5 ms·

Phones and tablets are very close to the point that desktop/laptops got to a few years back where unless there is some major disruptive technology introduced (e

Phones and tablets are very close to the point that desktop/laptops got to a few years back where unless there is some major disruptive technology introduced (eg. batteries with 100%+ efficiency over current ones) on top of them the one you bought this year is pretty much good enough to keep for the next many years, until it breaks somehow. There will still be a market of ultra-fashion-conscious buyers who really need this years model, just like there are people who lease brand new cars every year, but that market isn't big enough, IMO, to sustain the growth that Apple, Samsung, etc have enjoyed thus far.

ryanhuff 13y ago
Non-replaceable battery is probably a primary why this may not be the case. My iPad 3 seems to be discharging much more quickly these days, and will probably mean a replacement will be needed sometime next year.
- georgemcbay 13y ago
  Yeah that's a good point I hadn't thought about, and it applies to non-expandable flash ram as well since basically your data will grow to fit available space. But those issues are sort of cheating since they are basically planned obsolescence features that could trivially be solved if there were any incentive to do so. But there isn't, so more landfill generated for little actual new value.
  - empthought 13y ago
    > could trivially be solved I'm going to guess you're neither a computer hardware nor a battery engineer.
    - georgemcbay 13y ago
      I meant solved by making the battery replaceable, even if as a service of AppleCare or whatever if not the end-consumer. See: Teslas, which have to live by the same rules as everyone else when it comes to battery life issues but whose solution isn't 'throw your car out when it won't hold a charge anymore'.
      - bananacurve 13y ago
        Apple products hold value amazingly well because they are well built. My 04 iBook is still in service. Cheap crap will fill landfills.
      - Someone 13y ago
        Solved like with http://www.apple.com/batteries/replacements.html http://www.apple.com/batteries/replacements.html or http://www.apple.com/de/batteries/replacements.html http://www.apple.com/de/batteries/replacements.html (Germany) or http://www.apple.com/au/batteries/replacements.html http://www.apple.com/au/batteries/replacements.html (Australia)?
      - huxley 13y ago
        The battery is replaceable under AppleCare or for a $109.77 +tax after warranty/AppleCare+ expires: http://www.apple.com/ca/batteries/replacements.html http://www.apple.com/ca/batteries/replacements.html
      - thedrbrian 13y ago
        Don't tesla make you throw 1000kg battery pack away?
      - Tloewald 13y ago
        A car is expected to last longer than a laptop, and no-one needs to carry a car around all day in their back pockets. Also note that replacing the entire battery is the only viable way to recharge your Tesla quickly. You can charge your iOS device while you use it. When Teslas have seen the kind of prolonged use and abuse people's phones and computers have taken, let's see how their battery packs do. And of course, Apple sells battery replacements at pretty reasonable prices, but most people don't bother because depreciation makes it not worthwhile. Our kids are using our original iPad 1s and abuse the heck out of them, and they still get decent battery life.
- gcb0 13y ago
  apple is master of planned obsolence. and other are learning later but following close. battery as you said is almost the norm now. sd card dissapeared from all android devices save from some expensive sony ones. and with storage prices dropping (ssd just broke the 50c/gb barries) this is a sure way of making next year device much more appealing. scren resolution being improved in homeopatic doses. year over year. this also contributes to new storage needs as apps space quadriplicate to support all screen sizes, reinforcing point above.
grecy 13y ago
> but that market isn't big enough, IMO, to sustain the growth that Apple, Samsung, etc have enjoyed thus far. Which is why Apple is pushing so hard into "Developing markets" like China, Brazil, India, etc. etc. There are hundreds of millions of people on the planet that have never really even had the option of buying an iPhone or iPad. I'll wager tons of them have the means to buy one, and they clearly have the desire.
- pezh0re 13y ago
  I don't know... Unless people have specifically been avoiding smart phones/tablets in the expectation that eventually Apple products would become available - I would expect most of them already have devices that are as good, if not better than the iPad/iPhone.
Already__Taken 13y ago
It's not only batteries that have to catch up we're still exceedingly wasteful in other areas. There's tons of potential for display technology to move forward it just comes at the cost of per unit price. Computers don't need to be screaming away rending this form at 60fps but that's what we're doing at the moment just to make panels as simple as possible.
baddox 13y ago
I don't think that's true. Even without significant software improvements, the iPad could noticeably benefit from a generation or two of faster storage and wireless technologies (both LAN and WAN).
- georgemcbay 13y ago
  I agree, that's why I said they were close to this point... not quite there yet. I think faster WAN technologies will end up being gated by our terrible cell carriers though, who are already fucking up widescale LTE and generally doing a bad job of anything other than overcharging for poor service and getting away with it due to massive industry price fixing and collusion.
peter303 13y ago
Unless there is "planned obselescens" like not support the OS on only the three newest models.
- pezh0re 13y ago
  Or officially support the OS on older models, but leverage new hardware technology so much that it crawls on the oldest phones/tablets.
benihana 13y ago
It's funny. Every year, since 2007 I've heard this argument, that the market isn't big enough and every year: record growth and profits. No but seriously. This year is the year that Apple's iPhone success catches up to them. "Apple's iPhone business is finally going to fail this year" is the new "this is the year of the Linux desktop"
- acchow 13y ago
  Are we looking at the same financial results? Year-after-year, Apple has had double-digit % growth in both revenue and income (often 50%+). This latest quarter, revenue has grown 5.7% and income per diluted share 5.0%. This could actually be the end of limitless growth.
- patrickaljord 13y ago
  No one says Apple products are going to fail this year, relax. Most people on earth still don't have a smartphone and so Apple and Samsung will keep on making record revenues and profits until either a better competitor appears or the market gets saturated. Neither will happen any time soon but it's obvious that no market can keep on growing that way for too long. As for the "this is the year of the Linux desktop", this is the most annoying straw man meme ever. I have yet to meet anyone who ever claimed so except for a couple of articles on cnet or so a few years ago. Linux market share on the desktop worldwide is at 1% which is pretty significant when you think that macs, with all Apple billions are at 5% only. MS has won the desktop war. On mobile however, linux seems to be doing pretty good and so is ios, simply because the market is still growing and there is place for more than one winner. Isn't that great? :)
  - Diamons 13y ago
    Anyone that thinks Linux is going to take over the consumer computer market anytime soon needs to go outside more often.
    - patrickaljord 13y ago
      Yep, same thing for mac. Unless you consider smartphones to be computers (which they are) and in this case both mac and linux are taking over.
snowwrestler 13y ago
I think mobile software has a long way to go, and hardware performance will drive quite a bit of upgrading for years to come. Two areas off the top of my head: moving more voice recognition and "smarts" onto the client to speed things up, and better and better gaming. Non-replaceable naturally create refresh points for mobile devices, in a way they don't even with laptops. I have a Macbook Pro from 2009 with a totally dead battery, but it doesn't matter since I most use it at home, where it's easy to keep it plugged in. That doesn't work with a phone or tablet.
bane 13y ago
Something interesting that Apple has been able to do the last few years is find one new technology, or push the notch up on an existing one, such that people feel they're significant enough upgrades that they end up buying whatever it is. What will Apple throw out next? I have no idea, but I'm expecting to be mildly surprised when it happens.
plg 13y ago
In principle this could be true but I don't think it will be. A simply example: right now speech recognition happens in the cloud. Could be that a future device has a dedicated chip for speech recognition (or some kind of preprocessing). Then future versions of the OS will require this. Hence you have to upgrade. This is how it has gone with things like graphics, animation, even sound. In principle the core elements of the Mac OS don't require extremely fast chips/hardware ... but once you get into the fancy desktop animations, the sound processing, face recognition (e.g. iPhoto), etc etc, you require fancier hardware. There are still lots of directions for Apple to push their software, directions that will be aided by better and/or more specialized hardware. If all you need is a text editor, an email client and some CPU power for crunching spreadsheets then for sure, all you "need" is a desktop circa 2000 (or even earlier ...) ... but if you want to run the latest OS, even if you don't need/want all the features of that latest OS, you need to keep up with the hardware. Never mind games.
jsz0 13y ago
I don't think we're quite there yet with tablets. Maybe another 3-4 years. They are relatively inexpensive and they have a strong hand-me-down life cycle. A lot of people buying new iPads every 1-2 years are doing so to give their old model to kids/family/etc. They are very personal devices no one really wants to share a tablet. There is also going to be more churn in the market because they are very mobile devices more prone to being broken or lost. Being very mobile devices they are more likely to be replaced/upgraded simply due to fashion/social pressure. Best parallel to that is car sales. A lot of people buy new cars simply because they don't want to drive an old/unfashionable car anymore. SmartPhones are much closer to that 'good enough' point though I think subsidized devices are still very much in impulse buy territory for a lot of people. Given the cost of your cellular contract there's questionable value in saving $100-$200 every two years skipping an upgrade. You have to pay for the service either way it's in your best interest to have a device that can make the most of it. For unsubsidized devices (non-Apple devices at least) there is a healthy low-mid range market developing where the same trends should play out.

ryanhuff 13y ago

Non-replaceable battery is probably a primary why this may not be the case. My iPad 3 seems to be discharging much more quickly these days, and will probably mean a replacement will be needed sometime next year.

georgemcbay 13y ago
Yeah that's a good point I hadn't thought about, and it applies to non-expandable flash ram as well since basically your data will grow to fit available space. But those issues are sort of cheating since they are basically planned obsolescence features that could trivially be solved if there were any incentive to do so. But there isn't, so more landfill generated for little actual new value.
- empthought 13y ago
  > could trivially be solved I'm going to guess you're neither a computer hardware nor a battery engineer.
  - georgemcbay 13y ago
    I meant solved by making the battery replaceable, even if as a service of AppleCare or whatever if not the end-consumer. See: Teslas, which have to live by the same rules as everyone else when it comes to battery life issues but whose solution isn't 'throw your car out when it won't hold a charge anymore'.
    - bananacurve 13y ago
      Apple products hold value amazingly well because they are well built. My 04 iBook is still in service. Cheap crap will fill landfills.
    - Someone 13y ago
      Solved like with http://www.apple.com/batteries/replacements.html http://www.apple.com/batteries/replacements.html or http://www.apple.com/de/batteries/replacements.html http://www.apple.com/de/batteries/replacements.html (Germany) or http://www.apple.com/au/batteries/replacements.html http://www.apple.com/au/batteries/replacements.html (Australia)?
    - huxley 13y ago
      The battery is replaceable under AppleCare or for a $109.77 +tax after warranty/AppleCare+ expires: http://www.apple.com/ca/batteries/replacements.html http://www.apple.com/ca/batteries/replacements.html
    - thedrbrian 13y ago
      Don't tesla make you throw 1000kg battery pack away?
    - Tloewald 13y ago
      A car is expected to last longer than a laptop, and no-one needs to carry a car around all day in their back pockets. Also note that replacing the entire battery is the only viable way to recharge your Tesla quickly. You can charge your iOS device while you use it. When Teslas have seen the kind of prolonged use and abuse people's phones and computers have taken, let's see how their battery packs do. And of course, Apple sells battery replacements at pretty reasonable prices, but most people don't bother because depreciation makes it not worthwhile. Our kids are using our original iPad 1s and abuse the heck out of them, and they still get decent battery life.
gcb0 13y ago
apple is master of planned obsolence. and other are learning later but following close. battery as you said is almost the norm now. sd card dissapeared from all android devices save from some expensive sony ones. and with storage prices dropping (ssd just broke the 50c/gb barries) this is a sure way of making next year device much more appealing. scren resolution being improved in homeopatic doses. year over year. this also contributes to new storage needs as apps space quadriplicate to support all screen sizes, reinforcing point above.

grecy 13y ago

> but that market isn't big enough, IMO, to sustain the growth that Apple, Samsung, etc have enjoyed thus far. Which is why Apple is pushing so hard into "Developing markets" like China, Brazil, India, etc. etc. There are hundreds of millions of people on the planet that have never really even had the option of buying an iPhone or iPad. I'll wager tons of them have the means to buy one, and they clearly have the desire.

pezh0re 13y ago
I don't know... Unless people have specifically been avoiding smart phones/tablets in the expectation that eventually Apple products would become available - I would expect most of them already have devices that are as good, if not better than the iPad/iPhone.

Already__Taken 13y ago

It's not only batteries that have to catch up we're still exceedingly wasteful in other areas. There's tons of potential for display technology to move forward it just comes at the cost of per unit price. Computers don't need to be screaming away rending this form at 60fps but that's what we're doing at the moment just to make panels as simple as possible.

baddox 13y ago

I don't think that's true. Even without significant software improvements, the iPad could noticeably benefit from a generation or two of faster storage and wireless technologies (both LAN and WAN).

georgemcbay 13y ago
I agree, that's why I said they were close to this point... not quite there yet. I think faster WAN technologies will end up being gated by our terrible cell carriers though, who are already fucking up widescale LTE and generally doing a bad job of anything other than overcharging for poor service and getting away with it due to massive industry price fixing and collusion.

peter303 13y ago

Unless there is "planned obselescens" like not support the OS on only the three newest models.

pezh0re 13y ago
Or officially support the OS on older models, but leverage new hardware technology so much that it crawls on the oldest phones/tablets.

benihana 13y ago

It's funny. Every year, since 2007 I've heard this argument, that the market isn't big enough and every year: record growth and profits. No but seriously. This year is the year that Apple's iPhone success catches up to them. "Apple's iPhone business is finally going to fail this year" is the new "this is the year of the Linux desktop"

acchow 13y ago
Are we looking at the same financial results? Year-after-year, Apple has had double-digit % growth in both revenue and income (often 50%+). This latest quarter, revenue has grown 5.7% and income per diluted share 5.0%. This could actually be the end of limitless growth.
patrickaljord 13y ago
No one says Apple products are going to fail this year, relax. Most people on earth still don't have a smartphone and so Apple and Samsung will keep on making record revenues and profits until either a better competitor appears or the market gets saturated. Neither will happen any time soon but it's obvious that no market can keep on growing that way for too long. As for the "this is the year of the Linux desktop", this is the most annoying straw man meme ever. I have yet to meet anyone who ever claimed so except for a couple of articles on cnet or so a few years ago. Linux market share on the desktop worldwide is at 1% which is pretty significant when you think that macs, with all Apple billions are at 5% only. MS has won the desktop war. On mobile however, linux seems to be doing pretty good and so is ios, simply because the market is still growing and there is place for more than one winner. Isn't that great? :)
- Diamons 13y ago
  Anyone that thinks Linux is going to take over the consumer computer market anytime soon needs to go outside more often.
  - patrickaljord 13y ago
    Yep, same thing for mac. Unless you consider smartphones to be computers (which they are) and in this case both mac and linux are taking over.

snowwrestler 13y ago

I think mobile software has a long way to go, and hardware performance will drive quite a bit of upgrading for years to come. Two areas off the top of my head: moving more voice recognition and "smarts" onto the client to speed things up, and better and better gaming. Non-replaceable naturally create refresh points for mobile devices, in a way they don't even with laptops. I have a Macbook Pro from 2009 with a totally dead battery, but it doesn't matter since I most use it at home, where it's easy to keep it plugged in. That doesn't work with a phone or tablet.

bane 13y ago

Something interesting that Apple has been able to do the last few years is find one new technology, or push the notch up on an existing one, such that people feel they're significant enough upgrades that they end up buying whatever it is. What will Apple throw out next? I have no idea, but I'm expecting to be mildly surprised when it happens.

plg 13y ago

In principle this could be true but I don't think it will be. A simply example: right now speech recognition happens in the cloud. Could be that a future device has a dedicated chip for speech recognition (or some kind of preprocessing). Then future versions of the OS will require this. Hence you have to upgrade. This is how it has gone with things like graphics, animation, even sound. In principle the core elements of the Mac OS don't require extremely fast chips/hardware ... but once you get into the fancy desktop animations, the sound processing, face recognition (e.g. iPhoto), etc etc, you require fancier hardware. There are still lots of directions for Apple to push their software, directions that will be aided by better and/or more specialized hardware. If all you need is a text editor, an email client and some CPU power for crunching spreadsheets then for sure, all you "need" is a desktop circa 2000 (or even earlier ...) ... but if you want to run the latest OS, even if you don't need/want all the features of that latest OS, you need to keep up with the hardware. Never mind games.

jsz0 13y ago

I don't think we're quite there yet with tablets. Maybe another 3-4 years. They are relatively inexpensive and they have a strong hand-me-down life cycle. A lot of people buying new iPads every 1-2 years are doing so to give their old model to kids/family/etc. They are very personal devices no one really wants to share a tablet. There is also going to be more churn in the market because they are very mobile devices more prone to being broken or lost. Being very mobile devices they are more likely to be replaced/upgraded simply due to fashion/social pressure. Best parallel to that is car sales. A lot of people buy new cars simply because they don't want to drive an old/unfashionable car anymore. SmartPhones are much closer to that 'good enough' point though I think subsidized devices are still very much in impulse buy territory for a lot of people. Given the cost of your cellular contract there's questionable value in saving $100-$200 every two years skipping an upgrade. You have to pay for the service either way it's in your best interest to have a device that can make the most of it. For unsubsidized devices (non-Apple devices at least) there is a healthy low-mid range market developing where the same trends should play out.