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Comment by hx8 | Hacker News Reader

There aren't many more single new features that are going to justify upgrading that will exist on the mobile platform. Apple is playing a game where they try to add enough features to prevent the upgrade cycle from becoming too long. Encourage people with 2 or 3 year old phones to upgrade this cycle instead of delaying a generation.

Honestly, Apple's business model is harder if everyone wants to upgrade to a certain new version. The M1 Macs were so good, everyone upgraded their Intel Macs and then mac sales dropped. It's better logistically if the sales are more predictable and consistent year-to-year.

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That's an interesting point, so more of a game of amortizing upgrades over a few years rather than instigating a massive one-off purchasing craze. I could see how a drip of sufficiently useful AI features and improvements over like '24-'27 would bolster the market. Even then though, this seems like an opportunity to hold rather than really reverse the trend; at some point I think Apple is going to have to reckon with the fact that the market is more or less saturated, though I could definitely be wrong here.

Apple knows the cell phone market is saturated. That's why they have iPads, AirPods, Apple Watches, MacBook Airs, etc. Their plan is to create new accessories (and services) that pair with the iPhone. This generates a moat around existing iPhone users.

I guess if they start layering LLMs or similar into their service or accessory interop stack I could see how having the phone running the model could be a big win for latency and availability. Like if Apple Calendar uses a GPT to create a .ics from the invitation text my friend sent me then it could be very handy to do that locally, moreso if I'm using my Apple Watch to actually signal that I want the .ics created.

I agree, I think this is what they meant. A feature for the people who have an iPhone 8 or 9 who say “why would I upgrade, my current phone is fine”.

If you can use this tech to make a feature that they really want you can trigger upgrades that otherwise may not happen for many more years. We’ve seen that before with things like when Apple first released a bigger phone. That triggered a LOT of “early” upgrades that wouldn’t have otherwise happened.

I think people (and the market) make this assumption but the correction isn't Apple doing something differently it is the market and public assumption seeing that when you sell something that lasts longer than a year and works really well you need to accomodate the ebbs and flows of sales across a 5 year period instead of quarterly and YoY.

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