Hacker News Reader

Comment by nsbk | Hacker News Reader

Peak Apple "innovation" incoming!

Apple hasn't "invented" most things, from the personal computer, MP3 Player, or smart phone. They tend to revolutionize the things by making them work extremely well.

if by 'revolutionize', you mean 'let everybody else spend time, effort and money developing the idea, and once they've proven the market they buy an interesting company in the space with tons of patents, shut down everything they'd done before and make their interesting and take credit for the revolution, meanwhile, their new presence in the area mutes actual innovation, because they use all of the oxygen in the room'... sure, yeah, they do that... but the revolution was coming whether Apple participated or not.

Apple is great at winning capitalism.

Before Apple Silicon, who was making equivalent laptops? Highly competitive performance, great battery life, instant wake from sleep, pristine build quality, etc.

Forget before Apple Silicon, who's making an equivalent laptop now?

> Apple is great at winning capitalism.

Exactly, they deliver products that are better than their competition and thanks to that they got extremely rich. It's a great example of capitalism working as intended.

This take is completely divorced from reality.

That's obviously not what they mean.

Hey, if they can get the hinge working better it might improve the category at least. You'd expect Apple to do well at manufacturing for that kinda stuff

Agree, their "innovations" usually involve taking an existing concept or idea and executing it better. Hopefully they can pull that off and raise the bar for foldable electronics

They also buy a lot of their innovations. See Intrinsity, a fabless semi company Apple bought which lead to their Mobile Arm chips and eventually the M series.

The idea is the easy part. Execution is the hard part.

folding butterfly keyboard on a folding phone would be a real comeback.

Current foldables are fragile, require a built-in plastic screen protector, and have a visible crease. Apple is very unlikely to be willing to accept those compromises. We'll see, but I think their entry into the field will change things.

15 years ago, I would agree that Apple might not have been willing to accept those kinds of issues. I'm not sure about the Apple of today. That is not a slight against any Apple leadership, but I do feel that, for a variety of reasons, the level of minimum QC has notched back a bit in the pursuit of marketshare.

Apple fumbled on QC with software this past year, but have they with hardware? I've found their hardware (both computer and physical builds) has been very high quality still.

Sure this isn't just nostalgia / rose-tinted glasses speaking? In the 2010s, Apple shipped MacBooks with GPUs that fried themselves to death, and iPhones that bent in your pocket and lost cell signal if you held them wrong. Today's Apple does have some software quality issues, but their hardware is the best it's ever been.

Could be nostalgia for sure, but the issues you are describing were not anticipated or immediately obvious on initial launch (at least as far as I recall).

From what I have seen of folding screens today, they come with some significant trade offs (creases, wear, etc). Over time, I expect these to be solved, but I don't think folding screens are a luxury item today as much as they are a tech novelty. But, the cell phone market has kind of stagnated in terms of hardware, and it looks like folding screens might be the thing to drive some upgrade purchases. During the peak iphone growth phase I believe Apple would have labelled these screens as not ready yet, but today I think they risk losing market share and are potentially somewhat forced to build a folding iphone.

The iPhone camera bump is the "jumped the shark" moment for me when Apple went from unwilling to accept that level of quality to "I'm not sure... they might". Speculative to be sure, but I believe that if Jobs was alive we'd have a paper thin camera sensor because the bump would have been a nonstarter.

Same regarding your comment... I agree, the minimum QC does feel like it notched back a bit.

I disagree. The camera bump was functional pragmatism winning out over Jony Ive's increasingly form-driven ideals.

Even the Jobs Reality Distortion Field couldn't alter physics.

"notched back" - I see what you did there.

"hey guys remember that screen technology that came out seven years ago and has had plenty of time to mature? Well our 65 year old CEO just discovered it and has found a way to make it stratospherically more expensive than its ever been before!"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com