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Comment by terracatta | Hacker News Reader

I think it's easy to read this post, then look at Apple's market cap and conclude that Paul got this one wrong.

I don't think he did.

As an entrepreneur, when I held the iPhone 4s in my hand ~10 years ago, I saw only possibilities. In 2022 when I hold my iPhone 13 in my hand, I see a known quantity with all the use-cases permanently ossified. I don't dare to dream about what is possible. Only Apple can truly move this platform forward. I'll be a passive observer.

This is not how I feel about the Mac, and I think Paul's post accounts for the difference. I really feel if I have a great idea and execute I can meaningfully impact the trajectory of the platform.

There is no doubt the iPhone and the iPad will continue to be commercially successful products. But now, 14 years after the launch of the App Store, that feels like such a poor measurement of their net-new impact on society. The magic is gone.

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We’re just getting old. I used to think the same thing. Then I watched a designer effectively scan my home into a 3D model with her phone and return it from her assistant’s iPad with proposed changes reflected within thirty minutes. That wouldn’t have been possible only a few years ago.

That’s a pretty vain example, but there are a lot of opportunities opened by having a sensor that can create 3D models of nearby surfaces in everyone’s pocket. And that’s just one sensor Apple has added to their phones over the years.

> Then I watched a designer effectively scan my home into a 3D model with her phone and return it from her assistant’s iPad with proposed changes reflected within thirty minutes.

Curious to know which app she used for that?

just search for '3D scanner' if you have a Lidar phone and forget about it if not.

Completely agree.

The difference between then and now is that EVERY use case was changing. As smart phones have "mastered" to the common ones, the real change is happening at the edges and it's crazy what other industries are doing with the platforms.

Insistence on this site that iOS devices are "only for consumption" (or similar) baffle me. The things are I/O powerhouses. They're out-of-this-world. The only way that can be true is for people with weirdly tiny notions of what "creating something with a computer" looks like—like, say, using it as a tool to create 3d models of a house on-the-fly and produce (create!) new designs for that house, as in your example. I can't do that shit with my laptop—not without peripherals and a lot more hassle.

I suspect a lot of folks here assume the only type of "content" worth having is text, given the nature of programming, and of this website. Therefore anything that makes text hard to produce cannot possibly be good for "content" creation.

The way they crippled AI on the iPhone may make you reconsider if it is just us aging.

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