charlesn

ApplePoor said:

Not a surprise really that Apple got caught with their pants down. Too much time and money wasted on the "never saw the light of day" car.  The "googles" have consumed untold resources, too and have not been a runaway success in terms of sales. Frankly, usable Apple's AI is years away and could become a serious concern financially as investors loose confidence.

Apple has morphed from a small and fast Navy Destroyer to a more than cumbersome Battleship. The latter finally gets up to speed and requires vast space to change course or turn around let alone stop.

The incremental changes or improvements in their "core" revenue source, the iPhone, are an embarrassment when one sees what the competitors are pushing out. 

The comments here in the peanut gallery should be a five alarm file in the Board of Directors meetings such as the lack of more and more folks upgrading annually as there is just not enough change to justify a $2,000 expenditure for the top model with full memory - their most profitable model.

The incremental change of their most popular laptop (MacBook Air) is a chip change from the M3 to the M4. Wow! ???????

Just observations of an Apple user since1990 into computers since the early 1970s.

YMMV

Another Apple vet here, using Macs at work and home since the Macintosh Classic in 1991. It's not that I disagree, per se, with this assessment, but it's a reminder that perceptions in the tech press and by commenters on tech message boards like this one are often completely disconnected from the reality of how Apple is actually doing as a company. In three words: "Better than ever" by any of the usual metrics by which the performance of companies is measured. Something astonishing, almost unthinkable a short time ago just happened when Apple reported earnings for the holiday quarter: its iPhone numbers were a little soft, which would have normally tanked the stock, but this time, it didn't matter. Why? Because its insanely profitable Services business is growing so rapidly and is essentially a license to print money. Under Tim Cook, Apple has transitioned from a one-legged company whose fortunes rose and fell with iPhone, to a company with three sturdy legs: iPhone, Services (which will surpass iPhone in profit and revenues sooner than later) and Hardware, including Macs, iPads and wearables. Fun fact: even with numbers that were a little soft, iPhone 16 is the best-selling smartphone in the world, while Pro Max, Pro and Plus occupy 3 more spots in the top ten rankings in that order. So you might ask yourself how a phone that is supposedly "an embarrassment" compared to competitors becomes the best-selling smartphone on the planet, especially at a relatively high price point. 

Did I mention that this past holiday quarter was yet another all-time record?  Kind of a yawn, for Apple, I know, because it keeps setting new records like this, but: this only happens because buyers are voting with their wallets to choose Apple products. Here in the technosphere echo chamber, it's the constant sound of doom and complaints about the glacial pace of Apple evolving its products. But the real world of mass market buyers keeps disagreeing. 

Apple does face the problem of being more cumbersome battleship than nimble destroyer--that is the inevitable challenge all companies face when they grow to the enormous size of Apple. Even more difficult: Wall Street continues to price Apple stock like a growth company, so even as it keeps breaking records for revenue and profit, the challenge of continuing to grow those huge numbers just gets exponentially harder... but Apple keeps doing it thus far. Tech message boards have been predicting doom just around the corner for Apple for as long as the company has been in business. It has weirdly become the always-present background noise to Apple's continued success. Just how much more successful does Apple have to be before the doom-saying gets a rest?

Fun fact: Apri 28th will mark 15 years since Apple bought Siri. To put that in context: the current iPhone at that time was the 3GS. And here we are, a decade and a half later, and Siri still can't reliably tell you what's on your calendar for today. This is why, in an otherwise all-Apple household, I'm still using 7-year-old Echo Dots for Alexa to operate voice-controlled appliances. Alexa has no problem parsing requests to set lights by specific percentages of brightness, or color or color temperature for my white lights. Or filling pots with specific amounts of water at specific temperatures from my kitchen faucet. Or setting a sous vide device to a specific temperature and then starting it. Etc. Meanwhile, Siri still struggles with today's calendar and so many other voice assistant 101 tasks. smh

It's hard not to think that there is truly something about Siri that is irreparably broken. One can only imagine how much money and resources Apple has thrown at this problem by now. How can we still be HERE after 15 years? How could the "Siri promised land" of 18.4 possibly be such an embarrassment upon its first release? How could Siri actually be WORSE? "Delayed" is an acceptable excuse for the launch of an all-new feature. But it's no excuse for Siri, who's about to celebrate her quinceañera.  

indiekiduk said:

Meanwhile iPhone 16 refurbs out of stock

How many refurbs could there be for a phone that first delivered new only five months ago?

netrox said:

The last SE was $429. Now it's $599. That's a $170 increase! (edited to correct math)

Keep in mind that the dramatic increase in price was not because shortage due to pandemic but as a result of tariffs imposed by our President Trump. People voted for Trump who slapped tariffs on our imports and the costs are being passed to us. 

Stop calling it "a new low price point" - it's NOT. It's "increased due to tariffs." 

Hey... there's plenty of blame to go around for the Felon & fElon Circus, but the price of the 16e has got nothing to do with it. No new tariffs have been imposed--yet--that would affect the 16e. Also note that the 16e is being made in India, not China. 

stephanjobs said:

MKBHD 
Claims that AirPod Pros 2 have slightly beater noise canceling transparency mode. Can you explain why he thinks this if they have the same Apple H2 noise canceling and transparency? 

That they share the H2 chip does not mean the ANC and transparency mode will perform the same. There's a lot more involved than just the chip: microphones, microphone placement, software coding, algorithms and even the physical shape and materials of the pods themselves can have an impact. FWIW, I own both the Lightning and USB-C versions of the AirPod Pro 2 and I've found the newer USB-C version--although it's allegedly "identical"--to have slightly better ANC than my Lightning pair. This perception of being better held up in blind-testing, when I had my wife give me one pair or the other without my knowing which pair I had over a number of rounds of tests, and I could pretty consistently identify the USB-C pair. I wouldn't say it's a big difference at all, certainly enough to be worth replacing the Lightning version, especially since the AirPods Pro 3 can't be that far off. But--at least for the two pair I own--the difference was there.