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I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers

morrick.me

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Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers

#21

Post by haijo2 »

epistasis wrote: post #19
avidiax wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is a hostage of its own marketing. A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it? That would be a sellout. A convertible Macbook Air with a touch screen? It would be sold out. Neckband-style airpods with all-day battery life? Might not sell out, but would be popular. A best-in-class TV powered by Apple TV? Would probably sell well. But al…

> A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it? That would be a sellout. The number of people who might actually like this is very tiny. Most of them do product reviews. But their audience is not going to care. Think about your older uncle. Your niece in her 20s who loves to paint and read but doesn't want to replace hardware. That's what most…

spot on

Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers

#22

Post by CobrastanJorji »

avidiax wrote: post #15
daemonologist wrote: post #7

The title is appropriate, in that it feels to me that most of the awe has gone out of these products/keynotes. This is maybe down more to the maturity of the category(/ies) than any fault of Apple's though. Perhaps they can be blamed for failing to introduce exciting products in new categories. I do find that wireless earbuds actually last much longer than the wired variety, despite the non-replaceable batteries. Bac…

Apple is a hostage of its own marketing. A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it? That would be a sellout. A convertible Macbook Air with a touch screen? It would be sold out. Neckband-style airpods with all-day battery life? Might not sell out, but would be popular. A best-in-class TV powered by Apple TV? Would probably sell well. But al…

I get your other examples, but a best-in-class TV seems like it'd be pretty good for Apple. It's an Apple TV device that's jammed into a television and doesn't come out, plus a premium price. Seems like it'd work out great. And everybody else buys the 'Apple TV 4K' standalone doohickey and plugs it into their regular TV.

Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers

#23

Post by rd »

Not a huge believer in belittling an author's points, but the author makes absolutely not one objective point in this entire article. Genuinely every single thing he describes is an opinion, nothing more, nothing less. And those opinions, at that, aren't even very accurate.

AirPods becoming e-waste? Seriously? Pick a better idea to make your point, because pretty much everyone I know has had their AirPods for 2-3+ years, and even if that was _when_ they decided to move onto another, that's an _incredibly_ long amount of time to have wireless earbuds of those quality at that price point.

And as for disabling features on the Apple Watch - again, seriously? Most techie, HN'y complaint ever. There's a reason the Apple Watch and AirPods sell as well as they do - people love them.

As for awe at new features - AirPods live translation, standard iPhones being ProMotion, one of the thinnest phones ever created?

This is just a terrible opinion piece.

Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers

#24

Post by esafak »

chrisdelrosario wrote: post #14

Re: “Sob stories” it’s easy to cynically dismiss this as just another marketing ploy, but I see two other ways to see it. 1. It’s primarily for the people at Apple and their partner manufacturers to realize and be reminded of the value of the work that they do. 2. It’s a message to the broader tech community that if you’re going to copy most of what we do, here’s a few that actually save lives. Now will it sell more…

OpenAI did the same thing in the GPT-5 launch. https://youtu.be/0Uu_VJeVVfo?t=2079

Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers

#25

Post by avidiax »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #22
avidiax wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is a hostage of its own marketing. A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it? That would be a sellout. A convertible Macbook Air with a touch screen? It would be sold out. Neckband-style airpods with all-day battery life? Might not sell out, but would be popular. A best-in-class TV powered by Apple TV? Would probably sell well. But al…

I get your other examples, but a best-in-class TV seems like it'd be pretty good for Apple. It's an Apple TV device that's jammed into a television and doesn't come out, plus a premium price. Seems like it'd work out great. And everybody else buys the 'Apple TV 4K' standalone doohickey and plugs it into their regular TV.

Would would buy an Apple Cinema Display if you could buy a color-accurate TV?

Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers

#26

Post by altern8tif »

tra3 wrote: post #4

In the original announcement thread there was some speculation that the air is a precursor to folding models down the line. I hope that’s true.

Seems a possibility for the medium term.

I've also seen speculation that it's an engineering experiment to see if they can squeeze all the essential components of a high-powered computer into a space the size of the camera plateau. Which may eventually lead to viable AR Glasses (or a cheaper Vision).

Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers

#27

Post by kristjansson »

> these [AirPods and Apple Watch] are the Apple products I care the least, together with HomePods and Apple TV.

I won’t defend HomePods much, but skipping the other three misses a lot of the ecosystem value less technical consumers are getting. Turn your lights off with your TV remote. Go to a run with just your watch and headphones and take a call at mile 3. Approve a payment (or a sudo!) by double tapping your watch. Start a channel on your TV from Siri. And so on.

I’m not sure if Liquid Glass (that iOS 26 just insisted on capitalizing) is going to be worth anything, and definitely doesn’t merit the marquee. But the some of the design thinking is still there, beneath the surface, in the delightful interactions between parts of their ecosystem.

Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers

#28

Post by ceejayoz »

avidiax wrote: post #15
daemonologist wrote: post #7

The title is appropriate, in that it feels to me that most of the awe has gone out of these products/keynotes. This is maybe down more to the maturity of the category(/ies) than any fault of Apple's though. Perhaps they can be blamed for failing to introduce exciting products in new categories. I do find that wireless earbuds actually last much longer than the wired variety, despite the non-replaceable batteries. Bac…

Apple is a hostage of its own marketing. A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it? That would be a sellout. A convertible Macbook Air with a touch screen? It would be sold out. Neckband-style airpods with all-day battery life? Might not sell out, but would be popular. A best-in-class TV powered by Apple TV? Would probably sell well. But al…

> A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it? That would be a sellout.

And probably a regression on the waterproofing efforts they've made over the last decade. If you're gonna make it thicker, just put a bigger battery in.

Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers

#29

Post by ssl-3 »

epistasis wrote: post #19
avidiax wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is a hostage of its own marketing. A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it? That would be a sellout. A convertible Macbook Air with a touch screen? It would be sold out. Neckband-style airpods with all-day battery life? Might not sell out, but would be popular. A best-in-class TV powered by Apple TV? Would probably sell well. But al…

> A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it? That would be a sellout. The number of people who might actually like this is very tiny. Most of them do product reviews. But their audience is not going to care. Think about your older uncle. Your niece in her 20s who loves to paint and read but doesn't want to replace hardware. That's what most…

I am thinking about my older uncle and my niece in her 20s. They're smart-enough people, and they're quite aware that a modern phone can be very expensive to fix.

In particular, I'm thinking that I (a person of reasonable technical skill) would love to help them out by changing the designed-to-be-swapped screen on the phone they dropped instead of them paying someone else to conduct surgery on it.

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