Above Avalon: Apple Is in a League of Its Own | Hacker News Reader

Above Avalon: Apple Is in a League of Its Own

aboveavalon.com

33 pointslladnar17 comments

Some people love to hate Apple, but what they do they do better than anyone and it isn’t even close. Their hardware shows a craftsmanship and quality no one else in any of their segments, except for perhaps phones, even attempts.

What should scare competitors is that they are getting better and more serious about services, something they have historically been pretty bad at.

>Their hardware shows a craftsmanship and quality

I bet Louis Rossman would disagree

https://m.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup

The issue is form over function. But then, each person has a different view of what is an acceptable tradeoff for reduction in weight and/or volume of the laptop. Louis Rossman doesn't mind a beefy laptop if it means that he can get a decent battery life, keyboard with good travel (similar to the ThinkPads of yesteryear), and repairability. For a lot of people, the last point isn't all that important. This can lead to a whole bunch of issues like their keyboard failures, thermal throttling, and many others.

People also don't know how their machines should operate if they've always bought into the shitty ecosystem where sacrifices are made and computation is throttled because "aesthetics"

Not to mention the e-waste, that's probably the biggest issue

Apple is terrible if you care about ecosystems

Depends. Apple products are often not upgradable, but they are reliable. My 2015 Macbook Pro was my daily driver for 7 years and I just now replaced it with a Macbook Air that I will probably use for 7 more years. I only replaced it because it was outdated in terms of processor speed. Most laptops aren't all that upgradable to begin with, so I think the tradeoff makes sense for laptop computers and devices.

For desktop computers I don't think that same equation makes sense. If you need desktop power you have specific requirements and probably have specific peripherals that you use. You will want to always have the fastest hardware and so you want as much flexibility as possible. Apple doesn't provide this so the only people who tend to use Apple desktops are creative professionals where MacOS has some advantages and Apple hardware is always correctly calibrated out of the box.

They might not be as upgradeable as desktops, but generally they are slightly more repairable than apple devices. Reparability is the major driver behind ewaste

> Depends. Apple products are often not upgradable, but they are reliable. My 2015 Macbook Pro was my daily driver for 7 years and I just now replaced it with a Macbook Air that I will probably use for 7 more years. I only replaced it because it was outdated in terms of processor speed. Most laptops aren't all that upgradable to begin with, so I think the tradeoff makes sense for laptop computers and devices.

True. My late-2011 13" MacBook Pro is still running strong, albeit for the poor battery life. 5 years back, I upgraded the RAM to 16 GB, and swapped out the HDD and the DVD drive for SSDs. It gets the job done even today. All it needs is a battery replacement.

> For desktop computers I don't think that same equation makes sense. If you need desktop power you have specific requirements and probably have specific peripherals that you use. You will want to always have the fastest hardware and so you want as much flexibility as possible. Apple doesn't provide this so the only people who tend to use Apple desktops are creative professionals where MacOS has some advantages and Apple hardware is always correctly calibrated out of the box.

Exactly. They know that they cater to a very specific group of people.

It is certainly a tradeoff. For devices and laptops I am willing and happy to live within Apple's walled garden. For a desktop I typically have specific requirements and just build my own even though I could probably get something similar cheaper from a vendor.

I think the problem is that none of Apple's hardware competitors make enough money to match Apple's investment in hardware research creating a downward spiral where Apple just eats more and more of the top-end highly profitable market for phones and laptops.

I would agree with this, but Google and Microsoft seem to be dipping their toe into hardware with the former even beginning to design their own chips. Both have the finances to compete, but I suspect they are at least a decade behind Apple in terms of hardware design and supply chain logistics.

Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia...

Hardware research isn't everything though - consider IBM.

It makes no difference. Apple's past behavior has alienated enough people from their brand that they must provide such a large 'eco-system' themselves. For Windows, Linux and Android it's the users that provide those tools instead.

>Revenue, operating income, and cash flow metrics undersell how Apple is performing in the marketplace from a new user perspective.

If anything, then the financials oversell their position in the market. Apple is not in the lead in (almost?) any category in the number of users. They are the premium product, but a premium product that many users want to avoid, rather than can't afford.

But ultimately being second has been very smart by Apple. It has allowed them to not be punished by regulators for their (previous) bad behavior.

Try to tell that to the younger generations. They want apple products and they're either too young or don't care about Apple's behavior. Their friends have iPhones and the fear of becoming a green bubble is real. Apple is definitely over performing and could become the leading computing platform of the next generation.

I'm not exactly an Apple fanboy either and it's very obvious to me how this has started to play out. (I've never even owned an Apple product) Apple today is the best at portraying their vision than any other company. Google never commits fully to their products. Meta is limited by the bad press from Facebook. And Microsoft is doing... whatever they're trying to do with windows 11. Meanwhile Apple is pushing one of their strongest lineups in decades.

Ah, right, Apple's past behavior, like when they forced OEMs to pay for MacOS licenses on all computers, even when they didn't have it installed—oh, wait; that was Microsoft.

No, you must mean Apple's past behavior when they turned a popular and well-made browser into a tool for stealing everyone's data so they could profit off it—no, sorry, that was Google.

Then it must be Apple's past behavior when they chose to stoke millions of people's worst political divisions in order to increase their own profits—dammit, no, that was Facebook!

Let me check my notes.

Right, Apple's behavior. Like when they....reads notes...Made phones and computers that...were more expensive than some people wanted? Made them hard for users to repair?

Um.

Yeah, I don't think that's alienating enough non-geeks to have the effect you describe.

And I can tell you, as a Mac user for over 30 years now, that the primary reason Apple provides such a large ecosystem themselves is because from roughly 20 minutes after the first Macintosh was announced through well after the iPhone went on sale, the majority of the tech world considered them "doomed" because they didn't act like Microsoft. And after the iPhone came out (and yes, overlapping with the "doomed" narrative), they instead declared roundly that Apple had lost its spark every time they held an event that did not introduce a product as groundbreaking as the iPhone (which is to say, always). Apple provides the ecosystem themselves because decades of experience shows them that no one else is going to do it for them, and when they depend on outside companies for important parts of their experience (Motorola, IBM, Intel, Qualcomm), those companies eventually let them down.

As another potential "bad behavior," some developers and government regulators are saying that platform fees for the iOS App Store (comparable to the 30% taken by Google Play or Nintendo's eShop) are excessive and that Apple should be required to lower them.

However, I don't think it has had a huge effect on Apple's brand reputation among consumers.

The Huawei bans have also helped.

There are times I can't help feeling that the Huawei bans were to help Apple.

It makes sense, some Huawei phones are really nicely made.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com