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Comment by maz1b | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that Apple is only going to be further increasing the number of price points and "levels" of caliber of devices, from budget/entry level all the way to new heights such as things like iPhone Ultra or Macbook Ultra, because services will be have an even wider net to cast into (If you're buying Ultra devices, you'll probably get AppleCare+, and if you have new apple devices such as the Neo or 17e etc, you'll be more likely to get Apple music or books or fitness or whatnot.

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Focused on "simplicity", they used to have only a "tableful" of products.

With more products, will Apple collapse under the weight of the complexity?

That was a different era of consumer behavior. Consumers are hyper targeted with personalized organic and paid messages. The algorithmic media ecosystem mitigates or counters complex product offerings. For example, my YouTube feed displays Apple Pro devices reviews over other lines like iPad basic. Also, purchase power acts as a natural filter.

The customer base is also so much bigger. Just before the the iMac was introduced, they were selling under half a million Macs per quarter. And that was divided up among a bunch of different models. That makes it much harder to manage production and inventory, and your development costs get spread across fewer units. With 10x more Mac sales and 100x more iPhone sales, there’s more room for variety.

There is a difference between 5 B revenue and 400 B revenue.

Also the price point shifted from primarily a 2K machine, to all price ranges, with the original iPhone being a few hundred bucks. More sales smaller units so the number of products being sold is more than it appears based on the revenue comparison.

Maybe the price per unit is available somewhere for people to trend how it changed over 2-3 decades.

They pretty much still only have a "Good -> Better -> Best" ladder for the majority of their products, with a handful of "niche" offerings sprinkled in. Complexity hasn't increased much from those days, they added one extra column and row

iPhone: iPhone 17e -> iPhone 17 -> iPhone 17 Pro (Niche: iPhone Air)

iPad: iPad -> iPad Air - > iPad Pro (Niche: iPad Mini)

Mac Laptop: Macbook Neo -> Macbook Air -> Macbook Pro

Mac Desktop: Mac Mini -> iMac -> Mac Studio

They have product with different screen sizes, but those are really just configuration options on the base product in that tier, now. Compare that to offerings from Samsung or Dell and you can see it could be much, much more complicated.

I am personally saddest to hear about the discontinuation of the Vision Pro - in a couple of generations there was a solid chance that it would be easy sell for me and/or other people who don't VR/AR game but probably would use it for media/productivity.

>I am personally saddest to hear about the discontinuation of the Vision Pro

I'm more sad they cancelled their EV project. We need more healthy competition there than public spying VR ski goggles.

The competition would have been at the luxury end. Apple would have been competing with Mercedes, BMW and Cadillac, not with Hyundai and Kia.

Why luxury? Apple is mass market not luxury.

Apple sells mass market by marketing it as luxury.

And to be fair, it kinda is. The OS on the Neo is the same as on a Mac Pro (RIP)

> Apple would have been competing with Mercedes, BMW and Cadillac, not with Hyundai and Kia.

So? Did I stutter when I said that would be great for competition?

Luxury cars go down in value pretty quickly on the used market after they age a while and then become affordable to the masses.

I live in an low income migrant EU neighborhood, and it's not full of new Kias and Hyundais, but 10+ year old BMWs, Mercedes and Audis, because some people prefer the status of a used old car from a luxury brand, rather than a new car from a budget brand.

Apple entering the ring with their supply chain and attention to detail, would have been a net positive impact to the car industry the same way Tesla was when it entered. No major car brand took EVs seriously before Tesla showed them how to make good cool looking ones, and their media entertainment units, even on 100k German cars, were laggy pieces of shit before Tesla changed the game. Tesla might not win this war, but they certainly moved the industry forward a lot in the right direction.

There is tons of EV competition. 252 new EV models were announced at the Beijing Auto Show last week. Reviews of the Xiaomi SU7 2026 generally acknowledge it as best in class. etc.

Yeah, but Americans can’t buy those.

I couldn’t find information about discontinuation in the article - did I miss it or is there another source?

Edit, I found this: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/29/apple-vision-pro-m5-flo... - seems like rumors; but perhaps as close to an announcement as we’ll ever get.

The Vision Pro has been getting discontinued about once a month for the past two years.

Apparently it’s more that they’ve stopped making them because they have more than enough stocked up.

There's been nothing but rumors about that. I don't think it's getting canned.

"in a couple of generations there was a solid chance that it would be easy sell for me and/or other people who don't VR/AR game but probably would use it for media/productivity."

Why in a couple of generations? You've put your finger on why the product failed: Apple's fear of connectivity. Apple zealously cripples the I/O on all of its mobile products, rendering them unusable for so many things.

All the Vision Pro needed was a video input. Gamers, 3-D modelers, drone pilots, filmmakers, engineers, travelers... all would have been a ready market for an excellent head-mounted video device. But nope... Apple can't have people doing anything with its products that it didn't think of.

Agreed. I agree with the iOS lockdown as I do most of my financial and medical there. I can see it for iPad as a sort of locked down computer you can’t break typing random things into terminal some website said to.

Vision Pro, however, should have been a full computer the way the Mac is as it was never going to appeal to non geeks.

The introductory video of this cyborg recording spatial video at birthday parties seemed pure fiction as there would not be smiles at the weird masked guy with the eyes flashing whenever he wanted to take a picture especially as glasses that record video are slammed so hard. I could only imagine such a thing maybe at a wedding.

Flip phones with apps were around a long time before the iPhone and people knew what to do with them.

Vision Pro really was a whole new thing and they biffed it not allowing people to vibe code and play on it directly instead forcing to dig through complicated X-code on a connected Mac. It needed a 3D Quartz Composer type thing at the very least that just isn’t there.

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