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Ask HN: Why are there not more Apple-quality products?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are there not more Apple-quality products?

#61

Post by smitty1e »

I submit that there is a spectrum of product quality in many product categories.

Perhaps your question could be repackaged as: "Why is there generally a standard normal distribution of products in a category?".

Thinking about a market this way leads one to understand that businesses stake out segements of that market distribution, and compete to target those to the left and right in their relentless quests for global domination.

Therefore, the lack of Apple-quality products may be related to the lack of competitors with capability/vision to make a business plan work out there in the right tail of the distribution where Apple hangs out.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there not more Apple-quality products?

#62

Post by pwinnski »

I often think that Apple's real innovation with iPhone was how they contracted with Cingular before they were acquired by AT&T, and managed to completely bypass almost everything that was horrible at the time about phones. I think competitors have undervalued that fact, and so you end up with premier Android smartphones for which updates are rolled out at different times for the same model depending on carrier agreements.

Apple either owns or controls the entire pipeline from the mines where minerals are extracted to the palm of your hand, and it doesn't seem like any other company does, or even realizes the benefit of doing so.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there not more Apple-quality products?

#63

Post by pwinnski »

Comevius wrote: post #8

Apple makes mistakes too with it's many hardware-related and boot loop issues. The iPhone X was practically a lemon.

My iPhone X served me faithfully for five years without issue until I replaced it with an iPhone 14 Pro. A lemon? They seem to have sold 63 million[0] of just that model alone, which was introduced the same year as the normal iPhone 8, so it made up one-third of all sales that generation. Your comment is the first I've heard of any issues with the model.

I don't know what definition of "lemon" one could use to make it fit. I mean, iPhone X outsold every Android device other than the Galaxy SIII and S4, introduced five and four years prior.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph...

Re: Ask HN: Why are there not more Apple-quality products?

#64

Post by kcplate »

Test0129 wrote: post #38

I'm not being facetious here but I have no idea what you mean by "apple quality". I've been using Macbook Pros for a long time. In my opinion "Apple Quality" died way back in 2013, possibly 2015. After that, they started introducing user-hostile phones, laptops, etc. The touchbar is a travesty and now you have to pay more money to have a normal experience. The feeling of the laptops and aesthetics are nice but the pa…

Both my iphone my MBA are now 4 years old. Both are absolutely fine and short of accidental damage I expect them to last me at least another couple of years. In all the time I have been forced to use windows laptops that were of “premium” quality, I have never ever had one last into its third year.

So could it be that pre-2015 apple products were better quality? Probably. However, I don’t think we can say that current Apple products since 2015 are inferior to their android or laptop counterparts. They may be inferior to themselves, bt I think their builds are still superior to everything else.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there not more Apple-quality products?

#65

Post by Test0129 »

traceroute66 wrote: post #47
Test0129 wrote: post #38

I'm not being facetious here but I have no idea what you mean by "apple quality". I've been using Macbook Pros for a long time. In my opinion "Apple Quality" died way back in 2013, possibly 2015. After that, they started introducing user-hostile phones, laptops, etc. The touchbar is a travesty and now you have to pay more money to have a normal experience. The feeling of the laptops and aesthetics are nice but the pa…

> Apple produces garbage products. That's pure Apple bashing BS. It could be refuted in so many ways, but I'll pick an easy one. Apple silicon Macbooks Pros. They have no competition. The nearest competition you can find needs to be plugged into the mains, and even then it doesn't perform as well as Apple.

I personally wont buy into macs walled garden for M1, I think a lot of technically competent people agree with me. In exchange for a superior chip I get an user-hostile experience and lock-in. Hard pass.

Apple has first mover advantage. It won't be long before everyone is running M1-like chips and Apple will be back to making the same consumer nonsense they are now. Thats why I didn't mention. It's a big selling point if you want to buy a $2800 machine. I'm a professional programmer and have never needed more than an Intel mac. Maybe for designers it matters but it's just not that cool to me. I didn't even get around to mentioning the wireless mouse. The fact that I have to charge it flipped over because, as stated, charging in a standard way "ruins the aesthetic" is completely on-brand with Apple's BS.

Apple bashes themselves just fine. Nothing I said was BS. By and large Apple produces inferior products to their competition and their name brand and walled garden sell the stuff for them. Apple products look fantastic, have an allure that says "I have money", and lack practical functionality. Apple products are a luxury. Identifying you're a member of a cult is the first part of breaking free of it.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there not more Apple-quality products?

#66

Post by lotsofpulp »

Someone wrote: post #5
lotsofpulp wrote: post #3

Barrier to entry is very high (lots of expensive man hours to design and program device), and the people with sufficient money are not willing to bet they can sufficiently outcompete Apple and existing Android phone makers on cost to quality ratio to make a sufficient return in investment. Microsoft was halfway there, opened up retail stores, had a working product they could keep improving, and then pulled the plug.…

> Microsoft was halfway there I see that more as “on a way there, without knowing how far they were, and even without being sure the road they were on would not reach a dead end”. What makes you think they were halfway? Even if there are good arguments now that they were, could they have known them at the time?

Most importantly, Microsoft had and has a secure source of tens of billions of dollars of profit with which they can fund development of a product to compete with Apple.

If Microsoft could not, then there simply is no non governmental entity that can. By halfway there, I am just speculating, but given that they are one of the eminent employers of programmers in the world, as well as having strong relationships with hardware designers, I assume they had the capacity to iterate over and over to eventually catch up to Apple.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there not more Apple-quality products?

#67

Post by tdeck »

malermeister wrote: post #37
srk_hn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a lie that often gets repeated over and over, but I have firsthand anecdotal experience of how this is not true. My mother has no formal education and when she was given an Android she struggled to do basic things. Once she got an iPhone it was night and day and an entire world was opened to her and she was able to use and discover her phone with almost no handholding. That has still not changed with the late…

Counterpoint: The way that every single screen on iOS has a separate "back" button you need to look for vs just having it unified by the OS is an incredibly frustrating UX.

I'm not sure why someone downvoted this. Every time I use a friend's iPhone I find this frustrating. Like anything else it's something you get used to either way, but "back" is such a common action that it makes sense to have a unified way to do it.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there not more Apple-quality products?

#68

Post by DerekBickerton »

Test0129 wrote: post #38

I'm not being facetious here but I have no idea what you mean by "apple quality". I've been using Macbook Pros for a long time. In my opinion "Apple Quality" died way back in 2013, possibly 2015. After that, they started introducing user-hostile phones, laptops, etc. The touchbar is a travesty and now you have to pay more money to have a normal experience. The feeling of the laptops and aesthetics are nice but the pa…

> I'm not being facetious here but I have no idea what you mean by "apple quality"

OP said this: 'Android phones still feel like cheap plastic to me'. That's the difference. They break easily and a single drop can impair your phone, unlike an iPhone which can survive a nuclear blast. iPhones are the new Nokias.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there not more Apple-quality products?

#69

Post by Siddarth1977 »

jonathanyc wrote: post #32
Siddarth1977 wrote: post #9

Maybe try... a good Android phone? This question is silly. The Pixel or any top-end Samsung is equivalent or better than the iPhone in hardware. The Android and iOS user interfaces are similar enough that it's mostly personal preference and familiarity.

OP, this reply to your question ought to give you some insight: many people simply can't tell the difference. And if you can't tell the difference, you certainly won't budget resources towards making Apple-quality products. Then you'll spend years wondering why Apple has such ridiculous profit margins before coming to the erroneous conclusion that it must just be everyone else that's wrong.

This is a weird take. I can certainly tell all sorts of differences between Apple and non-Apple products.

A short list of the major things that I think set Apple-quality apart: Zero effort towards backward-compatibility or longevity, just force users to buy new hardware constantly. Actively hostile towards hardware interoperability, just force users to buy adapters. Actively hostile towards independently developed software and interoperability, just steal ideas to incorporate into an apple-owned product or use marketing to convince your users they're superior for being locked into your platform. Don't bother to make software that works for diverse users, just use marketing to convince users that flexibility and functionality are inferior to whatever the Cupertino designers decree is the one right way to do things

Apple isn't a technology company, they're a fashion company. They can sell an iPhone for huge premiums for the same reason that Chanel can sell a purse for $10,000. It's not a product-quality question, it's a brand-quality question.

Re: Ask HN: Why are there not more Apple-quality products?

#70

Post by the_third_wave »

"Apple Quality"?

You mean the iMac on my desk which I got because the graphics card was broken? It works again after baking the card for a few minutes but I fully expect it to break again.

How about the "Magic Touchpad" which drops its Bluetooth connection every few minutes? This is the solution for those who run Xmonad:

     ((modm .|. shiftMask, xK_a), spawn "hciconfig hci0 reset")
Resetting the HCI connection speeds up the process of getting it online again but it is still very annoying. Both of these problems are well-known, neither has a real solution. When my daughter got handed an iPad at school we quickly had to return the thing because it simply stopped booting necessitating a replacement. The school eventually replaced these things with Chromebooks. I would have preferred a Google and Apple-free solution but at least the Chromebooks worked. She since moved schools and is no longer burdened by a school-issued computing device, this school uses books made of paper.

While this is all anecdata it does not bode well for "Apple Quality", seeing how 3 out of 3 Apple products in our family have problems ranging from annoying - the disconnecting touchpad - to debilitating - the dying graphics card and the black-screened iPad.

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