charlesn

Well, at least AI is consistent in being consistently wrong. This is NOT a "5x optical zoom" lens. There are, in fact, no optical zoom lenses to be found in any iPhone ever. An optical zoom lens has optical elements (hence the name!) that move within the lens to change focal length. Why does Apple Insider find it impossible to accurately describe the lens for what it is: a fixed focal length 120mm lens which would replace the fixed focal length 77mm lens currently in the 15 Pro. iPhone lenses achieve zooming via sensor cropping (a/k/a "digital zoom") and computational tricks. The further you "zoom" with this method from the actual fixed focal length of the lens, the more you compromise quality. Whereas the current main lens in the 15 Pro handles the 24mm-76mm range, the main lens in the 16 Pro would have to handle the 24mm-119mm range, after which the 120mm lens would kick in. Photo quality vs the 15 Pro will be demonstrably inferior in the 77mm-119mm range, which is a sweet spot range for portraiture and short-mediium telephoto photos in general. 

Pema said:

If you purchase a Bentley Bentayga, you get the Mulliner Tourbillon Clock as an $30,000 option. But, hey, what's $30,000 between friends when the Bentayga will lighten your wallet by $550,000? 

By the same measure, when you purchase the Apple Car, you get the Apple Ring thrown in for free. 

Let's face it, Cook has kept Apple afloat quite nicely. But the reality is that since Job's passing the only innovative product that Apple has released to date is the Vision Pro. All the others have been upgrades upon upgrades upon upgrades. Forget the watch it's not innovative.

And truth be told, Apple has botched what could have been a multi-billion product had they released it in a smaller form factor without all the bells and whistles at $1500-$2000. Pitching it at $3500 USD is the same mistake when they sold the Gold Apple Watch for some outrageous price. However, they did offer the Apple Watch at a more affordable price range which made it a hit. 

The Vision Pro US market has dried up. So now they are offering the Vision Pro around the world. They will sell a few. But not enough to offset the R&D effort and not near enough to move the needle by much when Apple releases their Dec. 2024 numbers. 

The moral in this: start small, grab market share, get an audience then slowly increase the features and price to achieve a $3500 price point. 
If you already own an Apple Vision Pro 1.0 then you have trade-in value. Right now the only thing you have to trade-in is the shirt on your back. And Apple does not want that!

Wow. This is all so utterly baseless and mindless, it's hard to know where to start so I just quoted it all. 

The Watch isn't innovative? Hmmm... let's see. The wristwatch had been around for over 200 years when Apple introduced theirs in 2014. That gave every other company that ever made watches a two centuries head start on Apple. Apple was selling 0 watches in 2014. But just five years later, the Watch was outselling the entire Swiss watch industry COMBINED which. let's not forget, included mass market brands like Swatch. And, of course, Apple Watch sales left every other watch brand in the world in the dust. So yeah, definitely nothing to see here, nothing "innovative" to explain why Apple's watch upended 200 years of wristwatch history. I guess people just really like the bands? The Watch also created an entirely new product category for Apple under Tim Cook: Wearables. Which leads me to...

Apple AirPods. Yeah, like the Watch, another "nothing burger" created under Cook and released in 2016. It's really a shame that Apple's wireless earbuds and headphones never caught on. They should have listened when people said it was stupid to abandon the headphone jack on iPhone. What can you say? Another big miss in Wearables for Cook, who can't seem to innovate anything under his oversight. 

Vision Pro. So, according to your brilliant business mind, "smaller, simpler, cheaper" is the path to success! Well, my friend, both Meta and Microsoft--you've heard of them, right?--have been in the "smaller, simpler, cheaper" headset game for years. So where's the killer product that owns the market? OH... that's right. It doesn't exist. So what happened? Like a lot of people too lazy to actually research what gets reported online, you believe at face value the headlines that proclaim BS like, "Apple Vision Pro sales fall short." If you look at the quotes about Vision Pro from someone like Kuo, an analyst who gets quoted a lot, he has been all over the map in his assessment of Vision Pro. There is no consistency in what he reports, none whatsoever, so there's nothing you can believe. But hey... you'd have to be tracking his quotes to know that. Similarly, there was the "Market consensus says that Vision Pro sales fall short" that made the rounds for a while. Ask yourself: what the hell does "market consensus" even mean? Sure sounds authoritative, but only if you don't peek behind the curtain of nonsense. There was never any "market consensus" about how many Vision Pros Apple would sell. Brokerage houses ranged in estimates from 50,000 to 5 million, with all kinds of numbers in between. So Apple is "failing" vs. a consensus that doesn't even exist.

The truth about Vision Pro is this: instead of introducing another "me. too, mixed reality headset" for the so-called metaverse (remember when that was supposedly the next big thing?), Apple introduced an entirely new computing platform at the price point required to properly execute its vision for the product. Do you really think Apple was caught unaware that a $3500, v1.0 all-new computing platform wasn't going to be a mass market success? I have to assume no one is that stupid. What was important for this first iteration was to showcase the capabilities and possibilities of Vision Pro--which, if you book a free demo session of Vision Pro at your local Apple Store, will become much clearer, even if you, personally, have no need for the product. Sales of Vision Pro have followed the curve you would expect for a very expensive, 1.0 product: very strong sales initially from those who could afford it based on pent-up demand and early adopters followed by what was likely a sharp but entirely expected fall-off. The roll out of Vision Pro was always planned as USA-first, followed by rest of the world later, in stages, and not the insane "Uh, Americans don't want this, let's try to sell it elsewhere" nonsense that you suggest. The complexity of manufacturing Vision Pro has always meant that first year production numbers would be constrained. No surprise that Apple's biggest market, China, was next it line, where Vision Pro is priced even higher than in the US. The truth is that Apple did what it needed to do in Vision Pro 1.0: introduce an entirely new and highly innovative product that performs well and is unlike anything the market has ever seen in headsets. Its success was never going to be determined by v1.0 and Apple has mountains of cash on hand to sustain continued development of the future iterations that will determine if it remains a niche product or finds greater mass market success.

Services:  Cook's job as leader of Apple is to innovate new businesses to grow the company, which gets increasingly difficult as Apple grows ever larger. To the small-minded who lack vision, imagination and business sense, "innovation" only counts if it's a new hardware product. And so they stupidly overlook the fact that Cook has created the greatest new "product" and business in Apple's history except for iPhone: the Services category. Services now generates about one-third of all Apple profit, it is a larger and more profitable business on its own than most Fortune 500 companies and it eclipses, by far, the Mac and iPad businesses combined. Its profit margins are also incredibly high. Services has literally been the savior of Apple since iPhone sales started to level off and decline. But yeah, once again, nothing to see here. Cook can't do anything. 

dpkroh said:

Arghhh..... no mention of the app where Siri desperately needs to be improved - the Home App.  Right now it is terrible for voice control.  Most of the time we want to change a setting in the home we are not on our devices.  IMO that makes it the MOST important app for Siri improvements, as Siri is the most common way to interact with the Home app.

Absolutely. I"m 100% Apple except when it comes to voice control of home devices because the sheer suckiness of Siri has forced me to go with Echo Dots and Alexa. I really hope Apple proves me wrong, but I'm seriously doubtful that Apple is going to pull off the execution of this Siri revolution. It just doesn't add up for me. They can't get a friggin' voice assistant fixed in 14 years of trying after buying the company that created Siri--and now Siri has suddenly blossomed into AI Einstein/Master of the Universe? I'm sorry, but why has there been zero evidence of this amazing Siri engineering team for the past decade and a half? I have no doubt we'll hear a lot of big, exciting promises this week, but what will matter most is execution and how well the new Siri actually works IRL. As of today, Siri still sucks. But hey... if Apple can prove me wrong, I'll happily replace my Dots with HomePod Minis. 

Of course, reaching this Promised Land with Siri is all predicated on being able to consistently understand language, a capability that has eluded Siri for 14 years and counting. Who knows, maybe the 15th time is the charm, but count me as skeptical until proven. 

"The iPhone 15 Pro Max significantly pushed the camera system forward, adding a 5x optical zoom with its tetraprism lens." 

Absolute nonsense. Why can't AppleInsider get this right? What Apple did with the 15 Pro Max was replace the fixed focal length 77mm telephoto lens previously used with a fixed focal length 120mm telephoto lens. Neither lens has optical zooming, nor does ANY lens of the three in the iPhone Pro models. Zooming is done via sensor cropping and computational photography. Whether the 120mm lens "significantly pushed the camera system forward" really depends on whether you do a lot of shooting at 120mm and above. The vast majority of photographers do not, as is the case for the vast majority of photographs taken. Within the much more used and useful 77mm-119mm range, the old 77mm telephoto lens is qualitatively superior, as was shown in AppleInsider's own side-by-side comparison shots as well as those on many other websites. Why is this true? The explanation is simple. Because the 15 Pro Max model handles the 77mm-119lmm range with the 24mm main lens, so there is a lot more sensor cropping and computational trickery going on to achieve those images vs the 15 Pro where the telephoto lens kicks in at 77mm. For the VAST majority of photographers, trading off image quality in a much more useful range to gain better image quality is a much less used range is simply a bad trade and not a step forward. In that way, the "telephoto wars" are somewhat reminiscent of the early "megapixel wars" when phone makers were trumpeting more megapixels as inherently "better," even though the more densely packed tiny sensors produced crappier images.