Apple without Ive and Jobs increasingly has a taste problem. Everything from their ads to things like this are just in really poor taste, and aren’t something that they would have done 15 years ago because they would have thought it was beneath their brand.
I like Apple, so I’m really hoping they bring on someone to solve this. Otherwise they’re on track to be the same as every other tasteless tech company.
Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point, and smartphone sales are plummeting. And I think they're plummeting for the same reason desktop sales plummeted. We went from a time where a new PC was a bit dated in 3 months and obsolete in 2 years, to modern times where a desktop from a decade ago is good for pretty much everything, even including high end gaming if you started with a high end card.
The exact same thing's happening to phones. I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly. Tech hardware as a recurring business model only works when there's perceived significant improvements between generations. Trying to sell a few more pixels, or a fraction of a cm thinner case or whatever just isn't worth it for most people.
So, as typical with corporations in this spot, they start flailing to try to maintain revenue, let alone growth. Microsoft became a 'cloud' company paired with a side gig of spyware marketed as an OS. It'll be interesting to see what Apple transforms into.
I would say it’s simpler than that. Between Wall Street demanding “growth” and the executives’ stock options being tied to meeting those numbers, they always pull out any and all stops to push “growth”. As others have implied, with people like Jobs and others gone, there is also no cultural resistance based on core values that created Apple to push back on shameless debasement.
It is also what is happening all over the western world in general as “growth” sacrifices the indigenous cultures and people at the altar of money for the executives, ie aristocrats, and anyone resisting or even just objecting is silenced, including here, because resistance to growth at all costs is futile.
humans want to improve their (material) conditions, it's pretty much the thing we do at this point (that other species don't really)
the issue that was a bit of an inconvenience, a mere side-effect of our culture is nowadays burning down the whole shebang
we overvalue short-term gains (thus we have serious agent-principal and integrity issues), we have a laundry list of cognitive biases, and we managed to invent the weaponized cognitive-bias-exploitor and immediately tried it out on ourselves, and ... since the good old days of pamphlets and religious wars we are engaged in all kinds psyops.
we are both great and terrible at "winning hearts and minds" (that's why it works, but unfortunately it works much better at turning people into crazy self-destructive antisocial trolls than courageous prosocial reformers)
“ we overvalue short-term gains (thus we have serious agent-principal and integrity issues),”
Agree and would even make the argument that Chinas rise in some is a response to short term with patience.
China is willing to move mountains and allow western corporations 8-10 years of ridiculous low labor costs and promote incredible profits. They then learn the process and the tech and now companies like TP-link, Huawei, BYD, tencent, and so forth are all legit and make good products.
This approach can even be seen in their military. With all the talk of China invading Taiwan… the reality is it just won’t happen. China will patiently build the largest Navy and infiltrate the political landscape of Taiwan until they just peacefully transfer back into the fold.
Not sure what the answer is here but perhaps we could learn something back ?
I don't think the obsession with the short-term is necessarily the natural state of people, especially not in leadership. There were buildings built in times past knowing full well that it would take decades and even centuries to complete.
But I think long-term thinking requires a unified people in a democracy, or a non-democratic system. Democracy in a divided society makes long-term stuff basically impossible when the next guy who comes in will just undo it to spite you. And long-term visions often come with short-term costs without anything yet to show for it, which can then be weaponized against you. Oh and the best trick of all is doing something with short term benefit and mid-term costs, and then blame the consequences of your own actions on the next guy in office. Excessive printing of money is an obvious and extremely common example of this.
> China will patiently build the largest Navy and infiltrate the political landscape of Taiwan until they just peacefully transfer back into the fold.
I don't think this would work, they can't manipulate a sophisticated Western political system without actual sovereignty over the land. Western soft power is just that good.
If China had a playbook that could accomplish that, they would have used that instead for assimilating Hong Kong instead of what they ended up doing. They tried, but HK resisted Chinese influence HARD. So China stopped offering carrots and brought out the stick.
The west is very naive. A lot of the current state of the world is a result of western politicians believing the "end of history" theories of the 1980s - the idea that any country would naturally become a free market liberal democracy as it grew richer.
China is building soft power. We have Chinese funded teaching in British universities, lecturers moved from teaching a course because they upset Chinese students (who supported the regime), open apologists at places like Jesus College, Cambridge, agents building influence with MPs....
I agree Taiwan is unlikely to easily agree to be taken over by China, but that is because they know what living under Chinese rule will be like, not because of the soft power of the west.
The limiting factor to Chinese soft power development is its need to remain authoritarian. Folks will accept living under one if that's all they know. But if you didn't grow up with the brainwashing nobody will trust you and everything is transactional. You see Chinese attempts to exert political control over its diaspora and it never works as well as they would like.
Where the West's soft power essentially comes from in is in being the alternative to authoritarianism and it really doesn't have to be any more than that. The West will operate its own authoritarian regimes, like Puerto Rico, and Hawaii before it became a state, and the Phillipines, and these folks are perhaps the most oppressed of all. The West knows authoritarianism extremely well and is far better at the carrot / stick game of manipulating people.
When your carrots consist of patently self-serving deals to other autocrats at the expense of the public, the public eventually gets wise and puts pressure on the autocrat. The West can offer much more lucrative arrangements for all around, like that of building Taiwan's semiconductor industry. It's become a source of national pride for them and has created middle classes, a necessity for a modern political system.
I don’t know man, I would have believed this wholeheartedly ten years ago. But people are choosing true authoritarianism in droves. People just keep voting for Trump, Orban, Erdogan, and Le Pen. Trump is extremely transactional.
All of which is great news for China, and a great victory for their ‘do nothing: win’ policy.
I don't think authoritarian is the right term for critiques here. Try to define it in a way that one can't simply turn it around and apply it to people you probably don't want it to be applied to. For instance the actions taken during COVID, and against people during COVID, could easily be framed as extremely authoritarian. But then, like now, claims of authoritarianism were more of a proxy for 'I don't like the actions of this government' with authoritarianism just a framing of convenience.
In general the trends of the past were largely a product of globalism, and globalism is dying. So I expect we'll enter more into a historical zones of influence global status quo. For instance anybody who doesn't think Chinese soft power is growing exponentially should visit basically anywhere in Asia now a days. A decade ago China had relatively minimal influence, now it's everywhere driven in large part by just absolutely massive numbers of Chinese tourists as well as expats. A rapidly expanding middle class in a country of 1.4 billion has an impact that's basically impossible to overstate.
They always have. The present isn’t super special, and I think Europeans (speaking as one) realize this a bit easier, because we see populist governments rise and fall again, over and over, in different countries.
Populism is notoriously brittle, and almost every European populist party has eventually fallen once they gained actual power, because it turns out governing is complicated and can’t be done effectively while maintaining that beautiful, simple, enticing narrative that brought you into power.
But the Chinese government is not populist in the same sense, often quite the contrary. Their legitimacy seems to be derived from the fact that they have achieved real results for their population, which means they will eventually hit a different road block.
In uni, my friends used the phrase “simple solutions for complex times” as an insult for political ideas. Cutting the Gordian Knot only works well if your father spent half his life perfecting a new military doctrine for you. Still, it’s amazing how many people have “how hard can it be?” attitudes about everything but their own career/field.
Yes, it will surely all end in calamity, whether anyone here experiences it themselves or not. Humans have a major (among many) flaw, in the nasty tendency to believe they not only have a sufficient understanding of sufficient enough things, but that they also know the effects their perceived perfect choices and actions will have on such a complex system. Many religions have stories capturing this folly, the most famous possibly being the Tower of Babel, which were are furiously building in spite of what many humans call God, while others believe they have no more need for a God greater than themselves.
Orban just tried to ban the yearly Pride parade and inadvertently turned it into the largest protest against his rule ever. Trump barely took the election and may have even stolen it, if recent news is to be believed.
> Between Wall Street demanding “growth” and the executives’ stock options being tied to meeting those numbers, they always pull out any and all stops to push “growth”.
This right here. The perverse incentives integral to public companies are at the core of so much that is wrong with the world.
Growth is awesome. We're incredibly fortunate to live in this high growth era!
What Apple may be guilty of here is focusing on short term growth at the expense of the long term. If you make an extra buck today, at the expense of losing user loyalty, that's not what any shareholder wants.
This could be a case of short term growth being rewarded inside the company. It could also be any number of other reasons.
Maybe. But future generations (like yours kids) will have to pay dearly for our „growth at all cost“ mentality that uses up limited resources disproportionately and unsustainably.
> What Apple may be guilty of here is focusing on short term growth at the expense of the long term.
Wall St growthbros do not draw these sorts of distinctions. If the focus on short-term growth ends up tanking a company, there will simply be another company to project its growth obssession on. It could be Apple services, or Peloton bikes or Subway sandwiches, they could not care less. Those companies aren't their customers; the investment houses, short sellers, market makers and pension funds are.
This stupidity isn't leading to growth though. I'm actually shorting them because their inability to produce products that actually add value to their customers lives is already manifesting in earnings/sales decay.
Maturity/commoditization of technology (a good thing) can only be seen as problematic in a world where steady-state businesses with steady profits are seen as "stagnant", and only companies that delivers (or at least promises) perpetual growth are seen as successful. Apple has been wildly successful. There has to be a world in which such a company can benefit from a demand spike without betting its entire future on that demand continuing.
A graph whose data ends in 2018 isn't strong evidence for "they aren't plummeting."
That said, doing some searches for newer information (e.g., https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/) suggests that iPhone sales aren't plummeting but are instead rather stable. (Although I wonder how much of that is services attributed to iPhone as opposed to solely the sales revenue from iPhone, the source doesn't make that clear).
Sales are accounted for in $ terms, not units sold. It's the same thing with Hollywood. You might think movies are more popular than ever thanks to record breaking sales (pre-COVID at least). In reality, we reached peak movie, in terms of tickets sold, in 2002! [1]
Back to iPhones, this [2] page shows their stats by units sold (about half way down). iPhone is essentially treading water if those data are correct (with a peak in 2015 overcome twice since, but by ~1% each time), but I strongly suspect that that's showing units shipped and not units sold, as iPhone sales declining has been universally reported.
Ask yourself the question of what it means when a company makes more dollars from a product while not increasing the number of units sold. It's completely obvious if you think about it for a moment.
The last time I bought the newest iPhone was iPhone 5. In the past, I’ve been getting hand me downs since most people change their phone between 12-18 months. I’m still using an iPhone X. I can’t upgrade the iOS at the moment so looking forward to getting an iPhone 13 in the next year or so.
I agree with you. Hand me downs aren’t coming as fast as they used to.
That's probably pretty healthy -- phones these days should comfortably last you several years. I consider folks who buy a new phone every year these days to be engaging in pretty conspicuous consumption.
which when you look at your device, it's cost and what you use it for, should not be all that remarkable of a statement. I mean, what if you replaced "phone" with car, house or partner?
I bet id buy a new car more frequently if cars were first invented!
As it is, I bought my car new and is 20 years old in great condition. Partner … I mean, who wouldn’t want to trade in for a new model if it weren’t for the social concerns? (I kiiiid I kiiid)
If you could get the same partner with more capabilities and less wear and tear with all important information transferred into the new one every year it sounds pretty appealing.
Screenshots, for sales, from 2nd link, i.e. what we are told to look to see 2021 < 2023: https://imgur.com/a/CpGWbWM
(although, my comment makes a hash of the whole thing and says 2021 is both < and > than 2023. Sigh.)
(n.b. not trying to be aggressive, or disagree, or make a statement about the overall premise that sales are declining. Just mildly amused by the confusion in the thread)
(my $0.02 would be that we're seeing the same general stasis that was presumed after the iPhone 6 release, but really, we just need more data (2021 was COVID stimmy high))
(but my $0.02 should be that "yeah stuff plateaued, or at least no more hypergrowth, post-2018" because this is what we were shown on the Pixel team at Google, and a little birdy told me that's how Apple thinks about it)
> but my $0.02 should be that "yeah stuff plateaued, or at least no more hypergrowth, post-2018"
Note that what was being claimed was that “Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point, and smartphone sales are plummeting”. Whether iPhone sales are growing, bounced around a bit, or have plateaued is irrelevant. It’s pretty clear they are not plummeting.
There seems to have been a downward trend for smartphones since 2017.
Growth is either from an expanding market or an expanding market share, since it’s not an expanding market that leaves the market share.
I would image there is some substitution, with iPhones lasting longer on average it becomes more cost effective to switch to iPhones so they capture more market share. But if the general market doesn’t expand then it’s a fairly safe assumption that the new converts are going to wait before upgrading meaning that a decrease in sales is already partially baked in.
My anecdotal datapoint is 4 iPhones in 16 years which makes them rather cheap on an annual basis.
Edit: I had assumed that parent was correct, but as the peer pointed out iPhone sales have declined
Yep. And this is why “liquid glass” is the hot new thing this year. That’s basically all we have left to drive the refresh cycle that tech is addicted to.
It surprises me that this is what apple has essentially boiled down to. Yes there are people stuck in the walled garden but they were willingly stuck there tbh. They liked apple vision and felt different. But if apple is just going to lose on all fronts ("AI","vision?","This year innovation=liquid-glass") Yeah, they might not be in a good state..., Also most people I see want an iphone just rebuy old iphones and those phones themselves are still in good conditions.
Well, I’m pretty entrenched in Apple’s ecosystem because I value the iCloud integration between my devices, but all my devices are a couple years old and I tend to keep them until they are no longer supported (M1 Air, iPhone 14, iPad Air M1, etc.). In particular, I don’t drive my iPhone hard. As long as it can do phone and texting and run a browser and the Kindle app, I’m good. Needless to say, I won’t be upgrading devices for liquid glass.
Just like the new fashion season, car model year updates, and spectator sport video games roster updates. Change for the sake of driving sales. Has anyone done fashion as a service (FaaS)?
Agree they have a huge taste problem, but even besides that Apple has a huge incumbent problem now really.
Smartphones ate the world, and they ate the majority of profit in the space.
We are now 20 years on and the software is no longer driving the urgency of the hardware upgrade cycle it used to. Apple gets the majority of its revenue from iPhones and related services. Note that services category includes all sorts of App Store extortion payment stuff that they are slowly losing court cases over.
iPhones are so big for them, no other product category created since is even in the same order of magnitude.
Partially I think thats on Apple, but I look across the consumer electronics space and don't really see anything new categories they aren't already dominating anyway (tablet, smart watches, etc).
One "moat" they probably do have is that in the US at least, theres not a lot of other physical retailers to go try out consumer electronics. 20+ years ago Apple Store were filled with 3rd party products, now its all Apple everything.
Apple’s MO, at least in recent decades, is to let others blaze the trail into a new space, then do their own version that gets it right.
Smartphones were a big deal before the iPhone. People would talk about how they were addicted to checking email on their “crackberries.” But they were niche. You could see that they were going to be big, but they weren’t there yet. Then the iPhone catapulted smartphones from a popular niche to a ubiquitous product.
Before the iPhone, they did the same thing with portable music players. Afterwards, it was the same story for tables and smart watches, although not with the same degree of ubiquity. Arguably it was the same for PCs (“personal computers,” not IBM-compatible machines, of course) and GUIs, way back when.
What big upcoming thing would they do this with now? As you say, there really isn’t anything. Maybe VR/AR, but that isn’t even in the “popular niche” stage yet, the technology isn’t there yet, and it’s far from certain that it will ever be more than a tiny niche. Otherwise, what? Self-driving cars? That’s not a new market, that’s a product feature in an existing large, mature market. AI? That’s also looking like a feature rather than a new product category.
You're 100% right, Apple as a fast-follower "getting it right" tech company, and there's nothing to fast follow right now.
IoT/smarthome has been a niche/fad going nowhere since day 1.
Smart speakers are commodities.
They dabbled in an EV project, canned it.
They've dabbled in AR with the VisionPro but really it's too early, if it will ever work.
AI is software not hardware.
Apple smartphones/tablets/watches have essentially killed 10x more hardware categories than have come into existence since.
They sell a lot of headphones I guess.
The only consumer electronics I buy now outside Apple are basically higher end niche hobbyist stuff in for example music or photography. Nothing that would ever sell at the price levels ($200-1000) or volumes (billions) to move the needle for Apple.
If you are still using bluetooth headphones as they existed 10+ years ago, and haven't tried using apple headphones with an apple computer/phone, you are missing a massive quality of life upgrade in terms of basically never having to do the pairing dance again after your initial purchase.
You don’t have to do that with non-Apple headphones either.
The bigger problem with Bluetooth headphones is that the batteries are non-replaceable, so consumers are incentivized to throw them out every few years (just like smartphones).
Some non-Apple headphones can pair to more than one device, but there's usually a hard limit, and it's fairly small. And you have to set each up separately.
Apple headphones will roam between all Apple devices that you own, and it pretty much "just works".
Of course, as soon as you step out of their ecosystem, not only you have to pair manually again, but it can only be paired to a single non-Apple device at a time.
This is something I have said for a while. A lot of the fields they are in now are largely 'solved'. Not saying there cannot be improvements but we are well into the diminishing returns phase.
There is absolutely no risk of Apple going under any time in the next few decades but the era of rapid progress is over.
Things like Daylight could be really great if the software was more tailored to the device. And even then, you are right, I don't think it will ever be anything more than niche. It is the kind of product that if it absolutely struck a chord would be 10% of the market absolute tops.
Nothing wrong with that though. It is good to be a part of stable but solid market rather than trying to dominate it and fail.
What would be awesome is to have a double screen device. OLED on the front, eink on the back. So you could operate in simple mode if you want or use the sharp screen for photos when needed.
I believe the manufacturer Sharp is working right now on displays which will have both modes in the same screen, so no need to flip your device around.
That's like the people saying retina/HiDPI displays would only be niche, or that portable computing devices would only be niche. Good outside usable displays would revolutionize the world – especially in places that get a lot of sun. And Apple is probably the only company which would be able to capitalize on that with a "new" category of product. It's not different than people needing clothes for cold weather and for warm weather. Right now we only have indoor clothes...
Retina/HiDPI are almost entirely better than the alternative without them. The "almost" is just because of increased processing and power needs, which pretty quickly became insignificant. They took over because there's no real compromise. You pick the one that's better in all circumstances.
A display that's better outdoors and worse indoors is never going to take off. Approximately nobody wants to carry two phones just so that they can see the screen a little better while they're waiting for the bus. Current screens are good enough for outdoor use, even if not great.
> A display that's better outdoors and worse indoors is never going to take off.
That's not what I'm suggesting. We already have those displays. What I'm saying is that once they have the technology to make a great outdoors display without too many compromises on the other parts, then they have an entirely new category of device to replace the old, and to sell hundreds of millions of units.
> Approximately nobody wants to carry two phones just so that they can see the screen a little better while they're waiting for the bus.
You're arguing like you live a limited life, which I'm sure is not the case, you're just arguing in that way in the quote above. People want to be outdoors much more than just to wait for the bus. And approximately 100% of the people who work with computers would prefer to do it in a well-lit environment. Offices and living rooms are currently constructed to shield from light, to let people see their computer or TV screens better.
Not to forget the people who actually work outdoors and need to check blueprints, take orders, or whatever. Bring your laptop to the park on a sunny day and try to use it. It won't be pleasant for your eyes even in the shadow.
> see the screen a little better
It's not a little, it's a lot. Try comparing your phone screen out in the sun with a sheet of paper with something written or printed. The paper is much brighter.
> Current screens are good enough for outdoor use, even if not great.
They are absolutely awful, and you need to compare in real life with better screens or paper to get a feel for it.
This is why I originally wrote that Apple is the right company to bring this kind of technology to the masses. They understand that the general public will buy products that are great to use, not products which are capable of being used if the user suffers all the time.
I guess I misunderstood "needing clothes for cold weather and for warm weather. Right now we only have indoor clothes..." as suggesting we could have different screens for indoor and outdoor.
I often work outside in the middle latitudes when it's nice out, which usually means sunny. My laptop's display is fine in the shade. If I was desperate, I could use one of those third-party apps that enables HDR mode for all content to get it brighter than 100%, but so far I haven't needed it.
Which screens are you using outdoors? There's a pretty wide range of maximum brightness out there, so your experience will vary considerably depending on your specific hardware. A Dell Pro 16 laptop (picked arbitrarily from dell.com, I know nothing about it otherwise) display does 300 nits. My laptop does 1,000 nits, 1,600 with an HDR hack. An iPhone from the past few years will do 2,000. This is a wide range of usability.
If it's sunny outdoors, I use an E-ink display. My Macbook Air does a maximum of 500 nits, but I don't think even 1600 nits is enough, which is the maximum a Macbook Pro can do with some hacking.
It's usable if you really need to, but it's far from good. What's needed is "great" if Apple wants to bring a new category of device to mass market (new as in how iPhone with retina display was new).
> An iPhone from the past few years will do 2,000. This is a wide range of usability.
Billions of people use their phones outside every day, so there's no doubt it's usable. But it's a very very bad experience when the weather is sunny. Just look around you at the people squinting and shading their display with their free hand.
I have a friend who also insisted that modern OLED phones are good for outdoor use, and we tried putting his phone with max brightness next to a Kindle and a white sheet of paper. The difference is night and day. LCD/OLED displays are pathetic next to reflective displays outdoors. And much harder to read.
People say their Acer touchpad is good until they try a Macbook touchpad. They said that lo-DPI displays were good until they saw a Retina/hi-DPI display. They said 1,5 hours of battery was good until Apple started selling 8 hour battery life laptops. Or that entering a passcode was good until Apple introduced Touch ID. Etc etc.
Screen visibility outdoors is a real pain-point with modern electronics, and I think many people would like to pay for a good solution to this problem if it was offered, rather than suffer a bad experience for little reason.
I said “good enough,” which is not quite the same as “good.” They’re usable.
Better outdoor usability is demonstrably a selling point. That’s why newer iPhones have such a high max brightness. And people will certainly like even more. But they’re not going to pay a large amount for it, or accept any loss of indoor capability. It’s not going to be a new category of device, just the same stuff except better in very bright light.
It would be a new category of device in the sense that a significant amount of current device owners will have a very good reason to upgrade and in the case of portable computers and tablets it would change completely how and where they are used. I think that's the main concern of the original question: What next great thing could Apple release to make an additional ton of money again?
I think regular LCD/OLED displays will become fully daylight capable before these specialized displays become high volume. We’re almost there today. My phone and laptop are usable outside in most conditions, but not great in direct sunlight. It’s not really the right technology for that environment, but the R&D money being poured into it is immense.
LCD/OLED displays are hardly usable outdoors or in well-lit spaces, unless you live in a very dark place geographically. They need to become at least twice as bright if not more to be pleasant to use, and by that point battery life and heat starts to become a problem.
But if they are able to make it, I'm all the happier. If Apple manages to make a fully daylight compatible device (whichever display technology), then they will have unlocked sales of hundreds of millions of devices. Because who doesn't want to get out of the cave?
There is no evidence from Apple’s breakout of iPhone revenue that sales or “plummeting”. They are stagnant.
And statistics show that the average person buys a new phone every 3 years. Apple’s laptop sales are also stagnate and not declining.
Most people use laptops - not desktops. There is no six year old laptop that has the combination of speed, battery life, quietness and lack of heat that a modern M series Mac has.
I still have my iPhone 12 Pro that I preordered and got in release day and it still does everything I can ask of it, though the latest Call of Duty runs a bit slow, which is making me want to upgrade. Them not releasing a smart Siri that answers to more than just basic prompts is really hurting them and I can see why investors sued them. There's no reason for me to have to use ChatGPT on an iPhone, I should be able to talk to Siri like she's an actual personal assistant and not just an easier way to check the weather and set a timer.
>Apple is basically a smartphone company at this point
Not entirely correct. Apple is a software sales platform.
Apple have stated that even older phones and iPads and macs will get the new OS26.
Apple realised a long time ago that, as you said, consumers don't have a need to upgrade.
So rather than taking the approach of others, which is to stop OS updates and then also security updates, which would result in compatibility issues. Apple are trying to maintain the largest possible user base.
Google tries to maintain a large user base as well.
The problem Google has is that they’re dependent on phone OEMs to release OS updates, but OEMs mostly don’t make money off software.
They ‘solved’ this by pushing a lot of security and OS features into Google Play Services, so they can update them independently of the OS. Today, you can get new apps and OS features even on older Android versions.
If they are offering value add services, I'd much rather pay for them directly than have them subsidized be ads, sort of analogous to MS Office 365 (ideally with better privacy).
Maybe a direct pay model doesn't have enough reach for a big company in which case hopefully we'll get a Kagi-style paid phone OS from someone.
Unfortunately even if you're paying for the hardware, and paying monthly for iCloud, and paying 30% of every app and in-app purchase Apple still won't give you an ad-free experience.
The cash brought in by ads is concrete, quantifiable, and can be attributed to specific people. The lost sales and eroded brand trust are almost impossible to measure or attribute. This means it's very easy for businesses to (inadvertently) incentivise managers to destroy brand trust in pursuit of profit.
Nobody's every gotten a bonus for their restrained and tasteful decision not to put ads into something.
On top of that, Apple users tend to be in the upper half of the income distribution - like in the USA iPhones are 55-60% of the market, but that skyrockets to well over 80% in the upper income half.
There's a reason advertisers salivate at that (and why Google gives Apple billions to default to Google search).
You missed an important use-case. If my phone lasts for six years and I’m extremely pleased with it, then of course I’m going to buy another one. I’m going to keep doing that indefinitely.
>I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for
What's especially annoying about iphones is that my decade old andriod phones without any os updates work more robustly on the modern web than a 2021 iphone with its original os. You can blame it on chrome dominance. but it's pretty much bullshit if you're a company with Apple's treasure chest and you are no longer able to push out any buy-me features to make up for your outdated build and release cycle.
You’re an outlier. Apple has arguably the best lifecycle in the personal computing space in all of its categories.
They support most devices for 5-7 years, and have a strong incentive to do so as there is a pipeline of used devices into developing markets and their branding and segmentation means their devices have strong resale value.
With your old android, you’re either running an open source stack of some sort, which is out of the reach of most users, or operating on an ancient os that Google or your carrier (or both) has long abandoned that leaves you vulnerable to a variety of issues.
You're not responding to the case I'm specifically talking about. As new major iOS or Android releases have features I could care less about, I primarily only care about critical security releases for the OS I have. Why is it thatI have to install a new OS just to get a updated version of Safari?
Whereas I seem to be able to download usable browsers on older Android phones (with older Android versions installed) from the play store?
These phones are not my primary phones, so I'm less concerned with security and more concerned about them turning into bricks of trash sooner rather than later. A phone that can stay usuable for longer without any os updates versus one that requires os updates to stay usuable should get some points in that category. And it's been my experience that battery life of older phones are negatively affected after os updates anyway, as they are not the targete phones for new OS.
Because it doesn’t make sense with their business model.
My company had some ancient capital equipment that required windows 2000. We had a contract that supported them up until a few years ago. That contract costed a fortune, but made perfect sense for the use case. Nobody is going to pay to keep an iPhone 4 updated.
Note my comment is that you’re an outlier. That doesn’t mean that your needs are flawed, wrong or anything else. It’s just not consistent with the market’s need and represents an addressable market too small for Apple.
Sometimes companies do serve niche markets by rolling them together. Sonim, for example, made a fully waterproof Android phone that was rugged and marketed to public safety and construction customers. It also solved a problem for small customers like mine who had environments where traditional smartphones could trigger an explosion.
I don’t want a phone with design characteristics the lets it operate in a grain elevator. Likewise, I have no desire to operate a phone for many years, and the market, rightly or wrongly, agrees with me.
That's the bare minimum under the new EU Ecodesign Rules. Also for phones this is long, but for PCs/Notebooks this is rather short.
>With your old android, you’re either running an open source stack of some sort, which is out of the reach of most users, or operating on an ancient os that Google or your carrier (or both) has long abandoned that leaves you vulnerable to a variety of issues.
That completely misses the point that old Android Devices still get updated and recent Apps that work well, while Apple blocks their users from enjoying that. No more iOS Updates on Apple usually means no more App Installs/Updates after a short time
2015 Nvidia GTX 970 is such a piece of shit card, no you couldn’t do modern gaming. It has relatively few pipelines, low bandwidth and has no frame generation capability to make anything new playable.
Op said "if you started with a high end card". The GTX 970 was Nvidia's mid-range at the time, and not a great one at that. A 980 Ti or Titan X can still perform reasonably well for a 10 year old card. Even with the 970, the real problem is its low VRAM (and the 3.5+0.5GB fiasco). The AMD RX 480 8G which was comparable but with much more VRAM can still run most games, even if you have to make some compromises.
You absolutely can do modern gaming on it. I literally have 2 friends in our gaming group that are still rocking 970 in their desktops.
They have had to replace the fans on the graphics card a few times and a repaste but other than that they are chugging away.
Also solid lol on "frame generation". Marketing fluff/features like that only exists but because they have run out of real generational performance gains to sell cards with.
And yet it can capably power many classics. Skyrim. Portal 2. Witcher 3. The same argument made above about phone hardware is largely true for gaming. The hallmark of modern gaming (and increasingly television) is sadly one of eschewing artistic creation in favor of monetizing eyeballs and the construction of social phenomena, artificial scarcity.
The comment they replied to was that a ten year old PC can do high end modern gaming. Skyrim and Portal 2 are 14 years old, and Witcher 3 is 10. I don't think a 970 could run Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
> I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly.
Just to be clear your suggesting that your 6 year old iPhone runs a suit of social media apps, full graphics games like Minecraft (or whatever the hell people play these days I don’t know), fitness apps, connects to the latest audio devices like Apple’s AirPods Pro (as an example), works with CarPlay/Android Auto, has wireless charging capability, can place 3D objects in a room to help you plan out a new design, and allows you to use payments features like tap to pay? Plus equivalent camera and video quality?
Because if your phone doesn’t do all of those things and perform as well and have great battery life too, your 6 year old Android phone doesn’t really do what most people use their phones for today.
I don’t know anyone who uses their phone to play full graphics games or use it to plan out interior design, and for everything else, a 6 year old iPhone can most definitely do all of that. I know, because I did all of these things on an iPhone 11 up until earlier this year, and I only replaced it because the charging port was damaged.
Congrats man, but that's not really germane to the point, which is that a 6 year old iPhone adequately satisfies the needs of majority of the population.
An iPhone 11 does indeed do all of those things easily. The only thing it lacks is LiDAR, which I would argue very few people use intentionally and was introduced the following year anyway. Camera of course not going to be equivalent, but still takes stunning photos.
> Just to be clear your suggesting that your 6 year old iPhone runs a suit of social media apps
No, I deleted them all - other than youtube (premium, no adverts). I used to have them 10 years ago though so a 10 year old phone would run them.
> full graphics games like Minecraft (or whatever the hell people play these days I don’t know)
I have a few games to pass the time in some cases, but a touchscreen is rubbish for proper gaming. Sadly some games I had (monkey island rings a bell) seem to have been removed.
> fitness apps
Alas I'm not particularly fit, however I do recall a fitness tracker on windows 3.1, so I imagine that the supercomputer in my pocket can keep track of my heart-rate with the right sensor. I am fairly sure these were all the rage when covid hit 5 years ago so it's a fair bet they'll work now.
> connects to the latest audio devices like Apple’s AirPods Pro (as an example)
Headphones? My 25 year old phone will do that. Bluetooth? I'm fairly sure my 3GS did that. Sadly modern phones don't do wired headphones any more, so have regressed on that metric.
> works with CarPlay/Android Auto
Yes, I had carplay in my 2016 car so any iphone since then will do carplay.
> has wireless charging capability
My 4 year old iphone does that, although I rarely use it. It came out 5 years ago.
> can place 3D objects in a room to help you plan out a new design
I have to admit I have never even considered doing that
> and allows you to use payments features like tap to pay?
Yes. It's face recognition so less convenient than the older phone it replaced which was a touch sensor and also did tap-to-pay, more like "double click, stare at phone, wait, then pay". Apple Pay came out over 10 years ago.
> Plus equivalent camera and video quality?
Equivalent to what? A decade ago Apple were doing big advertising spreads about how good iphones were. I assume phones released 4 years later were at least as good.
Nothing on your list is a feature a phone from about 2016 didn't have, other than magnetic charging, and the 2020 era iphone 12 had that.
You're thinking about how you use your phone, not how most people use their phone. The reason people continue to upgrade their phones isn't always mindless consumerism.
For example, when you write:
> Headphones? My 25 year old phone will do that. Bluetooth? I'm fairly sure my 3GS did that. Sadly modern phones don't do wired headphones any more, so have regressed on that metric.
You're already showing me how you don't understand what people are buying or why they are buying it. You're referencing wired headphones as if anyone besides a tiny group of people wants wired headphones anymore. People are buying AirPods and AirPods Pro - they want them connected to their Apple Watch so they can go for a run with them, and they want new health features that continue to be released for such devices.
Reading these responses reminds me of the "inverse Reddit stock pics". If I were to take these responses seriously, and I don't because they are nonsense, Apple and others would be out of business tomorrow because any old Joe just wants to use their wired headphones and their 10 year old iPhone is JuST aS G00d. It's rubbish.
Here's a good example haha:
> Alas I'm not particularly fit, however I do recall a fitness tracker on windows 3.1
Yea man. That feature existed on Windows 3.1, ergo nobody should or would want to buy the next iPhone. Give me a break. Even so you yourself said you're not particularly fit. What makes you think you know the first thing about why people are buying new phones or new devices as it relates to fitness activities or apps?
Nobody I know buys a new phone until the battery dies on the old one.
Are you saying that modern airpods don't do bluetooth? And aren't supported on the iphone 11? People have used bluetooth headphones for 20 years. Why would apply regress?
> Yea man. That feature existed on Windows 3.1, ergo nobody should or would want to buy the next iPhone.
The point is it's software, which will run just as fine on a supercomputer from 2 years ago as it will on today. What features does an iphone 15 (14? 16? whatever) have that an 11 doesn't have to allow these features?
> The tech spec of every new handset camera is usually an improvement on the previous generation. But even this isn’t a guaranteed sales generator any more.
> “What is definitely happening is that people are holding on to their phones for longer. Back in 2013 there were 30 million phones sold annually,” adds Mr Wood. “This year it will be around 13.5 million.”
> Nearly nine in 10 adults think buying the latest smartphone is a “waste of money”. Research polling 2,000 Britons revealed more than half are “bored” of trying to keep up-to-date with the latest tech. And three in four are no longer willing to pay a fortune to get it. As a result, almost a third intend to spend less on smartphones and other gadgets over the next two years.
> Nobody I know buys a new phone until the battery dies on the old one.
Ok, well now you know one. I buy new phones even when they work just fine.
> Are you saying that modern airpods don't do bluetooth? And aren't supported on the iphone 11? People have used bluetooth headphones for 20 years. Why would apply regress?
You're not familiar with the products, are you? Folks buy products like AirPods Pro (https://www.apple.com/airpods-pro/) because they have features that they want which aren't necessarily compatible with older phones, for a variety of reasons.
> > Nearly nine in 10 adults think buying the latest smartphone is a “waste of money”. Research polling 2,000 Britons revealed more than half are “bored” of trying to keep up-to-date with the latest tech. And three in four are no longer willing to pay a fortune to get it. As a result, almost a third intend to spend less on smartphones and other gadgets over the next two years.
Most people say the same thing about social media but can't be bothered to delete the accounts that they supposedly never use. I don't think this is relevant to the main point I made which was that people do in fact use their phones for more than "the basics" and they (not me) justify the purchase of a new phone for new features. Your iPhone 11 isn't the same phone as an iPhone 16. The iPhone 16 has a better camera, has different chips, different and better features, etc. and many folks take advantage of those features.
> The point is it's software, which will run just as fine on a supercomputer from 2 years ago as it will on today. What features does an iphone 15 (14? 16? whatever) have that an 11 doesn't have to allow these features?
If you don't know what the difference is between an iPhone 11 and an iPhone 16, then why are you commenting here? You're basically saying "I don't know anything about these phones, but I am sure that people don't need the new one because it's no different, but I also can't tell you the difference or anything about them". Do you not see how asinine that is?
> Most people say the same thing about social media but can't be bothered to delete the accounts that they supposedly never use.
Well, yes, I guess it would be safer to delete them, but I presume most people just forget about having them once they stop using it (like you just reminded me that I do have several Facebook accounts).
But are any of those things a strong enough motivator to warrant the average person paying several hundred dollars more for an incrementally improved device?
You haven't really made a strong argument for why a user might upgrade specifically and immediately for those features, besides that they exist. Certainly the average person is upgrading over time as components break or fail, but why is it that you think the average person is still upgrading regularly for any of the things you listed?
> I have a 6 year old phone that was cheap when it was new, and it still runs 100% of what I use my phone for, and most people use their phones for, perfectly.
They made the claim, you should ask them for evidence instead.
Given that Apple continues to create new features that are only available on certain iPhones and market those functions and features heavily, we can guess that people buy new iPhones at least in part for those features.
We also know that not all features available on an iPhone today are available on all iPhones. For example, the original iPhone doesn't have the chipset required to do tap-to-pay transactions. The iPhone 11 (I'm guessing it's 6 years old and the one OP was referring to) can't play whatever the latest games are with the same performance with respect to graphics and battery life, as another example. While I don't care, many people do and spend quite a lot of money gaming on their iPhones. Think about all the new accessories that people use as well.
I don't want to suggest that I necessarily find those things valuable or that they are a reason to upgrade, but it seems very weak to suggest that other people don't value those things.
That's supply and demand I suppose. As demand for lightning dwindles due to a decreasing number of people actively using devices with lightning ports, the price will tend to drop. That's not an invalid reason to prefer lightning over USB-C, but it's not sustainable. Production of lightning accessories is probably at or near 0 at this point so the oversupply will not last forever. Enjoy the deals while you can!
The cables tend to cost the same, way more than the cost of manufacture.
If you're buying them in bulk on amazon, usb-c is still more expensive than lightning, but the vast majority of people tend to buy cables when they have either lost, forgotten, or broken their existing cables. Go to a shop at an airport or train station and they'll charge you £20 for a cable, and people but them.
The "apple tax" is irrelevant to the actual amount paid.
Frankly, you might as well. It's an inevitability that you'll have to do that.
If you're talking about charging a phone, the usb-c ecosystem is literally never going to give you even a single instance of annoyance. If you're talking about lightning and laptop sized power delivery then, yes the cables need better labeling, but all of those cables are going to work for charging a phone.
I have an iPhone 8. It does literally everything you've listed, and the battery is cheap/easy to replace. My lg v30, with a battery replacement is about the same (albiet with a custom os since androids didn't get many years of updates back then)
You can't play the latest games with the same performance and battery life on your iPhone 8 (if at all) as you can on the latest iPhone. You might not care about that but there are lots of people who do. Same with pictures. Do you have cinema mode on your iPhone 8? No you don't. For some that's a reason to upgrade - they really care about the features and quality of the camera.
I don't see what the debate is here. This is very obvious and become more obvious and true the older the iPhone is.
The whole forcing a U2 album onto people’s devices thing, which happened shortly after Jobs died, was the first time I, a former Apple fan, sat up and realized “wow, these guys are really losing their taste/tact!” Weird to think that was over a decade ago!
They learned from this but still couldn’t help themselves. There’s massive full screen ads in Apple Music to “preload the F1 the movie album”. At least it’s a choice to load it or not this time, but it’s still extremely disappointing that people paying for Apple Music get shown these ads. I had recently canceled my Spotify subscription because of sponsored content in their app.
>But I think he would’ve been more effective at handling the fall out.
"You're holding it wrong" was about the worst case of "handling the fall out" that I can remember in computing history. Jobs was an absolute laughing stock after he said that.
Yeah, I don't think Jobs was well-equipped for the imminent era of Apple's complete dominance. You could tell he was confused by antennagate, bothered by media coverage, and wished everyone would shut up about it. He's the Underdog CEO, not Monopoly CEO.
I know that wouldn't be a popular opinion but I think you are right.
I do wonder that with Job's bowing out when he did may have been the best thing that could happen to Apples. The visionary made way for the logistic guys to let the next 20 years or so boom.
Job's departed just as most technology fields were starting to move into a more mature state, not entirely there but definitely past peak innovation. This is why I think the Apple Watch is the only thing that I think Job's would have absolutely loved out of Apple over the last decade or so. Would have thought Apple TV+ is very cool but risky, and be disappointed in the lack of progress on iPhone and might have down right hated the Apple Vision due to the hardware limits (bulk).
> I think Jobs makes the same mistake with U2 even if he is at the helm. But I think he would’ve been more effective at handling the fall out.
Perhaps, but there probably would have been more thought over it than just shoving it onto everybody's phone. The problem, I think, is that Apple is *mostly* run by white men over 50 - a demographic that sees U2 as the pinnacle of the rock band. They probably don't even realize that rock bands aren't "cool" anymore. I remember when Apple Music was first announced and Eddy Cue spent far too long "demonstrating" his music library and it fell flat even to the press in his age range. Usually you're best off demonstrating with "timeless" music as music tastes are so personal.
That album still shows up today in jarring ways in Apple Music when you use the Create Station feature because it was on everyone’s phones and their algorithm still isn’t good enough to recognize when one of these things is not like the others.
I agree that was weird - but it was never forced onto your device unless you chose to download that album (it would be like saying a particular album was "forced" onto your spotify when they are ALL available and free - this was just the first "spotify"-style album designed to be streamed not purchased).
It was forced onto your device to the extent that any other of your library songs or iTunes purchases were, whether that worked out to be streamed on demand or downloaded locally. Space was never the issue, forcing bad music in my shuffle play was.
I remember distinctly, because after trying patiently for months then years to get rid of it through official channels, I rage-quit iTunes when that whiny man’s voice started playing again the moment I connected my phone in a rental car. I still won’t touch Apple Music to this day.
For that matter, it still comes back from time to time all these years later:
Apparently, since they have taken down their dedicated removal tool from 11 years ago [0], your remaining recourse is to contact Apple Support and persist through upsell attempts to paid support.
Yeah. One thing I learned working at a Big company is that companies are full of parasites who are there to get their promotion or salary increase and don't give a cat shit about users or mission or values. Honestly it sucked any joy out of my life but I am stuck here because of visa.
Until a company fully supports the combination of top-class engineering + top-class user experience to the exclusion and expulsion of political parasites, this is inevitable. Unfortunately, the ever-expanding blind profit chasing, at the exclusion of everything else, kills the chance of that happening.
You almost need (not going to be definitive because some big companies just need to execute the same operations for hundreds of years) a Jobs or Gates or someone who doesn't believe their own bullshit and is willing to say "this sucks, we're shitcanning it."
What @surgical_fire is describing is the "minimum viable product" for a career. It's the thing that serves the basics on Maslow's Hierarchy.
What @hshshshshsh is describing is anything past that. We briefly exist sandwiched between two eternities -- shouldn't we care about the quality of our time during the thing that takes up the largest quantity of our time?
The problem is that, the issue that @hshshshshsh is pointing out is precisely what makes the minimum @surgical_fire is describing damn near impossible to find.
Because no one gives a shit about users, values, mission, etc, the company suffers and turns into a shit-show, incentivizing people to become more selfish so that they don't get sucked into the vortex of shit.
In order to reach the minimum of a "tolerable" job that doesn't suck up all your free time or make your time there a living hell, the company _must_ engage with at least some of what @hshshshshsh is describing.
This requires some amount of good faith from the majority involved. This is a tricky and fragile thing. It's easy to lose. And thus the cycle begins anew.
Ultimately, we need more people thinking like @hshshshshsh so that we can get what @surgical_fire is describing.
Visionaries and solution oriented devs can’t deliver the kind of quarterly “profitability” that careerist, KPI-chasing, promotion-hungry product managers love to promise.
Apple employee pre, during and post Steve. I was in a lot of meetings with VPs whose tasteless suggestions were shut down immediately with the usual Steve critiques attached.
My recollection is that Eddy Cue got the most critiques, Phil Schiller the least and the rest were in between. Eddy would push back and still get shut down.
When Steve left the last time, it was knives out between these guys with Scott Forstall taking a fall as Tim Cook got ultimatums from everyone including Jony. I imagine loud voices with bad taste are pushing Tim hard. Apple can be an investor darling but Tim has needed to consider an exit and find a strong successor that knows what made Apple great in other ways.
Apple was fairly flat under Steve and meetings could have a fair number of interested parties involved. I can recall numerous weekly UI meetings with several of the people listed above there. Also note that Jony, Eddy and others weren’t always high level. Steve handed out his harsh comments regardless of concern for your level. Steve was a micromanager and was involved in anything that the user came in contact with and more.
To directly address your question, the answer was yes in that if you developed a feature, a demo, or anything Steve wanted to see, you would end up in a forum with a bunch a various levels of employees.
Thinking of C suite meetings happening when Steve was around cracks me up. Steve was always on the move, making edicts, rejecting things, walking into offices, having lunch with people, etc. There was no Jira, Confluence, Agile or any of that. It was a fight to ship by an imposed date or die trying.
>Tim Cook asserted his control over the company, putting his own personnel in place, and now his authority is absolute. Even those few others who remain from the Jobs era, such as “Apple Fellow” Phil Schiller, are overridden by Cook
Jobs was no angel, but he did follow "build great things and profits will come" philosophy. Apple these days is run for profit: profits are clearly first, and good things might accidentally come as well as a side effect.
That would be ok, because competition, except these days the moat is huge: it is very difficult for a new entrant to compete.
True but I guess I don’t find those visionary at all.
Historically Apple refines something common that already exists and makes it cool. The last big thing they made cool was the smartphone, followed by the AirPod pros. I think AirPods really pushed headphones ahead. Do you remember how bad wireless headphones used to be?
So I guess I want that sort of Apple experience. If Apple turned ordinary hardware experiences into premium, that would be nice. AR googles are not ordinary experiences. Smartphones were.
I agree about project titan/cars. That was a behemoth of a failed experiment experiment.
As for vision pro though and I guess even to a little extent the car exploration, it's sort of "safe" and derivative conceptually.
Steve's experiments were often seemingly directly at odds with profitability. Like, one day he may have looked at the extensive lineup with the "Pro Max" etc, and made the call to cut back down to one iPhone model. Or he would, you know, do something ridiculous like make the next Imac's screen round or something.
It's decisions like that which primarily profit driven mega corporations just can't do.
They could do “tacky things” without affecting a whole product category. Arguably they are doing potentially unprofitable experiments in their main product lines, like with the iPhone mini and the upcoming iPhone Air. They just aren’t “tacky”. I think they could go a bit more outside the comfort zone without immediately jeopardizing profitability and incurring the wrath of the shareholders.
Yep, the fundamental design of the iMac hasn't changed much since the iMac G5 in 2004. Yes, it is thinner, a new material and more refined but it is still a box on a stand with a screen.
They are either turbo sensible or doing silly things like Titan/Vision.
You mean the old classic way of doing business where the company focuses on the product and the customer and not the shareholder? What a shocking and novel idea.
I had a 3rd party band-aid sticker on the iPhone 4 I waited in line to buy at the flagship Apple Store in San Francisco. I remember Square handing out aux-input cardreaders for free to me and other line-con attendees pre-purchase. This was jailbreakme times. Cydia pre-exists the Apple App Store on iOS, in case anyone was unaware. Cydia and the wider jb scene used to keep Apple honeset, as Cydia is the original App Store. How the mighty have fallen.
Jobs hated ads. You're right that he never wouldve done what Apple is doing now.
Cook needs to stop listening to investors, like Warren Buffett, because he's letting them wreck Apple's integrity for the sake of making a buck. Apple just isnt user focused like they used to be and it's crappy.
he was vocal about his opposition to intrusive ads in particular. he'd say "You’re either the customer or you’re the product." he believed users paid a premium for apple products and that they should not be subjected to compromises with advertising.
iAd was something that happened right at the end of his life because devs were putting ads in apple apps anyway and he wanted to control how that was done.
this is meant to add context to what bluedevilzn said, btw. it is not a refutation.
Jobs disliked anything where Apple wasn't getting a cut. Flash games and Google ads being two of the biggest offenders in his eyes.
He also "hated" the small tablets Samsung were making, saying in a keynote that you'd have to file your finger down to use it. He said this knowing full well Apple were launching the iPad Mini in 12 months' time.
I really hope one day Jobs' marketer-speak soundbites stop being repeated like like biblical pronouncements. The App Store, Apple News, Stocks and other properties are filled with hideous Google-like ads today, and Jobs likely wouldn't bat an eye, because they brought in money.
I think Jobs recognised that ads are intrusions into people’s lives. The advertiser has a responsibility to respect the audience. They don’t have a natural right to that attention, and have to earn it.
Thats why the F1 wallet add is such a bad move. It’s disrespectful and intrusive.
iAD was supposed to be about innovative, informative, well designed high quality adverts. It never really worked out though.
Yeah, “Jobs hated ads” is a such a wild rewriting of the history of one of industry’s greatest marketers and, yes, ad men. (1984 commercial. Mac vs PC.)
I am curious what you attribute that Warren Buffett is asking Tim Cook to do? Warren is notorious for being hands-off with operations. I can't imagine him having ANY commentary on what Tim Cook should be doing with Apple other than with capital allocation.
Cook is an operations person. He makes the logistics work. He's no visionary. Jobs is a visionary, but is not a logistics person. Apple struck lightning when both existed, to provide complimentary ideas and counterbalances.
Same with Ive and Jobs. Ive was a great designer, but no usability expert. Jobs put practical limits on and as soon as Jobs was gone, Ive got total control. The result is some of the least-popular Mac laptops ever.
I remember when Jobs killed the Herald Square Apple Store even though the lease had been signed and it 'made sense' on paper. When visiting the location it's clear it's a dump and no Apple store will fix that. He put his brand before short term revenue.
Will they though? Where does a privacy-conscious consumer turn? The only other serious option is Android, where Google will eagerly track all the things.
I feel like there’s a taste aspect and also a focus/discipline kind of dimension to it. For the longest, they’d essentialize everything almost brutally: like that whole thing about the iPhone coming with no manual since you didn’t need it. The design only afforded you one right way to find and do things.
This is a toaster, it makes toast. This is Apple TV, it plays TV. This is Apple Wallet, it does what your wallet does.
And that was the magic! Of course the simplicity masked kaleidoscopic technical, commercial, and functional complexity—that’s not new!
This weird cross-promotion is the latest, most crass, symptom; but it almost reads as the metastasis of a deeper disease—namely this urge to cross-pollute between little functional fiefdoms from inside the megacorp, instead of prioritizing the perspective of one user on one tool for one purpose at a time.
I’m actually curious how they were able to exactly filter some of their less promising impulses.
Ive famously wanted the Apple Watch to be a standalone luxury product.
> Jony Ive envisioned the future of the Apple Watch as a luxury product. Not only did he want to build a $25 million lavish white tent to promote the first Watch, but he “regarded a rave from Vogue as more important than any tech reviewer’s opinion.” According to Mickle, “the tent was critical to making the event as glamorous as a high-end fashion show.”
Meanwhile Jobs always seemed to have an obsession with cubes (NeXTcube, Power Mac G4 Cube), no fans and nobody touching his products (the original iPhone “SDK” announcement was a badly received joke).
Is that lack of competence, or lack of motive? Is it a problem from their point of view.
Apple's main user base is not like HN users - not even like the Apple users/advocates here. I have come across many who are too deeply convinced that Apple is hugely ahead of other OSes (often because they assume other OSes capabilities are what they were years ago), and they do not want to adjust to anything that is different from what they are familiar with. They will stay will Apple almost whatever Apple do. Some examples of things Apple users I know have said were advantages of their products:
1. I can copy and paste between my phone and my desktop!
2. There is a terminal app that is so amazing you will want to buy a Mac just to use it. It was roughly similar to terminal apps I have used over many years.
3. If you buy a ticket on your laptop instead of your phone you will have to bring your laptop out to scan at the gate. When I explained my phone syncs selected folders with my laptop the reply was "that is so complicated".
Only the first comment came from a person who is not comfortable with technology - obviously in the case of the second comment!
I loved MagSafe, but after the USB C power, I don't love it. USB C power could go on either side of the laptop, and if I stepped on the cable it still easily disconnected, but MagSafe only goes on one side, which frequently means the cord needs to wrap around the back.
I have been reading the book “apple in China” after hearing the author on a podcast. It has fundamentally altered my view of apple as a company. From a consumer perspective, I thought it was a an amazing company. But looking behind the scenes, I came to understand how morally compromised it has been for a very long time. In retrospect, I feel complicit in things I didn’t understand I was part of.
Anything looks worse when you see behind the curtain. The question is in comparison - who produces technology you want without that behind the scenes behavior (or being dependent on someone else's behind the scenes behavior!)?
It has become increasingly clear that Apple needs a management housecleaning. Their purposeful antagonism of entire geopolitical blocs with anti-developer douchebaggery alone should have resulted in heads rolling.
But Jony Ive was part of the problem. His "taste level" resulted in the embarrassing emoji bar forced on "pro" users, a grossly defective keyboard that crippled Apple computers for five years, a computer with no available ports on it, regressive UI that made products less useful with every revision, battery life so poor that people were crouching in the corners of cafes next to outlets before lunch, the removal of headphone jacks from the best-selling music players... Ive is pompous hack with no ideas for the advancement of products.
Meanwhile, lazy and ignorant pundits have incorrectly lumped Apple into "big tech" with Google, Amazon, and Meta because they can't be bothered to inform themselves (or even think) about the fact that those companies are all gatekeepers to huge swaths of the Internet; Apple is not. And their continual whining about Apple being "behind on AI" further testifies to their laziness and lack of critical thinking.
Nonetheless, Apple has forfeited the high road. They're now another asshole in the club, inviting scrutiny and crackdowns that threaten the value of the company. What are the owners going to do about it?
The point is, when Jobs was around, there was an overarching (unstated?) policy at Apple of “nobody do anything to make us look like cheap tasteless shits”. Whereas now, Tim Cook is very happy to sell out for a quick buck. He's a logistics guy, not a product guy, and at his core is a bean counter; he neither has taste nor appreciates that it has value unto itself.
There were ~60M iPhone users when Jobs was the CEO. There are about ~1.4B right now. Both respectively accomplished very respectable things. It’s not selling for a quick buck if he was able to scale the business to such degrees. That being said, I agree that Apple makes a lot of wrongs.
One google shows that’s considered the “current active user” count, not total sales. 2.3 billion by Jan 2024 (so more now) is the estimate for total sales.
I used a llm to sum your percentages and counted only 785,644,479 people. That's just over half the 1.4B claim.
However, it also linked to articles that showed that as of 2025, there are approximately 1.38 to 1.56 billion active iPhone users worldwide. So the percentages may be misleading but the number is correct.
Part of the appeal of Apple was that not everyone and their mom just had an Apple device. They heavily played on that, similar to how fashion does. That "exclusivity" (sort of) is gone now, and it shows with Apple trying to create likable, noncontroversial designs for the larger crowd. They try to make up for it with prices, but it misses the point.
I promise you, in 2005, everyone and their mom had an iPod. If you couldn’t afford the full fat iPod, you bought any of the various cheaper stripped down models. If anything, Apple has gotten more exclusive through their pricing.
Jobs had won complete cultural dominance of desktop pcs with the iMac 27". If you saw a desktop on a tv show for the past 20 years it was an iMac 27". Tim saw they could cancel it and go against their policy of minimal cords and sell separate Mac minis and Mac Studio displays.
The entire reason Apple made devices that were a level above competitors is because the design wasn’t just the aesthetic. Ive was chief designer and so obviously had a key impact.
It might be a complete misinterpretation but it seems like Ive went completely haywire when Job's was gone with the ultra thin, portless, overheating Macs with a crappy keyboards and pointless touch bars that sort of looked cool but provided no other real value.
Neither did your second sentence, and you still wrote it. Sometimes we write things down to draw attention to the fact, not to inform a naive audience of facts that they did not know.
Those of us that have been long enough around, see this Apple like the one when Steve Jobs was busy at NeXT.
The only difference is that now they are decades away to ever worry about insolvency, yet the lack of direction and management entitlement as being the best, feels quite similar.
Is this really that different than pushing an immutable U2 album into your itunes account years ago? "liking Apple" is a weird position; they're several generations away from when you could identify the company with actual people, and anthropomorphizing the company at this point seems wild.
Ads are planed to come to every single wallet out there. Card companies, merchants, and tech companies are working on this together. Apple just thought it would be a good idea to be the first to launch it. Soon it will be a norm and everyone will forget about it or even find it useful.
I like Apple, so I’m really hoping they bring on someone to solve this. Otherwise they’re on track to be the same as every other tasteless tech company.
More on taste and Apple: https://www.readtrung.com/p/steve-jobs-rick-rubin-and-taste