With the VisionPro hype already dead (maybe forever?), bad or tasteless iPad ads, purposeless updates to iPad, Apple dropping their car project, and reaching out to OpenAI or Google for AI services … it certainly feels like it to me. They’ve at least run into their limitations recently however much they want to find the “next iPhone”.
With the VisionPro, I always thought it’d flop and so predicted that it’d be the end for Cook. I’m still holding onto that prediction.
Funnily I actually see them doing the opposite of this currently.
They’ve always been a company that extracts the most they can from their target demographics. It was a meme for a long time that apple hardware was overpriced rubbish that was wrapped up in a shiny (thermally badly designed) box, and until the recent shift, that’s kinda mostly tracked as true.
What we’re seeing differently now though, is they’re actually putting some of the best hardware in the industry in their machines, combined with the (now much colder) shiny box, suddenly the value proposition starts to make a lot more sense outside their usual demographics
Eh, kinda. The macbooks still come with 8gb non replaceable memory and the upcharge for another 8gb is $200 (not just for the air but the $1600 pro too). These are still great laptops but the pricing feels hostile.
IPad hardware is brilliant but what’s the point? You’re stuck with a neutered OS and a handheld formfactor that is not especially suitable for work or for gaming (the fields that usually need more power).
The baseline iphones are still lacking basic features like a high refresh screen purely for product segmentation purposes. And once again a slew of hostile, anti-user and anti-developer decisions like banning sideloading or alternative browser engines mainly designed to lock down the OS so they can retain all control of what goes on on your device. Another way this control is used is to funnel you to use icloud which offers an introductory free tier of 5(?) GB of data. I don’t think I had a single relative that didn’t have the “your icloud storage is full” popup every day until we disabled photo backups or they started paying a monthly subscription.
The app store is also a disaster. Just open it and search for something, I’m not even going to say more. This is an obvious profit vs user experience tradeoff.
Airpods are more or less fine. I had a gen1 Airpods pro which were kinda category defining at the time. Competition has caught up however, also better repairability would be nice. I’m actually surprised you were allowed to use them without an iPhone.
Apple watch seems fine, still no 3rd party watchfaces. The locked down OS is somewhat more justified in this case.
I haven’t tried the vision pro but that is also locked down software wise.
Overall, as you said, the hardware is good to best-in-class but it feels to me that at every turn you are being pushed and manipulated into giving more of your cash to Apple sometimes in the form of product segmentation, sometimes via artificial software limitations.
You don’t get to be a trillion dollar company just by making good products.