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> 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 all the same mistakes as Windows did. And a text terminal? Like DOS?? Who the hell is ever going to want to use that on a Mac?

Going even farther back, it was long-time dedicated Apple users who booed when Jobs announced the deal with Microsoft.

Being a long-time dedicated Apple user is a shitty job. You don’t get paid, have no input, and are constantly disappointed. And Apple does not care about you.

I strongly suggest people should throw this notion away. It does not matter how long you’ve bought from a big company, they owe you nothing. If the latest product seems good, buy it. If not, don’t. Any more emotional investment than that is going to cause pointless unhappiness.

Save your customer loyalty energy for businesses where you can actually establish a connection, like a restaurant you like, or a local handyman.

The worst Apple era for me was the butterfly keyboard / touchbar era of Macs. They went too far in the pursuit of thin and light - removing ports, going with a keyboard design that felt bad to type on and was prone malfunction, and the touchbar which I actually thought sounded cool at first, but ended up being much less useful than a row of function keys.

I didn't feel betrayed by Apple, I just decided not to buy a new MacBook until they fixed their keyboard issues. I switched to Linux for a couple of years, and switched back once they released the M1 MacBook Pro. I'm perfectly happy with my Macs (I have 3) now.

I actually really like the current era of Apple where their motto seems to be give people what they want. MacBook Pros with HDMI ports and SD card readers. iPads finally getting viable multi-tasking support and a real mouse cursor (although iPadOS still sucks IMO). The iPhone 17 Pro is slightly thicker than the 16 Pro to allow for a bigger battery.

It's not all perfect - especially on the software side. The settings menu on iOS is kind of a cluster. Apple Music has a terrible UX, as does the recent update to Photos. And I haven't tried Tahoe and Liquid Glass yet - but I'm definitely a little concerned.

> 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 on that the OS that you already own. 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.

> 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.

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. I can choose a phone that has the exact features I want - better battery life? great camera? best performance? great display? cheap price? smaller display? larger display? There's a phone for each of those.

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.

There's no straightforward way to migrate between an iPhone and Android so you'd spend a lot of time. Also I'm not sure if it's even possible to fully move over - for example would you be able to export your iMessages? Also, if you're fully bought into the ecosystem with Airpods and a Watch, you'd be better off replacing those (at least the watch which turns into a paperweight without an iPhone).

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've always been on Google only so that helps a bit. It works to backup on iPhone as well

I’m on iOS and backup my photos to both iCloud and google photos

iMessage is extraordinarily popular in the US. Its userbase dwarfs Signal by over an order of magnitude

Ah fair enough. Not as many use it here in Australia

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.

> It does not matter how long you’ve bought from a big company, they owe you nothing

The same can be said of employers. The company does not care about you no matter how many years you’ve been there. If you’re not c-suite, you're just a cog.

At my employer even c-suite get fired all the time. If anything it's safer being rank and file

I believe the term is "parasocial relationship".

I found this article quite weird. It would be one thing if it were (yet another) "Company X has lost its way..." kind of article. But this post seemed more along the lines of "Apple built these things that I don't care about."

Umm, so??? Obviously some people do, and this article struck me as someone complaining that Apple isn't building exactly what he wants. Furthermore, his analysis seems way off base to me: "Relying on legacy and unquestioning fanpeople, for whom everything Apple does is good and awesome and there’s nothing wrong with it, can only go so far." Apple stopped relying on "legacy and unquestioning fan people" a long time ago, ever since they basically became "the iPhone company" to a majority of their userbase.

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.

> And a text terminal? Like DOS?? Who the hell is ever going to want to use that on a Mac?

Had they never used MPW?

I’ve also come to this realization as a longtime Mac user. Granted, I’m not old enough to have used the classic Mac OS as a professional, though I did use it in my childhood. However, I was in high school and college during the Jobs era of Mac OS X, and that’s when I started using Macs as my daily drivers from 2006 until 2022 when I retired my 2013 Mac Pro and 2013 MacBook Air and switched back to PCs running Windows.

Before Apple’s success with the iPhone, Apple was essentially the Macintosh company. Its fortunes were tied to the Mac, and Apple seemed to be attuned to the needs of Mac users. In return, there was quite a strong Mac fandom. The Mac was more than just a tool or just a platform. The Mac was a philosophy, and what attracted people to the Mac was the philosophy of the Mac and its ecosystem.

Ever since the iPhone became a major hit, and especially since the passing of Jobs, it became apparent to me that my best interests as a computer user and Apple’s interests as a company no longer align. Apple no longer needed to cater to “the Mac faithful” to survive. In fact, Apple is one of the biggest companies in the world thanks to the iPhone. It also seems that macOS is losing its distinctiveness.

The unfortunate thing, and I think this is where some Mac users get emotional and disappointed, is that there’s nothing else out there in the personal computing landscape that is like the glory days of the Mac. Windows is an inconsistent mess filled with annoyances, and the bazaar of the Linux ecosystem is nothing like the polished cathedral of the Mac. Everything is a step down from older Macs, even modern Macs.

However, while thankfully we can enjoy retrocomputing for hobbyist use, many of us still need to use up-to-date platforms to browse the Web and to get our work done, and so clinging on to, say, Snow Leopard is not an option outside of hobbyist activities. Hence, why I use Windows. It’s not Snow Leopard but it gets the job done for now.

The beauty about software, though, is that we don’t have to resign ourselves to accepting whatever Apple, Microsoft, and Google releases. Many of us reading this forum have the ability to write our own software. FOSS projects such as Linux have shown that it’s possible for user communities to write their own software that fit their needs without needing to be concerned about business matters such as market dominance.

So, yes, this is a hard lesson for many longtime Mac users about being loyal to a company; companies change. But this lesson also creates opportunities. I think if enough disaffected longtime Mac users got together and pooled their resources together, we could create a FOSS alternative that is community-driven, one where the evolution of Mac-like personal computing is driven by the community, not by Apple or any other corporation.

> I’ve also come to this realization as a longtime Mac user. Granted, I’m not old enough to have used the classic Mac OS as a professional, though I did use it in my childhood. However, I was in high school and college during the Jobs era of Mac OS X, and that’s when I started using Macs as my daily drivers from 2006 until 2022 when I retired my 2013 Mac Pro and 2013 MacBook Air and switched back to PCs running Windows.

Me too. I liked opinionated software when my opinions aligned with Apple's. But I found i hated it when they didn't. Around mavericks or Sierra or so I started getting more and more annoyed with all the things being changed for the worse (in my opinion). Then during the pandemic I had plenty of free time to dig deep into my computing future and I moved to KDE. Heavily customised just the way I love it. It's a breath of fresh air not having someone else make choices on how I should use my computer. Haven't looked back since.

I had already left iOS because it's so locked down and the hardware too expensive for the specs. That already broke a ton of the "just works" of course.

  what a disaster OS X was

maybe, but I think not as bad as MacOS "classic" 8.1 and 9 that came before it!

> And a text terminal? Like DOS?? Who the hell is ever going to want to use that on a Mac?

Me. I have to use a Mac at work, and I use the text terminal more than anything else on the computer. It doesn't help that Mac's don't have a good UI, everything is hidden behind extra key-presses, and switching between windows is a PAIN.

On a mac every window for an app is considered the same, so there's no concept of switching between windows (except with special hidden key presses).

When a window is in the background it doesn't receive clicks, so you have to click on it twice.

The menubar of a non-active window doesn't exist, so you need an extra click, first to activate the window, then to go find its menubar and do an action.

It's just a bad UI.

> When a window is in the background it doesn't receive clicks, so you have to click on it twice

I get hit by this all the time. I have multiple monitors and I can scroll in a window without the window having focus. The scrolling leads you believe it has focus so when you hit cmd-w to close the window the window with actual focus closes instead.

> On a mac every window for an app is considered the same, so there's no concept of switching between windows (except with special hidden key presses).

Is Cmd+` the hidden key press? Alternatively you can go to "Window" at the menubar if you prefer to click

> I found a lot of reactions to these products to be weirdly optimistic. Either I’m becoming more cynical with age and general tech fatigue, or certain people are easily impressed.

I think it's both. There's a loud cadre of Apple fans who will always fawn over whatever comes out of Cupertino, no matter what. That group shifts its membership over time, but they're always there, and they're, well, always loud. Maybe some of us have been a part of that group in the past, or at least perhaps looking at things with less of a critical eye than we do now. But it's normal to shift your attitudes on things, and normal for those rose-colored glasses to fog up after a while.

Regarding the iPhone 17 Pro:

> People who have no use for all these pro video recording features shouldn’t waste their money on it. Unless they want a big chunky iPhone with the best camera array and/or have money to burn.

I feel like people who “want the best camera array and have money to burn” probably describes a significant percentage of HN readers.

I’m honestly pretty excited that they’ve finally put the larger, high res sensor in all three iPhone cameras - which should result in pretty decent image quality across the entire 13 - 200 mm equivalent range. It’s a nice upgrade from my current iPhone which uses smaller 12 MP sensors for the ultra-wide and telephoto cameras - resulting in images that are noticeably soft and noisy.

I personally don’t consider the iPhone 17 Pro to be too big or chunky. I’m generally happy to sacrifice an extra millimeter of thickness for better battery life, and enjoy the usability of larger screen sizes. I know that a lot of people really want smaller phones, though, and I think it’s unfortunate that Apple cancelled the mini (and the smaller SE design). I guess it just wasn’t selling that well.

And finally, I’m at a point in my life where spending $1100 on a new iPhone every few years isn’t going to break the bank. And I also am able to give my current iPhone to family members, who should be able to enjoy it for many more years to come.

The air is too big and clunky from me.

Sent from my iPhone 13 mini, which is also Too Damn Big.

I’m got above average size human hands, which are too small even for the mini.

On an iPhone 12 mini, wishing I hadn’t upgraded to iOS 26 because now my phone is notably laggy. Word to the wise. I use swiping for input and would consider it now unusable due to extreme lag.

The physical aspect I can’t give up is I can hold the phone with my thumb on the bottom and my middle finger on the top and scroll with my index finger to read. Wish I could buy that capability on a new iPhone, maybe one even slightly smaller.

Time to go find out if there’s even a way to downgrade, oof this is slow.

I, too, am still rocking the 13 mini, which they made good enough that nothing they've made since has made me wish to upgrade, though the fact that every phone since is Too Damn Big has made me happy I haven't yet.

We've got about three years left before these things are unsupported. Three years of hope for them to release _something_ a little smaller than "uncomfortably large."

Also on 13 mini. But my next phone needs a better camera, and the cellular radio reception needs to be better (my 13 mini loses network connection in weak areas faster than my wifes 15 or sons 16 pro does - they stay online, I’m out). I love smaller phones though (hence the 13 mini).

The problem is there aren't enough people buying mini phones to make it worthwhile to Apple. But that's only if they keep a mini around permanently.

However if Apple released a new iPhone mini model every fourth year, I'd wager these would be like a McRib-style smash hit sales event, compressing the comparatively small mini-enthusiast audience into a time-limited buying window. It would also trigger FOMO at a time when many people are increasingly willing to delay upgrades for 5+ years.

This is a brilliant idea, I really hope somebody on the iPhone 18 design team reads it. I think there’s a huge pent up demand for a mini model, many of us would pay more for it than the large versions.

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. Back in the day I went through one or two sets of earbuds a year because the wire failed internally, whereas I've only had two TWS pairs in ~six years (admittedly, it was the battery that became a problem in the first set). There's undoubtedly a lot more e-waste gubbins in each though.

Yeah, honestly, smartphones are a very mature category now. Only so much you can do with them. Same with laptops and desktops. Plenty of improvements to be made, but those yearly wow factors are just not coming back.

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 all of these products would cannibalize sales of some other expensive iDevice.

> 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 people are like.

Those are the people who Jobs focused on impressing and enabling to do things they wouldn't do otherwise. That is the focus that has been lost without Jobs, IMHO, and it's the focus that makes the products better for people who want to get the most out of their products per unit of time invested in learning how to use it.

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.

How many people do you know who want to change their own oil in their car? This is a frequent, required maintenance. Yet I can't think of a single car that advertises its ability to be maintained by somebody without special tools. The only people who change their own oil would have the skills to change an iPhone screen.

I have changed the battery on two iPhones on my own, and replaced one screen on my own. I've also once had one of those little shops do it, quickly and cheaply. I only did it on my own because I wanted to see how difficult it was. The savings in money and extra time was completely wasted other than for the entertainment value of changing it.

The slice of people who get entertainment value out of changing their screens, yet does not have the skills to do it on a current iPhone, must be quite small. Surely less than 10% of the population, for a "feature" that has easy alternatives of paying somebody $20-$30.

> How many people do you know who want to change their own oil in their car? This is a frequent, required maintenance. Yet I can't think of a single car that advertises its ability to be maintained by somebody without special tools.

Those are two very different topics. Sure, cars don't advertise their ability to be maintained without special tools. But I also know a lot of people who do in fact want to change the oil in their own car (because it's not hard, and much cheaper once you have the tools).

Yeah most people will get it done but if it's actually built to be repairable those little shops can do it better and cheaper.

Big bonus points for making spare parts available without all the BS strings attached that apple currently has.

Of course they don't advertise it: Most cars are dead-nuts simple to change the oil on.

If changing the screen of a phone were as simple as changing the oil in a Honda is, then none of this conversation would have to happen.

The price of replacing the screen is mostly the part itself. It’s extremely easy for any random shopping center phone store to replace in like 5 minutes. But the part itself costs more than an old phone is even worth.

Every time a family member has had a cracked iPhone screen replaced it has never really worked properly again. It may be easy but it’s apparently not easy to do it well.

That's because most of the screens on the market are fake and significantly lower quality than the genuine ones.

Did they get it replaced by Apple, or some guy in a mall kiosk?

My mom got her battery replaced at an Apple Store and the process broke the phones ability to connect to the internet or the cellular network. They ended up replacing the phone.

I fail to see the issue. Apple broke the phone during a repair and replaced it I assume for free.

Something to last a couple of hours became a change of phone with a mandatory round trip to Apple. Apple themselves are sometimes not able to properly repair their own allegedly repairable phone.

I see a lot of issues here personally.

Unclear – I assume many in their audience also break their phones somewhat regularly, they'd probably appreciate not having to drop $99 or even more abroad for a battery replacement.

Users who break their phone regularly are not breaking the battery.

spot on

1. All these devices would sell out, because these are all of Apple's best sellers. I'm willing to bet a replacable battery iPhone will sell as much as the iPhone 6e. Replacable batteries aren't a strong feature.

2. "Current Apple Product" + "My own personal tweak" isn't a product strategy. "A convertible Macbook Air with a touch screen?" wouldn't move the needle sales wise, and would just be a headache for developers. If, for some strange reason, you need a 19inch touch screen, the iPad pro already exists and has better developer support.

Most Apple products are locally maximized. The last great new Apple product was the AirPods in 2016. Neither the Apple Watch or Apple Vision Pro seems like they will define a new product space.

And this is why you shouldn’t listen to the “less space than Nomad. No Wireless. Lame” tech crowd [1].

A TV is bulky, race to the bottom commodity that is only replaced every 5-8 years.

> Neckband-style airpods with all-day battery life? Might not sell out, but would be popular.

I don’t think Apple has any issue selling AirPods. But honestly, I do like my $70 Beat Flex for traveling. I don’t have to worry about them falling out of my ears and between the seats on flights and the double flange ear tips block noise better than AirPods Pro.

I’ve had touch screen convertible Dells. I never used the touch screen. They are bulky, the screen ratio is off either way compared to an iPad. On the other hand, my wife now uses an iPad Air 13 inch with a regular old cheap Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and she loves it. Her x86 MacBook Air was getting long in the tooth.

This is before the newest OS with real windows.

[1] or more relevant to the HN crowd “For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”

> A TV is bulky, race to the bottom commodity that is only replaced every 5-8 years.

True but, can't you kind of say the same about phones? My sister buys Moto-G's. They cost her $120. Apple charges more. They make their own market. I don't know how much I'd be willing the pay but I feel like I'd pay for an 65" Apple TV. Sony, LG, Samsung, Roku, TCL, all make crap TVs that want to spy on you. They are almost universally underpowered for their apps and OS and are all jank AF. i have an AppleTV plugged into my Sony and a few times a month I bump the bad remote and it switched to Google TV and tries to get me to sign in so it can serve ads at me.

The market for an apple branded TV might not be the same size as phones but I suspect it's big enough to become 5% of their profit.

Who would have guess headphones would do so well before they did so well?

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?

Different markets. An Apple Cinema Display is a 32" screen, which is a big monitor but a small television.

Apple doesn't care about self-cannibalization. That's how you stay alive and avoid innovator's dilemma.

All of your solutions are bulky and difficult to manufacture compared to current products though.

“A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it?”

Definitely not! This would be an inferior product in almost every respect for 95% of customers.

> A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it

This is a false choice. There are thinner phones that have replacable batteries already.

> 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.

Go the other way. Hermetically sealed, no connectors, inductive charging, rugged, with a solid state battery that will outlive the rest of the phone. Solid state batteries are more expensive, but that's a cost issue for car-sized batteries, not phone-sized batteries for US$1000 phones.

Samsung expects to have 20-year battery life in 2026.

> 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.

This is a perfectly HN style misunderstanding of what Apple actually is and does.

An iPhone doesn't need replaceable battery or an easier to replace screen, there are other phones that have these features and anyone is very welcome to buy them. Moreover, the screen is really not that hard to replace and you can charge any phone off a powerbank, you can even have a special magsafe powerbank that you carry in a bag. A 3rd gen SE (relatively crappy for an iPhone) can charge up to 50% in half an hour if your wall block outputs more than 20w. The point of an iPhone is that it's powerful enough to do pretty much anything that anyone needs and has software that's good enough to the point that it doesn't need some shitty skin over it. It's also supposed to be consistent with your other apple devices and supported for absurd amounts of time in comparison to the competition.

Touchscreen on laptops is shit, I'm not interested in fatiguing my shoulders while I work for a 0.01% usability benefit in some niche scenarios. It's a gimmick, nobody actually needs it. My current gen MBAir lasts literally days on battery. If you want a touchscreen Apple product with a keyboard then iPads are right there. They exist. The trackpad on any macbook virtually eliminates the need for a touchscreen and that's why they're the best trackpads on any laptop.

Airpods are the breakthrough product that they are because they aren't neckband style, they're literally the seashells that Ray Bradbury describes in Farenheit 451. For better or worse. They've been around for a long time now and we've forgotten that nothing like them existed in. the mainstream before they did. All the initial criticisms about them have evaporated, they have become normal as has their form factor. No neckbands or wires, the charge case juices them up and the battery on them definitely lasts all day, I've tried. If they had wires or a neckband then they simply wouldn't be what they are. If you want neckband style earbuds like you've descriibed there are plenty of options out there that existed before AirPods did.

Why would Apple make a TV when Samsung has that market fully cornered? In every way. What would be the point of competing with the company that makes the actual display panels that literally everyone uses? Apple can offer it's excellent software and they've done that, you can plug an Apple TV into any TV or, if your TV is 'smart' like all TVs nowadays, you can use the Apple TV app on your best in class TV. As well as the Youtube App, or the Netflix app, or the Prime app, or pretty much any service you want has a smart TV app really. What would anyone gain from Apple making a best in class TV?

None of these devices would cannibalize sales of any of Apple's products because they're all a terrible idea. If you want non-apple products then just buy them. They exist. All that stuff exists, just not made by Apple because those are inherently non-Apple ideas. Apple makes their devices for people who want their devices and everything that comes with their devices.

Agree. Revolutionary tech happens, perhaps, once a decade. Apple's though is their own biggest enemy because there is so much gravity for these big roll-outs they have a couple times a year (typically Macs and then Phones+).

That's a lot of hyped, flashy events between anything really Earth shattering.

Maybe we miss when Apple was boring and new machines just rolled out with little more than a press release and a spread in MacWorld magazine.

> This is maybe down more to the maturity of the category(/ies) than any fault of Apple's though.

LiDAR was cool.

They could buy Oura and let you write apps with programmable micro LEDs, and that would’ve been cool.

If iPhones had Star Wars style holographic projector, that’d be cool.

They could just be content with keeping the lights on without unnecessary UX changes that literally no one asked for, and that would be cool.

I’m still happy with Apple, but the problem is that they now perceive staying relevant is wasting battery on visuals and making the phone thinner. Those are recycled old-ass ideas. They need to find the new Jony Ives.

Any decent earbuds have replaceable cables with standard two-pin connectors

Not good for exercise, it's heavy and has telephonic effects (walking/running sound transmit through the cable). Also ties you to the audio source.

Does anyone actually make wired headphones with ANC?

Look up "bullet MMCX IEMs". Plenty of options out there for cables too, some far less microphonic than others, and you can wear them over-ear to reduce that effect even more.

No ANC but they already isolate sound very well.

This pretty much sums up my feeling on the new generation. I too don't understand what's "awe dropping" about it, and have finally switched from an iPhone 15 Pro to the Android ecosystem, where a flip phone is somewhat "awe dropping". I'm not fully convinced about it, but it's different, it's fun, it's clever, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

The only thing I disagree with here is about the Air. I think Apple's strategy with the Air is to split the Pro line. Previously the Pro phones were for people who wanted a premium feeling and who wanted premium features, but those are often in tension, and might hold each other back. Now the Air is for those who want premium feel (you might call it flashy, looks great, feels great, but has trade-offs), and now the Pro is an uncompromising set of features, at the expense of being bigger and having a comical camera ~bump~ ~plateau~ continent. This is the same as the Watch, where you have the stainless steel models for the premium feel, and the Ultra for the premium features.

I suspect many on HN may not differentiate between the premium features and feel as much – I know it's not what I jump to – because "design is how it works" and many here aren't as fashion conscious, but a lot of folks buy new phones based on the colour, or how thin it feels, or other details that are easily written off when you know more about the hardware. I think the Air might be a big hit, while getting very little of the enthusiast market.

I don't know how widespread this is but in my little circle the orange Pro was the biggest draw, it's the first in the Pro line (or at least as far as I can remember) with real color to it. Most of them are grayscale or very muted colors. It's another "feel" thing but got more attention than the Air's thin body.

The people that I know laughed heartily at the orange.

Depends who you are. If you want to take pro video on the phone they dropped some great improvements. The Air is impressive even if not the phone I'd pick. But realistically, if your current phone works really well for you which it probably does, nothing they could possibly announce would be interesting to you.

> nothing they could possibly announce would be interesting to you.

Apple is a hardware company that makes lifestyle products. Why isn't their hardware appealing to me? Why can't it be?

In a competitive economy, phrases like this should a last resort, used to describe only the most decrepit and unjustifiable businesses. If nothing they can announce will interest me, then what are they even selling? A religion? A service? Certainly not a commodity, apparently nothing I need.

These are my thoughts exactly. I've seen a bunch of people who don't value thinness or lightness in a phone getting dismissive or outright angry at the existence of the Air, and I want to grab them and shake them until they get it. I don't want the Air at all, and that's exactly why I'm thrilled it exists: it will split the Pro buyers into form-valuers and function-valuers, so the function-valuers like me can get an iPhone with a huge battery and a vapor chamber in it.

If you're one of those people who goes "why can't they make the phone thicker and heavier with more battery life", you should be overjoyed at the Air, because now that those buyers are peeled off to a different SKU, the product line for you doesn't need to find a happy medium with them.

I appreciate that idea, but in this case the thinness is half-fake and it's still not all that light.

https://chainsawsuit.krisstraub.com/20161028.shtml

When "you can't use it outside anyhow" expands to phones, which are only useful because you can take them outside.

You couldn't really always phones outside until they switched to OLED because you couldn't see the screens in sunlight. They were still popular though.

I wish transflective LCDs were a thing on phones.

I do feel like there is some man shaking fist at cloud here.

The post dismisses airpods, yet they are one of the most popular products in the US, with like 75% of young people owning a pair, great quality, features, and battery life. I dont think a swappable battery is even a good feature, the parts would be tiny and break easily given their size not to mention how often they could get lost

Hot swappable batteries kind of became not so important after battery banks and fast charging became a thing. Makes more sense to carry one battery bank that can charge anything than to have 2-3 phone batteries in your bag (which would be exposed to puncture too).

I still think the price of battery replacements is way too high from apple. It's $150 AUD here which feels far and beyond the cost of the part cost itself.

I realize we're talking about Airpods, but hot swappable batteries don't make sense to me either anymore. I seem to have power almost everywhere.

My phone spends a surprising amount of time on a charger. Most of the day while I'm at home, it's on a charger. I used to keep one at the office on my desk. The car has a charger too, and CarPlay so you might as well plug it in.

I'm not sure if it's a coping mechanism for poor battery life or just convenience.

For long days outdoors, I've also got a booster pack in the car with USB ports and an inverter (120V) that gets some use.

I have an iPhone 16 Pro Max and an older version of this battery I use and when I travel:

https://a.co/d/3g3F4eC

It can charge my MacBook Aur M2 once or my iPhone 16 Pro Max 3-4x. The iPhone itself can easily last flying and layovers all day.

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, magnets, copper, lithium - similar materials.

In the ~10 years Apple has been making AirPods the materials used (by weight) is ~ 470 Tesla cars. So, per year (avg, not really good for this), resources consumed is about 47 Teslas (by weight).

Apple claims 40% of AirPods 3 are from recycled materials, so ~ 290 crashed / discarded Teslas could provide part of these materials - on average 29 per year.

I did the above because it perceptually relates to "real things". Teslas are NOT carbon neutral, very much carbon negative.

The reality / HORROR of waste is far, far worse. Any single plastic bag used to dispose of weekly waste likely weighs more than a pair of AirPods. Any can, made of steel or aluminum, could likely could make a lot of AirPods. The toy or product you bought that had a flap that you could lift up - there was likely a magnet under there. Any disposed single use battery might have zinc, if it was a CR2032 or "watch" battery, lithium (or silver).

Yes, AirPods might be disposable. Do they improve the qualify of life of the humans that purchase them? What is the real cost in perspective - with everything else taken into consideration? If the AirPods are used to listen to music or entertainment, then the positive mental health aspects are likely significant in a positive value direction.

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.

Are you sure? They say they can replace a battery online

I used to hate Airpods in videochats since they made the person wearing them sound bad because of dropouts, had heinous latency, and frequently disconnected causing meeting interruptions. But people think they're "better" than [wired] Earpods, which have none of those problems.

/me shakes fist at cloud

If I could do so, I would mandate that everyone at my workplace must use a wired headset with a boom mic for every Teams call.

You're fucking disgusting. You'd force people to use Teams?

> I do feel like there is some man shaking fist at cloud here.

The poster himself admits that after a meandering 2000 words...

> I found a lot of reactions to these products to be weirdly optimistic. Either I’m becoming more cynical with age and general tech fatigue, or certain people are easily impressed.

AirPods are one of Apple’s best products in forever and their size forgives them battery complaints, to me.

Even phones and laptops I’m willing to give a pass on, ever since USB-C got “good enough” and the battery life long enough.

If I had one complaint it’d be that they should sell one fat phone with no camera hump (because it has more battery).

Edit: I should have clarified as AirPods Pro are the ones I have experience with; no idea how the original AirPods are. But the Pros are phenomenal.

Airpods are very, very expensive compared to competitors with 90% of the same features. I've been using a $30 set for several years and the main drawback is it's difficult to switch devices—because apple doesn't allow third parties to use access the proprietary comms that allows this for airpods.

Also, I think the white is ugly. But kids seem to love it.

I'll happily pay the premium for "it just works", especially device switching iPhone to iPad to MacBook to Apple TV, it works first time, every time. I have a pair of Sony XM5s, and even at that price point, pairing and device switching can be a crapshoot some of the time.

Bluetooth honestly feels like a non-deterministic stack sometimes, it even took Apple 4 years to support it on the iPhone, how they have the AirPods working is close to magic.

I doubt very seriously your $30 headphones sound as good as AirPods Pro or have the ANC.

But you can buy much cheaper headphones with the H1 chip for fast switching between devices by buying one of the Beats headphones. I love my $60 Beats Fiex with the double flange ear tips for traveling.

AirPods (and Bose QuietComfort) make me dizzy/nauseous.

Also, they don’t have decent passive noise cancellation, so they’re not appropriate for mowing the lawn, etc.

My Sennheiser ear buds solve all these problems for a much lower price, and their sound quality is much better than the last pair of AirPods I tried.

To each their own, I guess.

You absolutely know they have tanks and tanks of colored plastic ready to hit those molds the moment sales slow down a tiny bit ...

Don't most people use nondescript earbuds?

I rarely see any earbuds except AirPods in the US, they are the overwhelming majority. Several other countries I’ve worked in also have pretty ubiquitous AirPods penetration, though not quite at the level of the US.

I have a few friends that bought every inexpensive alternative to AirPods, had a poor experience with all of them, finally relented and bought AirPods. Now they won’t use anything else. They spent more money avoiding AirPods than buying them.

Apple did a really good job with the AirPods.

A casual search showed several studies over several years estimating 70-80% of young people owning airpods, which matched my irl expirence. In the past random earbuds and headphones were common but apple has taken the market by storm.

To 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 watch, is around $9,200, plus a few thousand dollars of "additional dealer profit". As the CEO of Rolex once said, "We are not in the watch business. We are in the luxury business." The people who need a rugged, accurate watch today get a G-Shock.

That may be Apple's path - to fashion themselves as a niche luxury brand.

See also: Porsche.

Being a "lifestyle brand" works great, right up until it doesn't.

Can we get text to speech better than twenty year old dragon naturally speaking please?

People can tell when I’m texting by voice because it reads like I’m drunk.

Siri is neither awe inspiring nor delightful.

> 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: “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 watches… probably. Is it a net positive? I think so.

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

> As for the AirPods, and true wireless earbuds in general, I find this product category to be the most wasteful. Unless someone comes up with a type of earbuds that have easily replaceable batteries, I’m not interested in buying something that’s bound to become e‑waste in a relatively short period of time.

I'm not a apple fan (been windows most of my life till moving to a new company that is Mac only, and have been on android for about 13 years at this point) but the airpods pro are maybe apples greatest product in a while (other then the M1 macbooks).

The audio quality+noise cancellation+transparency quality made them a super easy buy and I would buy the app3 as soon as my app2 die that's how much I love them as a android user. This is coming from someone who owns multiple iems and very expensive over the ears.

From everything reported so far, the app3 look like a solid spec bump at the same price, there isn't many products that keep that formula.

Edit: I am disappointed that the OP didn't talk about how all the iPhones now have "pro-motion" aka high refresh rate screens.

This is (personally) one of the biggest step up in quality, I would never buy a baseline iPhone because 60 Hz just looks gross to me now, it's immediately noticeable.

Huh. 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” model.

I’m not much of a power photographer, but I really like the orange of the pro, and the trickle of feature improvements between my 14 and this one are enough to get enthused about.

My Pro ‘Pods (2) are going strong after a few washes, and I look forward to replacing them with 3s when they give out.

Here’s the thing for me I guess. I develop/maintain native apps on both platforms for my employer. I test with a couple of Samsung devices (why Samsung? Because 85% of our Android customers in ang tech are using Samsungs). And I just hate the experience. The hardware is ok, at times. We use them for testing (so not much daily driving) , and the failure rate is worse than the iOS devices. But the Ux is the worst. Apple will have to turn liquid glass into muddied frosted glass in a storm before the hodgepodge that is material, ui one, and the weirdest apps, make me want to switch.

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, perhaps echoing the G4 Cube, and the iPad Pro M4 was a milestone product that leapfrogged Mac laptop hardware by including an OLED display and next-gen SoC. We may see something similar with an iPad Pro M5.)

I think AirTags also transformed their category. Vision Pro was a new product line for Apple but has not been a success so far.

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.

I think the only way you can consider iOS “amateurish” is according to a ridiculously high standard for phone software that Apple itself is responsible for normalizing.

Unfortunately, the only real comparison for iOS is past versions of iOS; until that changes I don’t see things getting better in any stable way.

iOS 26 actually has a lot of great features and convergence with the rest of the ecosystem (e.g. preview is awesome). But it lacks the polish that Apple has a reputation for; unfortunately 50% worse polish for Apple is still significantly better than Android and Windows. There just aren’t greener pastures to move to.

This is it, the grass is not greener on the other side unless you're moving over here. I don't understand why people who live on those less green pastures continuously wish for the greener pasture to be more like what they have now.

On iPhone Air

The C1, while slower, was a little more energy efficient. Signal Reception seems to be ok too. I am expecting the C1X to be even better.

Combined with A19 Pro, C1X, N1. I would expect Air to be more efficient than 16 Pro. So with that in mind,

The Air ~3100 mah, the 16 Pro ~3600 mach should have similar battery life, or may be just slightly less than 16 Pro, a little bit better than iPhone 15 Pro with 3274mah.

If that is the case I say Air is actually not bad. And we can look forward into the future for even more energy efficiency OLED, SoC and newer Battery Tech. That would make Air perfect.

Not to mention iPhone Air is a required training for foldable iPhone. Their competitors are already making foldable phone with one side at less than 5mm. And is currently being held back by USB-C port. Apple needs at least one or two generation of learning to move in that direction. And iPhone Air is exactly that.

I am really looking forward to al the iPhone review this year. It has been a long long time since the iPhone produce range was exciting.

List of iPhone Battery Capacity.

Model/Battery Life Battery Capacity (mAh)

iPhone 17 Pro Max: 5088 mAh (100%)

iPhone 16 Plus: 4,674 mAh

iPhone 15 Plus: 4,383 mAh

iPhone 17 Pro: 4252 mAh (84%)

iPhone 17: 3692 mAh (73%)

iPhone 16e: 4,005 mAh

iPhone 16 Pro: 3,582 mAh

iPhone 16: 3,561 mAh

iPhone 15 Pro: 3,274 mAh

iPhone 15: 3,349 mAh

iPhone 14 Pro: 3,200 mAh

iPhone Air: 3149 mAh (62%)

Reading the criticism, I just came to a completely opposite conclusion regarding the magsafe battery: is the iPhone Air the answer to the people complaining about no removable battery? Make the body thinner, still waterproof, and you can have multiple “external” batteries to clip on. Boom, battery life is “infinite”.

The part about AirPods is just…dumb. If you have seen the teardown of how AirPods are made…

https://nebula.tv/videos/realengineering-the-hidden-design-o...

There isn’t any way that you could have replaceable batteries and still make them as lightweight and comfortable in your ear without other tradeoffs. We can argue about the case - maybe.

The AppleTV is by far the most responsive set top box and the least slimy as far as privacy and invasive ads [1].

If you like classical watches, the Apple Watch isn’t for you. But there are enough people that disagree that they sell like crazy.

The iPhone Air is probably going to sell like crazy in places with low iPhone adoption where it’s only affordable by the wealthy minority like China where it will be seen as a status symbol. Ben Thompson of Stratechery has been documenting for a decade about the biggest driver of iPhone sells is models that look new.

But if you already have an iPhone 16, Apple doesn’t expect many to upgrade. The replacement cycle has been around 3 years for awhile now.

[1] yes I realize the default Home Screen of the AppleTV has Apple’s apps in the top navigation bar and when you are on the icons it is advertising for Apple services. But you can put any apps up there and those apps control the hero image when you on them. They usually show what you have been watching

This just sounds like it was written by someone who hates Apple first and foremost. There was nothing of value in this post.

The bit about AirPods was very odd. User replaceable batteries in headphones is such a bizarre request.

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.

A foldable iPhone has been pretty firmly rumored for fall 2026 for a while now, I think you can take it as virtually certain: https://www.macrumors.com/guide/foldable-iphone/

I don't think the Air is merely a precursor to the foldable, however. It's rather that the technological evolution that allowed for the 5mm thin iPad Pro last year allows for the Air this year and helps with the foldable next year (and thinner MacBooks are rumored as well). But the Air is probably there to stay as a separate form factor, assuming that it doesn't flop in terms of sales. The foldable will be much heavier and bulkier, more resembling a Pro Max.

I want that speculation to be true, but I also don't think that the Air is a stepping stone towards that. The risky parts on a folding phone are the bending screen and the hinge and the software features.

The iPhone Air tests none of those things.

It tests their assembly lines and supply chain by producing 100 million titanium cases.

They did something similar when they transitioned the product line to aluminum.

(As a product, it’s the opposite of what I’d want — worse battery, bigger screen, worse camera, but they’ll certainly sell enough to debug the assembly lines.)

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).

I feel like these posts started popping up with increasing frequency over the last 10 years. At this point its almost a rite of passage to realize that Apple---though good in many ways---is far less than it's cracked up to be.

At least in tech circles.

Tech circles have never particularly liked Apple. Sometimes they're right; sometimes they're just grumpy that non-techies like things that they don't.

I've been hearing that since before Slashdot dubbed the iPod lame. So I just kinda tune it out and wait to see whether people buy it or not.

I started using Linux in the 1990s, and I flirted with Apple through out the 2010s. I finally switched full time to a Mac Studio this year despite the UI, despite the read-only root and kexts no longer being a thing and inconsistencies and stupid settings app and everything else.

For one, M4 Max is awesome. For two, every other OS is now more annoying to me. Linux is more inconsistent, and the changes being made by major distros make little sense. Windows is a dumpster fire. The BSDs don’t work on anything I own, and the M4 is better anyway. Finally… pricing. For the price of my M4 Mac, there is no PC with as good a spec considering the price of GPUs. RAM and SSD? Yeah, Apple is nearly criminal… but the price of an NVIDIA GPU? Actually kinda criminal.

Some of it is that the market has matured - going from not being connected to only connected on a desktop to everywhere on a phone with a real browser was a lot of changes you notice all day.

A child born on the day the first iPhone launched is old enough to vote now.

Many of those posts are being written by people who have been along for that ride, too, so it’s going to be hard to recapture that excitement after experiencing past hot products not changing your life. It’s like a middle aged American buying a new car - yeah, it’s nice but fundamentally nothing changes in your life and you’re never reclaiming the excitement of being 18 and going from marooned in a boring suburb to being able to travel, which is a transformative change even if it was in a clunky old hand-me-down.

Tech circles have been complaining about Apple's mediocrity all the way back to when they were actually mediocre.

Some small carriers in Australia don't support eSIMs, even though they're required for Apple Watches and other devices, and also second phone numbers in phones without dual SIM card trays.

I'm hoping that the iPhone Air will make them prioritise eSIM support!

Some carriers in the UK have been on the brink of providing eSIM support for several years, maybe Apple as often is the case can drive this forward.

I’m not sure what the issue is though, could it be a standards issue? Government tracking phone users? Someone being cut out of the money?

Answers please on a postcard.

Australia has like 100 reseller phone networks. There are only 3 real network providers and these as well as the majority of the resellers support esim, but when every single retail brand and supermarket has it's own mobile network offering, there's always going to be a couple that haven't put in even the smallest amount of work to support it until it's absolutely forced.

Seriously? Which ones don't support it, I actually have found more that are "esim only" these days (but I am someone who churns through ozbargain deals)

With Apple, the bloom is off the rose, and as with a lot of big business lately, the prose misses the mark.

Its copy was once great. Now we get "Awe-dropping", the latest example of marketing professionals coming up with the most basic rhyming wordplay that fits in a three word sentence. Smack a big period on it so it looks like a fact, then head to the bar.

The iPhone X had Apple’s best camera. Every version since has over processed its photos. Like an E30 BMW, I wish Apple would have never stopped making that device.

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.

I agree. It's objectively nonsense with regards to AirPods and Apple Watches in particular. Both are extremely dominant in their respective categories for many years at this point. Objectively, Apple is not alienating its "long-time customers". Someone raging about his perceived wastefulness of AirPods is out of touch with the vast majority of people.

But people love to rage and be enraged on the internet. So anyone pointing the vacuity of the enraged is downvoted and cast aside.

Corporations have no interest in making things that no one will buy.

To change Apple's behavior, consumers need to change theirs.

Given the lines out the door at China at Apple stores today, I don't see Apple changing their behavior anytime soon.

Or 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, and there cheaper friends are , as the article mentions, e-waste. Maybe you get 2 years out of them.

My analog headphones, with some light maintenance ( and a detachable cable) may last decades.

At this point Apple could come out with a 2000$ Audiophile line of phones with the jack and I'd buy one. But they won't.

If you're doing "audio production" you're going to have a USB audio interface.

You can use any USB C device that supports the industry standard USB c audio profiles.

Couldn’t you use a dongle?

Yea, I literally just bought an OEM dongle 20 minutes ago for this exact purpose.

I'm sure the USB-C port is more than sufficient.

They make USB-C EarPods.

I'm just getting back into Apple after having the first iPhone, but then Android/Linux since then. Now I'm all in on Apple silicon... For the next decade at least.

They're worth trillions already, but the truth is Apple knows the market will collapse long before they lose their leadership, so they don't really give a fuck. Notice how their most important event ever has been mostly pre-recorded corporate slop for the same phone for the last maybe 10 years?

You lost me at "traditional horology"

I agree with a lot of what this author says but they’re so wrong about AirPods.

The AirPods Pro 3 or really any of the recent AirPods are magical products. They’re the rare modern Apple product that Steve Jobs is smiling down upon.

Not only are they great for music but they are absolutely killer conferencing and phone call earbuds.

From early reviews it sounds like the Pro 3 has astounding microphone quality on top of the wide versatility and portability that the product already has.

The e-waste stuff, honestly, is nonsense. Maybe they’re a waste of money to need to be replaced somewhat frequently, but when you throw out AirPods you’re throwing out mere grams of total material. A replaceable battery would barely help that impact, it would mostly save you money to not buy the product all over again. And if you’re like me spending hours a day in meetings, AirPods are downright cheap for the utility they provide.

The average person is throwing out a pair of AirPods’ worth of fuel weight and carbon emissions every time they drive 10 minutes down the road or buy one hamburger with all that packaging from McDonald’s. Throwing out a pair of headphones smaller than a deck of cards every 4 years is basically nothing compared to typical consumer waste. Much lower hanging fruit to pick.

I think that the awe actually dropped when Apple stopped doing in person live events instead of recorded ones.

As a counterpoint: Apples has gotten so big that its user and customer base is not techies, they have moved into supporting our mainstream society as it operates today. They don't care about techies (at least primarily)

Apple has never cared about techies. They have always been consumer-focused, at least since the original candy-colored iMac days.

wonderfully written article -- my thanks to the author. there's a heavy amt of cynicism, but i enjoyed the argument, and i believe it's well reasoned. i do think that modern tech companies have lost all sight and attachment to the products that customers actually experience. it feels dissociative & much like another step of our broader culture shifting towards "bend-the-knee-ism", thanks to our current cabinet of clowns.

companies like Valve & Panic! remind me that focusing on producing high quality, enjoyable software/hardware experiences is not only still doable, but highly desired.

it's a beautiful art form - the exploration of human computer interaction. we're only really touching the surface, even still. it's exciting.

i thought tech companies were exciting? that they cared about this future? when did Apple & co start becoming IBM? when did the shareholders that Jobs despised win?

> What really got on my nerves during the Apple Watch segment of the event, though, is this: Apple always, always inserts a montage of sob stories about how the Apple Watch has saved lives, and what an indispensable life-saving device it is. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad those lives were saved. But this kind of ‘showcase’ every year is made in such poor taste. It’s clear to me that it’s all marketing above everything else, that they just want to sell the product, and these people’s stories end up being used as a marketing tactic. It’s depressing.

Yeah, the trauma porn in Apple events has become quite annoying. We get it - if you don't have an Apple watch you're going to die.

This, plus one important addition: How many people actually got killed or injured _because_ of iPhone or Watch? Think about it: using screens in traffic or in other situations where your attention to the world is critical.

All the best to the folks who where saved by any device, but given the large volume of devices sold - one has to assume there is a flip side to this coin, too.

Sure, but how many other products have a feature like that? I live in a very remote area. I NEED Starlink because it's my only choice for internet. I NEED a big 4x4 because if there's some particularly bad rain I'd be trapped in my home. If a tree falls in the nearby forest and nobody is there to hear it our power still goes out because it fell on a powerline and we NEED solar panels with battery backup or we can't flush the crapper because the water pump doesn't work without power. If my wife has a breakdown of her car or, god forbid, an accident on her way home from grocery shopping there is no cell service. No way to call me or the breakdown company or the police or an ambulance. I'm also not the only person who lives here. There are a few hundred people spread out across the general area and they all have these issues too. Apple's atellite communication could literally save my life as I go about normal, non-adventurous humdrum day-to-day tasks. Informing consumers of an actually useful standout feature unique to your products is good marketing and they're doing it at a marketing event they host to market their products. This guy's whole article was just the same tired applebashing that has actually become quite annoying. We get it - you don't think Apple products are good value for money in your use case and you don't understand the people who buy them.

I understand authors sentiment. It's hard to be fascinated by another revolutionary thinning of a device once more.

im glad you don't worship a corporation anymore bro

you would think a trillion dollar company would be able to innovate, but as it turns out. It really just goes into fancy marketing, C-level executive pockets, and shareholders.

Got to think of the shareholders, bro! Disgusting.

[dead]

Awe?

Come on. These are all minor improvements on existing products. Yawn.

A few days ago I tried to express a similar opinion here - regarding design and taking in account the liquid glass thing and the iphone air, it feels they are doing "innovation" for the sake of "innovation", and got downvoted. They're doing (arguably) huge improvements in processing and computing yet they want to disrupt user experience just because.

I wouldn’t mind them innovating if Liquid Glass wasn’t so bad. It’s a clear step back in usability with all the things you can’t properly read.

The updated applications which Just clearly copy Android are nice however.

I kind of agree but I also can think of a counter argument. They don’t want to seem stale. The current macOS look is more than a decade old, so Tahoe shakes it up a little.

I’m kind of indifferent to it so far but I can see what someone might have been thinking.

You are experiencing the negative side of the apple reality distortion field.

I too have experienced this. I expect that i have been too direct in my dislike of apple in this post.

You have to come at the problem sideways. To allow for any real hope of not being down voted the crowd.

I dont know what the root cause is.. if Cupertino corp has a really expensive pr team or apple devices are laced with some kind of mind altering drug.. the effect is the same.

I'd like to say HI to the apple PR team! looks like you made it.

Well, they're also desperate for anyone not to think of the absolute mess they've made of AI.