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I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers
151–160 of 606 posts
Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the "replacement" is "get two new AirPods". Even Apple can't take AirPods apart non-destructively. They are disposable. So much for their carbon neutrality.
Everything humans do is carbon negative. Breathing, eating, driving, pooping (Westerners: toilet paper, All: waste management) and building. Getting every human to be carbon neutral would be an amazing thing! From searched / online numbers, Apple has shipped 150 million AirPods since 2016. The AirPods 3 weigh 5.5g. The gross weight of a basic Tesla model 3 is 1760Kg. I picked a Tesla because it has plastic, metals, m…
A few random notes:
- Your model neglects the charging case with its own battery and microcontroller.
- A Trsla is more likely to be recycled properly than the same amount of earbuds. Itbis also more recycleable because ofnthe high amount of steel and other bulk materials in it.
- The ratio of semiconductor electronics to total weight is extremely different between the two products. And semiconductor manufacturing is extremely resource intensive. All we typically see is squeaky clean neon lit clean rooms, which belie the use of high amounts of aggressive and toxic chemicals that have to be produced somewhere and generate waste that is never talked about.
Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers
#153To some extent Apple is now a "lifestyle brand", like Rolex. Rolex was originally a rugged, waterproof watch for people who needed such a watch. Pilots, divers, mariners, and military officers wore the things. Rolex had the accuracy of a marine chronometer in a small package. The Rolex Submariner was introduced in 1953 at $150. That would be $1,820 today. But the base price for a Rolex Submariner today, the same watc…
See also: Porsche.
Being a "lifestyle brand" works great, right up until it doesn't.
Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers
#154Or course. Case in point, iPads don't have headphone jacks. While these devices are very capable of audio production, that's a joke while using Bluetooth. But that's not Apple's concern. Airpods sell billions of dollars worth every year. Every other phone manufacturer said ooh, cool and instead of getting pro level audio in my 1000$ Android phone I have to settle for Bluetooth which still hasn't caught up. Airpods, a…
If you're doing "audio production" you're going to have a USB audio interface.
Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've migrated back and forth. Most things are backup to cloud now. Only thing missing was Signal messages last time and I think they now fixed that. Do people still use plain SMS now?
How about photos? Moving from android's Google photo integration to apples icloud photos integration seems.. complicated
I’m on iOS and backup my photos to both iCloud and google photos
Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest reason for me using Android is simply because of how much competition there is in the space. If I use Apple products and don't like something they do then I'm stuck on an older version at best and need to migrate everything from their walled garden (at great cost) at worst. With Android, I can use Samsung one generation, switch to Pixel the next, and give Motorola/some other smaller company a chance later…
What would be the “great cost” of moving from an iPhone to an Android phone? I’m struggling to think of what would cost money at all, aside from the phone itself.
Time and existing apps I already paid for. Even upgrading to a new Android phone costs me a few hours of setup. Moving to iPhone (or the other way) would be seriously painful.
Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers
#157> it’s a company that I feel has lost its alignment with me and other long-time Apple users and customers. When OS X debuted there was a daytime radio talk show in my area called “The Computer Guys.” They capably covered all sorts of computing topics, but were clearly long-time Apple dudes. And they spent weeks complaining about what a disaster OS X was. The Dock was useless and violated Apple’s HIG. The Finder made…
> Any more emotional investment than that is going to cause pointless unhappiness.
Agreed 100%. If you're writing 2,000+ word blog posts out of anger and exasperation, you should take it as a moment of self reflection that just maybe you're too invested in a corporation.
Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers
#158> it’s a company that I feel has lost its alignment with me and other long-time Apple users and customers. When OS X debuted there was a daytime radio talk show in my area called “The Computer Guys.” They capably covered all sorts of computing topics, but were clearly long-time Apple dudes. And they spent weeks complaining about what a disaster OS X was. The Dock was useless and violated Apple’s HIG. The Finder made…
> If the latest product seems good, buy it. If not, don’t.
There is another aspect to this though. As a user of an ecosystem, you're committed in many ways. As Apple or Microsoft or Google releases a new version of their operating system you're going to run that on hardware you already own. You're going to run software that you already own on that the OS. And you're doing to use skills and knowledge of that software to accomplish something useful.
In some ways it doesn't matter if the product is good or bad -- you're pretty committed. You're going to be willing to suffer some pain because the alternative is too difficult and too expensive. The only thing you really can do is complain.
Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers
#159Huh. It’s been a while since Apple has “one more thing” awed me. So… “the awe tapers” sentiment, I can agree with. The rest of the article I found full of non-sequitur, for me personally. I think the Apple Silicon laptops are just about right. About the only thing that would fill an itch: I angsted for years after the discontinuation of the 17” models. Since what was 15 can now be 16, I’d put cash down for an 18” mod…
Apple transforms product categories from time to time, and the rest of the time improvements are incremental (though usually good). In the last 5 years or so Apple Silicon has transformed expectations, not just for Apple products but for the whole industry, starting with the M1 MacBook Air, then with the M1 MacBook Pro, and more recently with the M4 Mac mini. (Meanwhile Mac Studio refactored Apple's desktop lineup, p…
Vision Pro's only problem is the price. At $1k I think we would see a lot more adoption. I say this as a former skeptic and who gets VR sickness from other AR/VR devices, and hates the idea of strapping a device to my face and being isolated from my surroundings.
I got an AVP for work (long story), and was blown away. No VR sickness. I can work from anywhere with my laptop while enjoying a massive, wrap-around high resolution (virtual) display. I can relive vacation photos in full 3D. I can watch For All Mankind projected on a drive-in movie theatre screen in a lunar crater, while laying in my bed.
I think I'd have to go back to the original iPhone to think of a product that is so innovative and visionary that you just KNOW from first use that it will completely transform the way we interact with computers.
But at $3,500? Nobody can afford that, and only a small subset of the 1% would even consider buying one.
Re: I feel Apple has lost its alignment with me and other long-time customers
#160> it’s a company that I feel has lost its alignment with me and other long-time Apple users and customers. When OS X debuted there was a daytime radio talk show in my area called “The Computer Guys.” They capably covered all sorts of computing topics, but were clearly long-time Apple dudes. And they spent weeks complaining about what a disaster OS X was. The Dock was useless and violated Apple’s HIG. The Finder made…
It's not just about emotion or loyalty. It's about built-up knowledge and the difficulty of switching.
When you're a long time user, you know how to do everything with what you're using - whether that's an operating system, a programming language, or something else.
The latest product isn't good and your suggestion is "don't buy it." OK, what do I do instead? Buy a Windows or Linux laptop where I have to re-learn a decade's worth of knowing-how-everything-works? Build up my natural flow in a new OS? Find whatever are the Windows alternatives for all the little things that I do on my Mac?
I'm not saying that companies owe things to their customers, but I think it's really simplistic to say that it's just an emotional investment and misplaced loyalty. People have a tool and then a company makes that tool worse. There are other tools, but it takes time to learn them, figure out their differences and how to get everything done with them, etc. Pretending that there's zero cost to switching is disingenuous.
For example: if you're a software engineer and someone made your main programming language bad, there's a high cost to switching to a new language. Even if you're excellent at learning new languages, you don't know which libraries are good, you don't know what various functions are named, you don't know what warts are in the build system (and how to avoid them), etc.
It's not just some emotional response or misplaced loyalty. It's that you've built up skills over many years that are tied to that thing.