. Now it's 1k+.

Why would anyone want that? If Apple pushed out iOS 26 to the iPhone 6 (or even 8), it would look like a slideshow and everyone would scream "planned obsolescence". As opposed to now where it still works fine on iOS 15 or whatever.

Though I guess if they did like Google and updated a lot of OS components through the App Store (which I agree they should) then you could have security updates for most stuff without major UI updates that slow you down, that would be cool.

I would consider a lack of liquid glass to be a positive.

The iPhone Air existing as a "prototype" for a fold-able future phone is probably the best explanation I've seen for why it even exists.

Looking back, other than the insane media coverage, when was the last spectacle really? To me the iPhone sort settled down with the iPhone 5, providing only minimal improvements in terms of actual usage since then.

iPhone X’s removal of the home button was a pretty big change, made navigation more fluid and felt very futuristic.

I feel like it made the experience worse. Just like removing the headphone jack made things worse. Want to connect a midi keyboard to your iOS device and play some instruments on GarageBand? Do you also want to use external speakers without Bluetooth latency? Well too bad!

I don’t know that world (midi and music) but these seems solvable with a dongle/external device. Some quick googling shows at least a few such devices that seem to do the trick. Obviously those cost more money but even with a headphone jack you’d need an adapter for the midi input to the iOS device right?

Then again, you have to realize that your use-case is almost a rounding error. There just can’t be that people, as a percentage, that have that need and it makes sense (to me) to optimize for the largest pie slice and let dongles/accessories cover the gaps for everyone else.

Right so I need to buy new hardware for something I used to do for free? You don’t need any adapters, just plugin the midi keyboard into the usb port. With the old devices a lightning to usb converter was needed but that let you do lots of other things as well. Let’s be honest Apple removed the jack to get people to buy their shitty AirPods. My solution in the end is to stop buying iPhones and Apple products all together.

>Right so I need to buy new hardware for something I used to do for free?

>With the old devices a lightning to usb converter was needed

So it wasn't for free. You still had to get dongles.

Personally, I just need an audio interface to plug in a guitar, a headphones and speakers into my iPad. I need to buy something, but nothing that I wouldn't have had to buy with a PC either.

It's not like what you are describing is impossible today. With the switch to USB-C, iOS devices are compatible with a vast number of affordable adapters. Some of which add features and ports that realistically couldn't be physically on a phone like HDMI or RJ45.

So I would have to buy a usb hub + a dac. So much for it just works!

What percentage of iOS users use a midi keyboard with their devices? 0.01%?

My desktop audio interface plugs right in an iPhone (USB-C to C), no hub or dongle needed, and provides audio in/out, 5-pins midi in/out, microphone preamp, etc.

If it comes to the flexibility of improvising a jam session with inexpensive gear, we are in a much better place today than 10 years ago when phones had headphone jacks. And I say that as someone who uses wired headphones extensively and carries a 3.5mm dongle everywhere.

The switch to USB-C was the whole reason I went to iOS personally. Lack of a proper headphone jack does suck (the Apple USB-C to 3.5mm is quite good however). Too bad we can't have both

Why do they keep investing into the iphone air? There’s nearly no consumer interest in an iphone thats ‘as thin as possible’.

With the capabilities they showed they have for slimming parts down I’d be much much more interested in more battery capacity and a smaller iphone, a new mini.

For the upcoming foldable. Keeping the air allows them to successively engineer the following foldable generation with lower risk and spread out the costs.

But it makes no sense. If you want to test for thinness, they’ve been doing it already with ipads.

Also look at the thinness, weight of iphone 6s and compare it to air. You will be suprised.

The main paint points about foldable is a — duh — folding screen and a hinge. And neither are in air.

> The main paint points about foldable is a — duh — folding screen and a hinge. And neither are in air.

The idea is that the folding phone would be essentially 2 Air’s* with a hinge between them.

* possibly/probably thinner, but the Air serves as a “how thin can we make this since we need to improve our ability to make thin phones/components to accomplish a folding phone”. A sort of “you have to walk before you can run”-type thing. At least that’s how I see it.

Like I’ve said: - ipad pro is 5.1 mm - iphone air is 5.6 mm

Air is thicker than ipad

Reasons: > steadier revenue throughout the year, reduce strain on employees and manufacturing partners, avoid premium and budget models from cannibalizing each other’s marketing, multiple chances each year to counter new releases from competitors

I’m happy to pay more for services if it means longer device lifetimes

Why would paying more for services imply longer device lifetimes? These seem uncorrelated at first blush.

My only guess is that, if they are making more money from services, they need to sell less phones. Therefore hardware obsolescence becomes less important as a means of getting revenue.

I don't see why they would put effort into making the phones last longer, though, if this didn't matter to them before.

Anyway you can't exactly pull a longer lasting battery out of thin air

> Anyway you can't exactly pull a longer lasting battery out of thin air

I don’t know if intentional but I enjoyed the pun about the iPhone Air, here.

Your premise is based on a trillion dollar company saying "I need less money"

They'll (try to) charge the most they can to maximise the profit

Hey! Apple needs to make money, too! /s

How fun. They are essentially repeating the playbook of the 2000/2010s automotive industry: minimal true innovation, instead focusing on establishing a core foundation and subsequently differentiating their model lines solely through arbitrary feature variations. Wonder how that turned out.

They plainly can't compete on innovation.

They are lagging behind the Asian companies on the actual equipment: Chinese phones have far better battery capacity, camera sensors and screens are both sourced from competitors, Mediatek has caught up to them on the SoC side of thing. People here are musing the Air might be a foldable prototype, something Asian brands have been releasing and improving for, what, five years now.

On top of that, they have been struggling on the software side of things for quite some time. Stability is so-so. AI features don't really work. Plus, they pretty much stopped delivering new features in the EU.

To me it looks like the only thing Apple has going for it is their brand image in the USA and their locked down ecosystem. Might be fine to keep revenue steady but doesn't bod well for growth.

I personally went back to Android this generation when my iPhone 13 became unusable. I doubt I will be the only one making the switch.

I don't know enough about supply chains to recognise whether what most of what you're saying is true or not, but "Mediatek has caught up to them on the SoC side of thing" is so laughably false that I seriously doubt the rest of what you say. The best MediaTek CPU is about 3/4 the speed of the best Apple one.

"I personally went back to Android this generation when my iPhone 13 became unusable." - perhaps you're letting your situation affect your bias...

3/4 the speed is actually very very good, given how fast iPhones are! 3/4 the speed together with much better battery and cameras is clearly better, especially since you cannot run iPhones in Desktop Mode. 3/4 the speed of the best iPhone is way more speed than 99.9% of users need.

No offense but you could have checked before accusing me of bias. Here is a summary of the benchmarks. [1]

The Dimensity 9500 scores above the A19 Pro in AnTuTu 10 and Multicore GeekBench 6. A19 Pro has better Single Core Geekbench 6 results but that only around 10%. The Dimensity 9500 GPU scores are also better but that was already the case for the previous generation.

Apple used to have a significant lead on the SoC side of things. That's over. Both Mediatek and Qualcomm are competitive nowadays.

And before people come back explaining to me that it hardly matters because the A19 Pro is more power efficient, my current Chinese phone battery is 1.5 times larger than the one in the Iphone 19 Pro Max and I have more than two full days of use between charges, which are obviously significantly faster than on the iPhone.

[1] https://nanoreview.net/en/soc-compare/mediatek-dimensity-950...

Look, everyone in the space is eking out just about all they can. A phone with a bigger battery and larger camera sensors will involve other tradeoffs. Ones Apple don’t want to make. They certainly could, though!

Stability is fine, iOS dev is pleasant which is important, AI stuff is meh (notification summaries are great though) and Siri is getting Gemini. And the thing about the EU isn’t remotely true. Opposite if anything, since EU brought us usb-c and alternative app stores.

And the lock-in thing isn’t to be discounted. Emotional and practical as well. Once your files are on iCloud, photos as well, universal clipboard built in, AirPods automatic transfers, instant MFA fill, some apps lack android versions, the devices just geling… switching would for me mean dropping my watch as well, and losing out on a bunch of Mac side features. Androids can’t merely be “as good” or even slightly better, they would need to utterly kick iPhone's ass for years and years to even get me contemplating a switch.

Saying that Mediatek has caught up to anything is, well, simply false.

That's not what the Dimensity 9500 benchmarks are saying. This SoC is in every way comparable to the A19 Pro. Apple used to have chips twice as effective as the competition. That's simply not the case anymore.

I think Apple users are in denial regarding the current state of the market. Your comment is the second one apparently unaware of where Mediatek and Qualcomm currently stand compared to Apple.

Cars didn't have a vendor lock-in ecosystem for your purchases, personal data and prized memories, to make switching brands a pain for the user.

Ford and the other carmakers at the time absolutely tried to build that kind of lock in. The only reason it didn’t stick is because Congress stepped in with the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act. Automakers wanted to force you to buy OEM parts and pay for OEM service, and the anti tying rules killed that. It wasn’t some natural property of the market. It was government regulation that kept the ecosystem open.

If phones had gotten a Magnuson Moss style intervention 10 years ago, the platform dynamics would be totally different today.

I'm sure they're trying to change that. OEMs are now using the infotainment screen to advertise their new models.

Great Chinese cars.

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