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Apple's iPhone overhaul will reduce its reliance on annual fall spectacle
- mgh2 1y agohttps://archive.is/OweSR https://archive.is/OweSR
- BoredPositron 1y agoHow fun. They are essentially repeating the playbook of the 2000/2010s automotive industry: minimal true innovation, instead focusing on establishing a core foundation and subsequently differentiating their model lines solely through arbitrary feature variations. Wonder how that turned out.
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- jack_tripper 1y agoCars didn't have a vendor lock-in ecosystem for your purchases, personal data and prized memories, to make switching brands a pain for the user.
- throwaway48476 1y agoI'm sure they're trying to change that. OEMs are now using the infotainment screen to advertise their new models.
- fragmede 1y agoFord and the other carmakers at the time absolutely tried to build that kind of lock in. The only reason it didn’t stick is because Congress stepped in with the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act. Automakers wanted to force you to buy OEM parts and pay for OEM service, and the anti tying rules killed that. It wasn’t some natural property of the market. It was government regulation that kept the ecosystem open. If phones had gotten a Magnuson Moss style intervention 10 years ago, the platform dynamics would be totally different today.
- StopDisinfo910 1y agoThey plainly can't compete on innovation. They are lagging behind the Asian companies on the actual equipment: Chinese phones have far better battery capacity, camera sensors and screens are both sourced from competitors, Mediatek has caught up to them on the SoC side of thing. People here are musing the Air might be a foldable prototype, something Asian brands have been releasing and improving for, what, five years now. On top of that, they have been struggling on the software side of things for quite some time. Stability is so-so. AI features don't really work. Plus, they pretty much stopped delivering new features in the EU. To me it looks like the only thing Apple has going for it is their brand image in the USA and their locked down ecosystem. Might be fine to keep revenue steady but doesn't bod well for growth. I personally went back to Android this generation when my iPhone 13 became unusable. I doubt I will be the only one making the switch.
- jdibs 1y agoSaying that Mediatek has caught up to anything is, well, simply false.
- StopDisinfo910 1y agoThat's not what the Dimensity 9500 benchmarks are saying. This SoC is in every way comparable to the A19 Pro. Apple used to have chips twice as effective as the competition. That's simply not the case anymore. I think Apple users are in denial regarding the current state of the market. Your comment is the second one apparently unaware of where Mediatek and Qualcomm currently stand compared to Apple.
- spacedcowboy 1y agoI don't know enough about supply chains to recognise whether what most of what you're saying is true or not, but "Mediatek has caught up to them on the SoC side of thing" is so laughably false that I seriously doubt the rest of what you say. The best MediaTek CPU is about 3/4 the speed of the best Apple one. "I personally went back to Android this generation when my iPhone 13 became unusable." - perhaps you're letting your situation affect your bias...
- wslh 1y agoGreat Chinese cars.
- throwaway48476 1y agoIncreasingly phones are being obsoleted by software and not the hardware which is still technically capable of running n+7 yearly OS. 10 years would be a good target for software support.
- buran77 1y agoManufacturers will look to price the OS support into the product. Customers will see an overpriced phone because it has ten years of support or a cheaper one with five years support and will think "I'd rather buy a new one in five years, I need a battery replacement anyway". I'd be very curious to see how the market responds to this, but I suspect manufacturers will set prices in such a way as to lead the customer towards a predetermined choice.
- joshstrange 1y agoReminds me of college where a MBP was $1k but a bargain bin windows laptop was $300-400. I knew many people who scoffed at the price of a MBP and then proceeded to buy 2-4 new laptops over the course of 4 years due to their laptops (sometimes literally) falling apart or otherwise breaking down. It was lost on them that they ended up paying close to or more for their laptops while having a subpar experience. To be fair, a nicer, more expensive, more reliable windows laptop would also have been an option.
- adithyassekhar 1y agoDidn't those people also get much newer hardware each time they upgraded? People who chose the expensive one will be dealing with the sunk cost fallacy.
- throwaway48476 1y agoThat already happened. Phones used to be $600. Now it's 1k+.
- concinds 1y agoWhy would anyone want that? If Apple pushed out iOS 26 to the iPhone 6 (or even 8), it would look like a slideshow and everyone would scream "planned obsolescence". As opposed to now where it still works fine on iOS 15 or whatever. Though I guess if they did like Google and updated a lot of OS components through the App Store (which I agree they should) then you could have security updates for most stuff without major UI updates that slow you down, that would be cool.
- rusk 1y agoI’m happy to pay more for services if it means longer device lifetimes
- MangoToupe 1y agoWhy would paying more for services imply longer device lifetimes? These seem uncorrelated at first blush.
- ycombinete 1y agoMy only guess is that, if they are making more money from services, they need to sell less phones. Therefore hardware obsolescence becomes less important as a means of getting revenue.
- iso1631 1y agoYour premise is based on a trillion dollar company saying "I need less money" They'll (try to) charge the most they can to maximise the profit
- MangoToupe 1y agoI don't see why they would put effort into making the phones last longer, though, if this didn't matter to them before. Anyway you can't exactly pull a longer lasting battery out of thin air
- weikju 1y ago> Anyway you can't exactly pull a longer lasting battery out of thin air I don’t know if intentional but I enjoyed the pun about the iPhone Air, here.
- brazukadev 1y agoHey! Apple needs to make money, too! /s
- mgh2 1y agoReasons: > steadier revenue throughout the year, reduce strain on employees and manufacturing partners, avoid premium and budget models from cannibalizing each other’s marketing, multiple chances each year to counter new releases from competitors
- gyomu 1y agoOne of my favorite questions to muse about is when will be the first year where Apple does not release any new product branded as an “iPhone”. Everything must end after all; but I get wildly different answers when I ask that question to people around me. Some think it’ll happen in <10 years as other platforms like glasses take over, others will say it’s gotta be many decades away given how much the iPhone is a cash cow for Apple and they’ll milk it as long as they can. FWIW, the first year without a new iPod introduced was 2011, and the product line was discontinued altogether in 2022.
- camillomiller 1y agoThat was 4 years after the launch of the product that was also an iPod —namely the iPhone. I still don’t see the iPhone’s iPhone anywhere on the horizon
- keyringlight 1y agoI suppose a lot of people who like to try and predict the next big thing would try and guess what the precursors are. For example where would you be looking now for the equivalent of a camera OS that would end up being Android years later? That was at the tail end of the period where consumer compact cameras were a big thing (before they were bundled into phones), so it could be that there's a path of evolution from smartphones to the next big thing, but I wouldn't want to place bets especially if you're trying to judge whether there's an audience for it.
- camillomiller 1y agoI think no product comes close to the penetration of the iPhone, though. How would you compare that to what an iPod used to do? That's the fundamental difference with previous cycles. I think the smartphone in general is such a universal device, and nothing comes close to how much it can cover thousands of digital needs. Take the AI pin style devices: what are the incentives in going from a perfected device like the iPhone to something that limits you to a single type of interaction, that technically the smartphone can already cover?
- mrweasel 1y agoThe iPhone Air existing as a "prototype" for a fold-able future phone is probably the best explanation I've seen for why it even exists. Looking back, other than the insane media coverage, when was the last spectacle really? To me the iPhone sort settled down with the iPhone 5, providing only minimal improvements in terms of actual usage since then.
- zaptrem 1y agoiPhone X’s removal of the home button was a pretty big change, made navigation more fluid and felt very futuristic.
- archerx 1y agoI feel like it made the experience worse. Just like removing the headphone jack made things worse. Want to connect a midi keyboard to your iOS device and play some instruments on GarageBand? Do you also want to use external speakers without Bluetooth latency? Well too bad!
- nicolaslem 1y agoIt's not like what you are describing is impossible today. With the switch to USB-C, iOS devices are compatible with a vast number of affordable adapters. Some of which add features and ports that realistically couldn't be physically on a phone like HDMI or RJ45.
- archerx 1y agoSo I would have to buy a usb hub + a dac. So much for it just works!
- nicolaslem 1y agoWhat percentage of iOS users use a midi keyboard with their devices? 0.01%? My desktop audio interface plugs right in an iPhone (USB-C to C), no hub or dongle needed, and provides audio in/out, 5-pins midi in/out, microphone preamp, etc. If it comes to the flexibility of improvising a jam session with inexpensive gear, we are in a much better place today than 10 years ago when phones had headphone jacks. And I say that as someone who uses wired headphones extensively and carries a 3.5mm dongle everywhere.
- yapyap 1y agoWhy do they keep investing into the iphone air? There’s nearly no consumer interest in an iphone thats ‘as thin as possible’. With the capabilities they showed they have for slimming parts down I’d be much much more interested in more battery capacity and a smaller iphone, a new mini.
- zemvpferreira 1y agoFor the upcoming foldable. Keeping the air allows them to successively engineer the following foldable generation with lower risk and spread out the costs.
- piskov 1y agoBut it makes no sense. If you want to test for thinness, they’ve been doing it already with ipads. Also look at the thinness, weight of iphone 6s and compare it to air. You will be suprised. The main paint points about foldable is a — duh — folding screen and a hinge. And neither are in air.
- joshstrange 1y ago> The main paint points about foldable is a — duh — folding screen and a hinge. And neither are in air. The idea is that the folding phone would be essentially 2 Air’s* with a hinge between them. * possibly/probably thinner, but the Air serves as a “how thin can we make this since we need to improve our ability to make thin phones/components to accomplish a folding phone”. A sort of “you have to walk before you can run”-type thing. At least that’s how I see it.
- piskov 1y agoLike I’ve said: - ipad pro is 5.1 mm - iphone air is 5.6 mm Air is thicker than ipad
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