Comment by IBM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IBM | Hacker News Reader

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I haven't tried it yet but this isn't surprising to me at all. Every recent Apple product has had a slow burn until mainstream adoption except for the iPad which exploded out of the gate. I think the Mac might have had the slowest burn of them all without really penetrating the mainstream until the early 2000s with the Intel switch and the iPod acting as a gateway drug.

Heck the Mac is still growing long after the PC market matured and even while it's declining. That is what the end game for iPhone will be in my opinion. When the global smartphone market finally becomes saturated, the iPhone can still grow at the expense of Android from switchers (that's when being the highly differentiated product will help the most).

Macs were top sellers before their recent success in the personal computing market. Their share only dropped in the 90s, but if you are around earlier, they are clearly on a nice roller coaster ride. And who doesn't remember the Mac SE, the Mac II, the first PowerBook?

>> that's when being the highly differentiated product will help the most

But the iPhone does seem to lose differentiation. Android apps have recently become well designed using material design, there's an app saturation, and 90% of the time people spend in phones is inside apps anyway,so it's harder to differentiate on the OS.

> 90% of the time people spend in phones is inside apps anyway,so it's harder to differentiate on the OS.

But the app does not run within isolation, the OS impacts a lot on the app experience. e.g. iOS Share Sheets/Android Intents. How a tweet is shared from the Twitter app is dictated by the OS

Even with that, Android itself is well designed.

Currently it seems that apple is taking the battle to curation. I'm not sure it has the advantage there - but than again, content quality is very subjective and hard to compare,and than it becomes a marketing game - and Apple is much stronger in marketing.

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