this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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Apple
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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.
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
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.
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.