With the VisionPro hype already dead (maybe forever?), bad or tasteless iPad ads, purposeless updates to iPad, Apple dropping their car project, and reaching out to OpenAI or Google for AI services … it certainly feels like it to me. They’ve at least run into their limitations recently however much they want to find the “next iPhone”.
With the VisionPro, I always thought it’d flop and so predicted that it’d be the end for Cook. I’m still holding onto that prediction.
I think they’ve hit a point where they’re doing more for shareholder value than for customers.
They’re so scared of iPad chewing into Mac sales that they’ve hobbled iPadOS, leaving it just useful enough to encourage people to buy both. They’re continuing to offer base 8gb RAM, despite it costing them pennies to increase that to 16gb, because they like the money they make from charging for upgrades.
They’re one of the world’s most valuable companies, and they’ve got there by shortchanging customers as much as possible over the past 15 years.
In many ways, I have no problem with what they charge for their devices. What they make is (generally) very high quality and can last for a long, long time. The likes of Amazon and AliExpress have given us a false sense of how expensive things should be.
But I do have a problem with feeling like I’m not getting the most from my purchase.
Like, I have a 6th gen iPad mini. It’s a great little device. But I can’t help thinking how much more useful it could be if Apple had allowed Stage Manager and external display support on it. But why would they when a 256gb version of it puts it on par with a Mac mini. For the majority of what I do, I could be happy with my iPad hooked up to a display, with the ability to side load apps, a la macOS, and the ability to be portable. But Apple don’t want people buying the cheapest they can work with when they can charge twice for both a Mac and and iPad. So they’ve intentionally hobbled the iPad.
And that’s a problem for me.
The likes of Amazon and AliExpress have given us a false sense of how expensive things should be.
I think that’s a strong point, especially when you look at devices like smart speakers with voice assistants or TV steaming sticks. Those devices should not be $30. If you consider a 3x markup over the cost of parts to be a pretty standard rule of thumb to remain profitable for a consumer electronic product those devices should be a lot closer to $100. When they’re not it should be raising red flags about the company using information gathered from you to make their profits.
I suppose there’s no guarantee that Apple isn’t also collecting that data, but the pricing on those devices in a competitive market seems a lot more consistent with a company that needs a product to make a profit in a more traditional manner. Of course, they take a cut on subscriptions sold through the device, but I suspect that’s not as reliable per-device as a game console collecting a license fee for every device sold.
When they’re not it should be raising red flags about the company using information gathered from you to make their profits.
I suppose there’s no guarantee that Apple isn’t also collecting that data, but the pricing on those devices in a competitive market seems a lot more consistent with a company that needs a product to make a profit in a more traditional manner.
This nicely describes the way I think of Apple - they’re not an advertising company first like google is, their business model is selling overpriced hardware and hustling devs on the App Store, so they “don’t need” to sell my data too. But then there’s like a big asterisk on the whole thing that says remember they are a trillion dollar company which means they’re almost certainly doing it anyway.
Apple has been like this for ages now though. They succeeded despite of it, not because of it. What OP is suggesting (I think) is that there’s less positives and those historically outweighed Apple’s anti-consumer practices.
They weren’t like this under Jobs.
They were, they just weren’t massive enough for it to be as obvious or egregious as it is now.
I mean, I remember buying my first Macbook in 2007 and only speccing it with 1gb of RAM because what they were charging to double it to 2gb was eye-watering compared to what I paid online. Same with storage. They only get away with it now because they solder everything on.
But while I never like to be all “Steve would never…” I do wonder whether they’d have walked a more fine line if he was still around. Some of the shit they’re pulling now feels downright hostile, where his approach was to make Apple the more friendly of the computer companies.
Well yeah it was a moot point when they were upgradeable.
And you could argue that they were only upgradeable because they hadn’t at that point, figured out how to make it not.
Certainly soldering chips to the motherboard wasn’t an unknown technology to apple in 2007?
yeah. 2010 was sorta the end for me.
I’m not sure. IIRC pricing structure that pushes you to upgrade to high tier hardware was there under Jobs as well. And they’d solder RAM if it was a thing back then too - they always purposefully gimped base models.
They’ve been in a slump for a while in terms of product innovation. Technically though, they’re designing some of the best processors on the planet for the past 4-5 years or so. They recently beat Intel on single core performance (which was the last thing Intel still had over everyone else)
Apple aren’t going anywhere, and if you look at the stock ticker, wall street doesn’t think so either.
I don’t think it’s going anywhere either but Warren Buffet did sell his position in Apple. The M1 for sure is/was a hit but other than that they seem more focused on extracting every penny from customers, rather than providing the best products possible. I guess we’ll see how it works out as a long term strategy.
they seem more focused on extracting every penny from customers, rather than providing the best products possible.
Funnily I actually see them doing the opposite of this currently.
They’ve always been a company that extracts the most they can from their target demographics. It was a meme for a long time that apple hardware was overpriced rubbish that was wrapped up in a shiny (thermally badly designed) box, and until the recent shift, that’s kinda mostly tracked as true.
What we’re seeing differently now though, is they’re actually putting some of the best hardware in the industry in their machines, combined with the (now much colder) shiny box, suddenly the value proposition starts to make a lot more sense outside their usual demographics
Eh, kinda. The macbooks still come with 8gb non replaceable memory and the upcharge for another 8gb is $200 (not just for the air but the $1600 pro too). These are still great laptops but the pricing feels hostile.
IPad hardware is brilliant but what’s the point? You’re stuck with a neutered OS and a handheld formfactor that is not especially suitable for work or for gaming (the fields that usually need more power).
The baseline iphones are still lacking basic features like a high refresh screen purely for product segmentation purposes. And once again a slew of hostile, anti-user and anti-developer decisions like banning sideloading or alternative browser engines mainly designed to lock down the OS so they can retain all control of what goes on on your device. Another way this control is used is to funnel you to use icloud which offers an introductory free tier of 5(?) GB of data. I don’t think I had a single relative that didn’t have the “your icloud storage is full” popup every day until we disabled photo backups or they started paying a monthly subscription.
The app store is also a disaster. Just open it and search for something, I’m not even going to say more. This is an obvious profit vs user experience tradeoff.
Airpods are more or less fine. I had a gen1 Airpods pro which were kinda category defining at the time. Competition has caught up however, also better repairability would be nice. I’m actually surprised you were allowed to use them without an iPhone.
Apple watch seems fine, still no 3rd party watchfaces. The locked down OS is somewhat more justified in this case.
I haven’t tried the vision pro but that is also locked down software wise.
Overall, as you said, the hardware is good to best-in-class but it feels to me that at every turn you are being pushed and manipulated into giving more of your cash to Apple sometimes in the form of product segmentation, sometimes via artificial software limitations.
You don’t get to be a trillion dollar company just by making good products.
I think you make a point, but their recent customer-side choices have been more hostile than usual. I like Apple’s hardware; and I buy their products, but their insistence on delivering barely-usable entry level products is even greater than before. Especially with the AVP, they could have actually made it into an incredible value proposition as a MacBook replacement, instead both the hardware and the OS is somewhat meh
If we’re being fair, they made the one of the most impressive devices in that category currently - it’s just that category doesn’t really have the tech behind it to deliver what most people want as usable. I do agree though if they had marketed as a VR headset it would have been personally more interesting, but the true vision of the AVP category has yet to be fully realized by any company.
I agree. But for me personally, the fact that VisionOS seems to be an iOS port rather than MacOS is already enough to make me incredibly reserved as far as excitement goes. The hardware seems great, but software wise they seem to be attempting to push out more and more mobile-first devices, rather than a useful productivity device.
Because they can make more money from the walled garden of i/Pad/VisionOS. They can’t take their cut of apps installed on a Mac outside of the App Store, and they hate that.
Classic Apple being Apple. Maybe one day they’ll come (or be forced to come) to their senses, but I doubt it. In short, computing is fucked.
Sure, by the unrealistic standards late-stage capitalism Apple is falling behind. But in the scheme of things, they are still one of the most profitable/successful companies. They still have enough money to keep innovation, development, and their retail spaces open.
There are successful companies that make a single product, and have been doing so for 50 years. I wish the view on companies would shift back to that being more the norm.
There are successful companies that make a single product, and have been doing so for 50 years. I wish the view on companies would shift back to that being more the norm.
I’m with you there.
Amen. It has become so normalized to treat company health like Ricky Bobby treats Nascar races, “if you’re not first you’re last” “if your not more profitable this quarter than last then your going out of business”.
Apple is in a weird spot. They’re probably sitting on a metric shit-ton of cash, and happily bucked the trend of laying off their employees (for a while). They were in a position to grow and expand as a tech company, while everyone else was restricting themselves.
Sadly, they haven’t looked to solidify their position for years, and outside of the Apple Watch, there have been very few true innovations from Apple for a long time. Apple actually have an extensive applied ML science team (source: have worked with them), but like many of their divisions, they just don’t have the faith to pull the trigger and truly invest in them.
Apple right now just…kinda exist. They make shareholders a lot of money, and they churn out incremental updates that keep fans happy, but is that a tactic for long-term success, or a sign of a business that’s out of direction?
They still got their cash cows iPhone and Mac, and I don’t expect these two to go away anytime soon. Their biggest struggle is to establish new product lines other than their main ones.
It’s not only Apple who’s struggling with this. Most of big tech are in the same position. For example, Meta and metaverse.
Although I’m sceptic of the Vision product line, I wouldn’t write it off just yet. They’ve just launched the first version and we don’t know yet how future versions will look like.
Although I’m sceptic of the Vision product line, I wouldn’t write it off just yet. They’ve just launched the first version and we don’t know yet how future versions will look like.
Thing is, they’re leaning hard into it, which makes sense if they’re going to make any progress in that space in part because it aligns with their strengths. But the big question is whether “spatial computing” is there yet? And that’s the elephant in the room here and where I think there was a lack of wisdom on the part of the execs. As good as Apple have made the Vision Pro, the tech just isn’t there yet as you still need a large device hanging off of your face.
Not to “if Steve Jobs were still alive” this too much … but I think of the whole stylus v fingers thing here. To blow up as a new “form factor”, it likely has to feel natural and seamless. Which means it probably has to be tantamount to wearing a pair of glasses or small goggles. If improvements of that magnitude are on the table, then yea, maybe the 3rd gen could be interesting. But if not, it’s looking to me increasingly like another Apple Newton where they just go too hard too early on something.
in my opinion, the experience of the vision pro is magical enough now hardware-wise, but the lack of killer apps and the price are too painful. of course the hardware will get much better over time too, i figure the cpu/gpu/networking etc will be down the wire on the hip so the glasses are just display and sensors.
Agreed. The demo is stunning. But this is the developer version. Look at the IPhone vs the iPhone 6.
Yes and no.
Apple used to be something of a design innovator which the rest of the market would follow. It has this reputation for creating product categories that didn’t exist. That’s not quite true and is rewriting history, what it was good at was design.
What it did was take a product and design a high quality cutting edge of that and make bank. It started with Mp3 players - there were many of them before the iPod but the iPod did very well because it was a good design with some nice features. Then it made the iPod Touch - which again wasn’t the first but was by far the best and really a mini ipad.
The iPhone wasn’t the first touch screen phone, but it was a huge leap in usability and power and they did extremely well out of that. The ipad wasn’t the first tablet but again it was a huge leap in usability and design and they did very well. The imac and later mac books were attractive designs rather than innovative.
Now there isn’t really any areas left for them to work that strategy on. The Mp3 player, the phone, the ipad - they were obvious product categories that existed but were far away from what they could be.
VR is the remaining obvious tech frontier - but the difference is the technology isn’t quite there yet. It’s obvious what the ultimate VR device should be - a light weight, high fidelity unit that immersed you. Other manufacturers are either making PC tethered devices with high fidelity or mobile devices with low fidelity,as the tech isn’t quite economical or right for the sweet spot.
Apple Vision Pro is a gamble on trying to secure that sweet spot. It’s not intended to do well currently, it’s intended to build up the manufacturing supply chain which should bring down the cost over time. Vision 2 or 3 will what they’re hoping takes off. It’s a new spin on their old strategy.
Most of what Apple does now though is just release fresh spins of its current products. They don’t innovate but it’s hard to when there isn’t much left to improve on those product categories. All they can do is make the devices more powerful and lighter, and compete with companies who have now learned all the tricks and offer similar products for cheaper.
Vision may or may not win the VR wars. Otherwise there isn’t really much else for Apple to go in consumer electronics. Now it is focused on “services” - selling apps, selling media - and organically growing it’s user base. Big leaps in consumer electronics probably won’t come until there is a big innovation in battery technology - that’s the holy grail of tech at the moment.
Yea. They have been treading water to concentrate resources on Tim’s Apple Vision. Just incremental product bumps (thinner! faster!) and a real dearth of innovation in UI. I expect things to change when Tim finally retires. I hope we get Federighi as the new CEO because he is younger and seems enthusiastic.
Yes. They are not run by a visionary.
I miss going to the Apple Store in 2009. So many cool new toys
Not if you afford it.
This question makes me feel like a fanboi because I think they’re doing great. And I don’t understand the fuss about the ad: I thought it was excellent. I understand the words of people who are offended but that does t mean I understand why they are offended - it was a fun commercial, on point for squeezing all those creativity tools into one very thin package
- all the family share stuff is really heading in a fantastic direction - shared apps, subscriptions and purchases, shared Apple cash, shared password management, etc
- it’s fantastic that they’re trying to do on-device ai - they almost sold me on the iPad Pro just to better support that. I’ll probably get the Air to replace my old iPad, and grumble when it drops out of support a year earlier
- Vision Pro seems like a big success and right where they want it - as seeds to developers to see if they can make this baby fly. The hype from all the streamers was never realistic, always going to die off right away. Even reports of all the returns really seem like streamers riding the hype train but never intending to buy. The experience is there, now it’s up to the developers
- I’m loving their approach of developing medical sensors on the watch and plan to update when the get one of my big asks or fix the one they were forced to turn off
- they’re enshittifying slower than everyone else - I’m waiting to see if there’s a new Apple TV release this year but my Firestick has become unusable with ads and data collection, as has my TV, and chrome stick, so my only hope is Apple TV. If I can’t get back to enjoying video with that I swear I’m done with anything tv-like
- I even feel like I’m getting good value from the Apple subscriptions I pay for and am willing to pay more, while it seems like everyone else wants me to drive me away
- I was excited upgrading my iPhone for the matter/thread support - does any other phone have a Thread radio? The improved device finding, the huge improvement in photo processing speed. But for the first time ever, I’m excited about the next one already - on-device Ai!!!
- AppleCard and Apple Savings are so much nicer than dealing with regular banking apps. Heck, I earn a higher interest rate in my savings than I pay on my mortgage - that’s never before happened. I only hope they don’t lose features when they change banks
Holy crap, who is writing all this?
Holy crap, who is writing all this?
LOL. No worries!
they’re enshittifying slower than everyone else - I’m waiting to see if there’s a new Apple TV release this year but my Firestick has become unusable with ads and data collection, as has my TV, and chrome stick, so my only hope is Apple TV. If I can’t get back to enjoying video with that I swear I’m done with anything tv-like
My “smart TV” is an Apple TV 3 which was released 2012 (and bought ~2015). It’s still going fine. It hasn’t had an OS update for ages. For a while, Apple streaming/tv/movies had a bug that would crash it pretty regularly. But that disappeared, meaning they probably fixed things on their backend. While a number of services have stopped supporting it (youtube and netflix, notably), streaming from a phone works perfectly well and Amazon TV still supports it (or works) indicating that there’s nothing wrong with it at all.
it’s fantastic that they’re trying to do on-device ai - they almost sold me on the iPad Pro just to better support that. I’ll probably get the Air to replace my old iPad, and grumble when it drops out of support a year earlier
I agree. I hope they persist with this.
There’s so many personal devices one may need, but I don’t think they’re in a slump just because one product they released didn’t work. Apple Silicon has been pretty revolutionary and it was only a few years ago.
It’s too early to say Vision Pro is dead. It is highly constrained by component production. Apple physically cannot produce enough to merit a marketing campaign. For now, it is a public devkit, and I don’t expect the software to be fully baked until 3.0.
For many years now, Apple has been sustaining its quasi-monopoly in the smartphone ecosystem by drip-feeding features that have been part of the baseline for other brands, and having the most hard-core blinkered Apple cultists proselytize about what innovations they (supposedly) represent. This advantage doesn’t exist in the silicon or VR markets. They’ve managed to keep their CPU successful because it’s built on existing technology and because of vendor lock-in, but the Vision Pro didn’t have the same training wheels and ate shit right at launch.
In case it isn’t obvious, I don’t have many positive feelings towards Apple.
From a financial standpoint i would never bet against them, but personally i haven’t liked the direction they’ve gone since Jobs died. But I’m obviously in the minority, because they’ve sold gabillions under Cook, including brand new product categories like the watch, airpods, and apple music. IMO none of those are particularly special, but whether it’s Apple’s marketing machine or something i dunno, but the fact is those are all new product categories and they’ve all sold very well.
