Hacker News Reader

Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

We've seen this before, we'll see this again.

Apple may do better in tablets than Samsung, or Microsoft, or LG, or Toshiba, or whoever. Apple may do better in phones than Nokia. Apple may do better in laptops than Dell or Asus.

Sadly, that isn't enough--with sufficiently tight margins, they need to do better than !Apple (better than all competitors, not any competitor), and in the long run, that's not going to happen. They're going to get pushed out by more competitors in hardware, and honestly I don't think their software play is good enough to save them.

View on HN

I agree. Unless their software engineering improves pronto they are in trouble. Hardware in this market is headed for commodification.

It's still their game to lose but they really need to nail a lot of things in iOS 7 and so far I don't see any sign of the kind of leadership that would require.

> so far I don't see any sign of the kind of leadership that would require.

As of 29 October 2012 - Eddy Cue in charge of maps/cloud services, Craig Federighi in charge of iOS/OSX, Jony Ive in charge of human interface and hardware design. It'll be interesting to see how iOS 7 pans out, because these guys are very good at what they do.

Ive is a brilliant hardware designer but software UX is a whole different ballgame and his ability there is currently a big question mark. Cue and Federighi were both on board when a number of architecturally questionable APIs were added (Storyboards, AutoLayout), so they're a bit of an unknown too. That's why there's so much riding on iOS 7.

Contrast this to Google which has a strong, stable team in place that's been doing superb work for the last few Android releases and you can see why people are a little gun shy about APPL right now.

Hardware in this market is headed for commodification.

Is it though? Apple, kinda like Intel or Nvidia (ATI? Are they still relevant?), is advancing the limits of what humans can produce for mass consumption. Every new chip fab process from Intel/Nvidia/ATI/TSMC advances not just the front-line ability of one company, but of humanity's capabilities as a whole.

Apple is the one spending un-stevely amounts on custom manufacturing processes while everybody else is still using plastic shells on phones/tablets/phablets cranked out by the hundreds of millions.

You can make all the Geo Metros you want, but some [1] people still want a Model X [2].

[1]: a heckuvalot of

[2]: imagine if the Model X was only $5,000 more than a Mazda 3 5-door. For $little more, you get the best designed thing in the world. Not everybody will pick that, but countless (well, about 50 million per holiday quarter) will.

Luxury brands don't drive the mainstream in any mature hardware market I can think of. Volume == power and we're already at the point where making phones more powerful adds essentially no user value. The components that cost $500 to ship today are good enough already and the price is only going to go down. There's no way Apple can preserve it's unprecedented profit margins and that's why the stock is down.

I didn't downvote you, by the way.

They're going to get pushed out by more competitors in hardware

But, why? It didn't happen with iPods even though you can build an mp3 player on your desk from parts ordered online.

It's not always about hardware-hardware-hardware-nerd-spec-wars -- Apple is a desirable brand and people want to be associated with it.

Meh. You're talking about 10 years ago. I was part of a semiconductor team that bid on the processor for the iPod [to the then-blond-haired Tony Fadell). [We lost to PortalPlayer.] I had just been at a Creative Labs office in Scotts Valley and seen their pink Nomad Jukebox Extreme (16GB hard drive!) which was shaped exactly like a portable CD player and thought "what could Tony be pitching?". Tony was very cagey about the project but was unequivocal about the fact that it was revolutionary. He was right. Then Apple vertically integrated the music store (the pukeworthy iTunes) and he was doubly right.

>Apple is a desirable brand and people want to be associated with it.

That's irrelevant since, if we're talking about iPod and "is", we're talking about 5-10 years ago. Apple produced a great product, but their brand was not great at that time. It was certainly on the mend and they were a small player in a giant market, but it was a PC-ish market and they weren't all that.

>>They're going to get pushed out by more competitors in hardware

[The grandparent] Completely agree. My wife has a very nice Moto Xyboard and our kids call it an "iPad". It's much like "kleenex" or "xerox". My kids are not more likely to buy an iPad because they say "iPad". They're equally capable and, AFAICT, uncaring about whether they're using an iPad, Xyboard, Verizon Fascinate, Nexus 4, Galaxy Nexus or Ubuntu laptop. Further, a particular friend of mine who is a crazy Apple fanboi can't stop talking about how much he likes his Nexus 4. As the rhyme gets longer, it gets more familiar...

> Meh. You're talking about 10 years ago.

Hmmm? Apple still sells iPods. And I wouldn't be surprised if Apple still took the lion's share of the profit in that market. They sold 12.7 million of them last quarter (including Touches). Surely if consumer hardware headed towards commoditization in the fashion you describe, someone would have released a quality 16GB MP3 player for far less than $150 and been able to push Apple out of the market.

Look back over the course of Apple, think back beyond the early 2000s.

hardware-hardware-hardware-nerd-spec-wars is a funny reference--for quite some time in the desktop space, Apple was the performance leader, right? And it did not save them. Compaq and other vendors destroyed their market share.

Apple is a desirable brand among people that can afford it and aren't concerned with bleeding-edge tech--do not overgeneralize here. Most people (the rest of the market!) bought iPods and iPhones because there wasn't a good competitor at the time; this is no longer the case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com