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Ask HN: Walled garden dwellers: What keeps you there?

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In reading the discussion about Tahoe's release and Apple's prioritization to meet its ship dates over its delivering actual new value to customers has got me thinking about what keeps me there.

I am thinking about this more in the angle of moving to a simpler device, not a switch to Android which feels to me like it's trending toward just a different walled garden.

After considering, my only main barriers for switching:

* Cloud Sync / Backup

Particularly for Photos, Messages and App Data, the data is auto-saved seamlessly. If I lose my phone, I can be back on a new one in a few hours.

* Calendar and List Management

As primitive as the experience still is with Siri relative to modern AI assistants, having my to-do and shopping list sync'd to my devices and being able to add to them with voice commands is an essential.

* Electronics Interface Apps

A few devices I have (solar charge controller, leak detector) require an iOS/Android app to use. There's not a great way around this, but keeping an old phone as a controller is an option.

It's really a much shorter list than I thought it would be. There are definitely some apps that I use whose experience would be decidedly worse if I had to use them in a browser (YouTube, Spotify, Maps) but it feels almost worth trying.

If there were an AI-focused simple phone that could solve the first two and offered a modern AI voice interface, I would be very interested to try it.

I am curious to hear other's opinions.

Because I have more important things to do than inconvenience myself because of a meaningless geek holy war.

1. When I paired my AirPods Pro and my Beats Flex (more convenient for traveling) to my phone, they were automatically paired to and auto switch between my Mac, iPad, Watch and AppleTV.

2. When I get messages on my phone, they automatically appear and I can respond to them on my watch, iPad, Mac and in my car with CarPlay

3. When I go to the gym, run or get in the pool, I can leave my phone at home and still listen to music and accept calls on my Watch

4. Widgets from my phone show up on my Mac.

5. I can control my iPad from my keyboard and mouse paired to my Mac.

6. I can use my iPad as a second display with my Mac.

7. AirPlay works from iPhone /iPad to my AppleTV

8. I can copy and paste between my Mac, iPad and phone

9. I don’t think it’s really an argument that all Android tablets suck and Google has given up in the space.

10. CarPlay

11. My M2 MacBook Air runs cool, quiet, fast and battery last for 12 hours+

12. iCloud - I can drop my phone in the ocean, go to the Apple Store and get a replacement, log in and you can’t tell the difference between my new phone and old phone.

13. While this isn’t iPhone specific and you can do this with Android - Apple Pay from both my Watch and my phone

14. When I’m walking around in a city, having directions on my Watch means I don’t have to take my phone out.

Could not have said this better myself, so let me just add a little extra.

It works. Its polished. It’s ubiquitous.

But most importantly.

I don’t have to think about it. My 9-5 is deeply considering trade offs, configurations and debugging edge cases.

Why would I want to do that in my off time?

My only one complaint.

Please for the love of your bottom line Apple, fix Siri, jfc.

Yeah, the convenience of pairing and switching is something I didn't think of.

When you said you were looking at a simpler device, I was not expected all those requirements and an AI device at the end. I was assuming dumb phone.

It seems an AI phone is going to also lock you into its own walled garden. So I’m not sure what this would solve.

What kind of AI phone did you have in mind? As it stands, it seems AI is an app or OS integration to smartphones as we know them today. Anything else seems like it would be too compromised as a product.

I stay with Apple’s walled garden, because it seems like the best option in terms of hardware, software, and services. I’ve tried Android tablets, Windows laptops, and use Linux on and off for various things. I don’t like any of it as well as what Apple, and the 3rd party developers on Apple’s platforms, put out. If Apple were to horribly fumble the ball on privacy and sell out their customers (they are going in the wrong direction in a lot of ways), I would have to seriously consider leaving, but I honestly have no clue where I’d go.

Talking to an audio-enabled LLM is definitely "simpler" in terms of device interaction than navigating menus and such. Also having less GUI focus would feel simpler to me.

I find myself missing the experience of earlier iPhone where it didn't feel like I had so much crammed into my phone.

I can imagine using a device that I interact with primarily by talking with it, and the GUI is secondary or non-existent. For the bulk of what I use my phone for other than consuming video / doom-scrolling (which I could use much less of anyway), I think a voice interface would be preferable.

Initially "Apple Intelligence" was very exciting to think about, in that having a Siri that you could actually talk to would have a lot of possibilities, but we've seen essentially no progress in that direction.

A speech or LLM based device is only more simple if it works perfectly. As it stands today, it’s far from perfect. When it makes a mistake, if there nothing to fall back on, I would think that would be very frustrating. I run into these types of issues on a daily basis with current LLMs.

I would liken it to a non-responsive touch screen. The magic of the modern smartphone evaporates if it stops responding to touch.

I missed the early iPhone as well. I actually setup my Home Screen on my phone to be the same app setup as the original iPhone when iOS 26 released. I still have other apps in the App Library if/when I need them, but I have my basic setup how things were in 2007… At least for now. I’ve actually liked it quite a bit so far.

I’m curious if Siri with Apple Intelligence will live up to some of what they showed in the ads last year, but at this point I need to experience it working with 0 issues for an extended period of time before I even start to think about an AI-first device, and especially for an AI-only device. I haven’t seen AI from anyone that can perform at that level. Much like full-self-driving, I feel like this is going to be something that is perpetually 5 years away.

Agree that if the primary UI is voice, it will need to be the the multiple nines of success to avoid being frustrating.

Even so, I still frequently use Siri now despite it being much less successful than that.

I never use YouTube outside of a browser except on the Meta Quest 3 where you can watch panoramic videos with the app.

A big factor is that carriers get to pick what OS you run on your phone. My understanding is that it was the end of Windows Phone when US carriers said they weren't going to activate any devices.

The carriers don’t care what you run on your phone as long as your phone supports the necessary standards. That use to be an issue with CDMA networks.

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