Ask HN: Can Apple Ever Be Disrputed? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can Apple Ever Be Disrputed?

7 pointsTaikhoom201029 comments

Curious to know, just wondering about Apple and its current position. It feels like there is no way it can be unseated. It has customer lock-in in terms of the brand, as well as the subscriptions and ancillary devices to the iPhone. Developers will not stop developing for Apple, considering they are missing out on a large, if not the majority of their potential market. No hardware company can really leapfrog Apple because of the consumer mindset for Apple products.

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It’s not the consumer mindset, other hardware vendors simply aren’t making products at the same level. I have yet to use a trackpad on a non-Apple laptop that feels good to use. Meanwhile, Apple’s laptops have had buttery smooth trackpads for decades. Every time someone tells me laptop X has a great trackpad and I try it, I’m disappointed.

How is it that with decades of opportunity, hardware and software on the PC side have been unable to come together to solve this problem Apple solved so long ago?

Apple can and will make mistakes. They’ve done so in the past and they will do so in the future. The real question is, does the industry have anywhere for those users to go?

I’ve been using Apple computers at home for 23 years. I like the idea of being on a more open platform, but I feel stuck. Not because Apple has me trapped, but because no one else offers a compelling package that seems worth the move. These days, that package has to include mobile in the equation, in addition to the laptop/desktop… and the software that goes with it needs to be up to par as well.

These other companies need to stop releasing dozens of models that technically tick a bunch of boxes and instead actually focus on making something that works really well. Pay attention to the minutiae that no one might be able to articulate, but it can be felt when using it. This extends from the hardware through to the software.

as a pointing/selection device, touchpad is a degenerate version of mouse, and its ubiquity is primarily because it excels at the constraints imposed by the laptops -- form-factor and portability in a unibody chassis;

case in point - mouse is the first choice in cad/cam/eda/games; and even in the general market, the share of mouse selection dwarfs that of external touchpads; not sure of others, but i rarely use touchpad on the laptop, let alone get an external touchpad.

most laptop manufacturers likely realize this, so they spend the bare minimum on the laptop touchpad just to keep it from being a real turd; premium laptops might fare better, but then for 75usd mouse even a mediocre laptop touchpad ceases to be an issue;

most non-tech users are unlikely to know this, and rarely ever need to be a power-user, hence the mindset hypothesis ;)

Perhaps, maybe the modular tech future? Framebook is interesting, but that is likely a niche market. If you are interested, I tried to articulate what keeps Apple around specifically here - https://open.substack.com/pub/taikhooms/p/apple-has-the-lowe...

Could not agree more.

Can Apple Be Disrputed? Yes, in theory, in part. In practice? Unlikely.

agreed, if your interested I tried to explain it here - https://open.substack.com/pub/taikhooms/p/apple-has-the-lowe...

It’s not even just consumer mindset. Look into any deep dive into their custom tech, it’s insane the engineering dominance they have.

The M series was and still is generations ahead of x86. There is no competition from anyone else.

Their AirPods routinely score the best on noise cancellation performance, battery etc.

The iPad (even though arguably “out of place” platform) is the only tablet device anyone actually uses.

MacBook hardware pre-ram price issues was incredible. My wife has a NEO and I was floored at how much it was like my m4.

They did some pretty good marketing at convincing us they don’t sell our data to third parties. I assume this is still the case.

I’m a long term PC enthusiast, I’m old enough to have played games on dos. I daily drove Linux on gaming laptops and MacBook clones. I have a custom machine running Bazzite for my gaming needs.

In the last couple of years I made serious attempts to switch to Linux from windows for my main development machine but it was pretty unreliable experience across all the distros I tried (fedora was the most stable), so I bit the bullet and bought a Mac mini, the only complaint has been related to thunderbolt and it’s unreliable hubs.

It replaced an i9-14900k and did it with almost no change in performance and it doesn’t sound like I’ve got a leaf blower in my office.

Arguably the platform I’m least happy with is the iPhone. It was at is best 5 years ago and just gets buggier every release.

It’s impossible to not sound like an Apple shill but this has been my experience for 35 years of computing.

At one point it felt like Google search could never be unseated, then suddenly within six months or so, I barely use it. I'm not saying it's dead yet, nor do I know what Apple's killer will be, but it is hard to see these things coming.

If I had to guess? All of Apple's strengths lie around the domination of the (local) personal computer. Top notch UX, best in class performance etc. AI could make that significantly less important. Who cares about beautiful UX when you only interact via MCP? Who cares about incredible silicon when it's not your hardware and it runs, fast, a thousand miles away?

But more likely, it'll be something else neither of us see coming.

Respectfully, you're wrong here. You may, in your opinion, not use Google Search, but search revenue is growing rapidly, and AI overviews are a much better experience than a consumer app.

Heads up, you forgot a link to your substack in this comment.

It's the customers 'mindshare' that value the fit/finish/status that comes with it, more than anything. I owned only one mbp when they first introduced the retina display (I believe it was 2012), and it used to randomly reboot even after multiple OS refresh from apple tech support. as i recall, it was a some issue with the graphics chip or a driver. i hated everything about its desktop gui, animations, miniscule software options (back then), and their stupid external keyboard; I would never buy another apple product ever again.

I have had Dell Latitude, Inspiron, Thinkpad series (many), and the issue was the mostly windows. If msft had solved virus issues, or more fundamentally, adopted xenix and built a graphics shell, they would've been at a different level -- essentially amplifying the hardware efforts of the laptop manufacturers. case in point - android ecosystem.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but 2/3 phones and smart watches are not Apple, and 7/8 consumer PCs are not Apple. 100% servers and industrial PCs are not Apple. 100% network equipment is not Apple. Apple doesn't have its own storage or RAM game and is ultimately at the mercy of the same companies it competes with.

No on smartphones while Apple's market share by revenue is like 20 ish %, they have like 80% of the industry's profits. If you're interested in the specific dynamic, check this out - https://taikhooms.substack.com/p/apple-has-the-lowest-disrup...

Not by a comparable company that is trying to compete across multiple products. It's too wide of a field.

I do think that someone could make a better individual phone, computer, etc. if their entire company revolved around that singular focus.

Rather, they're in a somewhat precarious position. Almost all of their revenue is from phones and the services that are tied to those phones, which perform better as a lifestyle product than a productivity product. They are in a position where either a market change in what kind of hardware we use to communicate or a stylistic change in lifestyles people wish to portray could collapse their revenue.

For an excellent view on how established players miss market changes, check out The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen.

Disagree; regardless of the hardware change, Apple will release its take, and people will continue to use it. I write about the dynamic of a double-sided lock-in here: https://taikhooms.substack.com/p/apple-has-the-lowest-disrup...

Definitely love Clayton's work though, happy to connect - so.taikhoomcb@gmail.com

For many, computers are interchangeable. Outside HN, people browse the web and do email.

Guess what? For the most part, so do I.

And otherwise, I mostly avoid Apple apps or try to find alternatives. Who needs AI? The Finder has a (demented) mind of its own. Apple has churned out some of the worst software imaginable. It took Apple forever to (horribly) clone Dropbox, which Steve Jobs failed to buy.

Integration is a big deal. Devices and controlling the hardware mean a lot. These will go a long way.

Will people rebel when large companies increasingly become arms of the government? I will.

I once felt that way about Zenith, RCA, Timex Sinclair, Acorn, Atari, Commodore, IBM (especially them), the old HP, DEC, SCO, Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft.

In other words, all things have their end.

Yes, but Apple has two-sided lock-in, in terms of a brand and consumer pricing power, as well as ecosystem lock-in through services.

Several of the companies I mentioned also had this, some rather notoriously, such as Sun, IBM, and Microsoft.

How so? None of those were directly consumer companies.

I guess you'll have to define what you mean by "none of those were directly consumer companies" because I disagree, with the exception of Sun.

As in apple has a consumer brand which creates a sense of status, and then a developer ecosystem which has to develop for Apple since they have the highest paying consumers, and a they have services which create switching costs if you try leaving the ecosystem as a consumer

You just described Acorn, Atari, DEC, Nintendo, Commodore, HP, IBM, SCO, Sun and Microsoft in certain decades. A few of those aren't strictly consumer, I suppose, but my point is: all empires decline.

Yes, but what would lead to Apple's decline? Sure, you can say that everything can decline; all I am doing is articulating why they can be around for a very long time, considering the competitive dynamics surrounding the company.

Yes. A good percentage of Apples revenue comes from stuff like iTunes and App Store. I wrote personal web apps to bypass those on multiple fronts.

If you trapped a billion engineers into a room to outearn Apple, it would collapse overnight. Because Apple shaped the rules 10 years ago.

You are American aren't you ?

does tim getting lost in the donut count as being "disrupted"?

(to be fair, i heard that one when said donut was fresh, and to be fair, they rightfully don't let me anywhere near it.)

No way, Apple is now controlling the ai wave by providing infra

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