Not as a shareholder, but as a customer and user I’m very ok if they just focus on making those rectangles.
Makes no difference to me if Apple does the new “innovative” products or if some other company does it. But if Apple starts getting “visions” and those interfere with the iOS and macOS experience that I have and like now, I’ll be annoyed. I like my MacBook, AirPods, and iPhone how they are now. If they don’t screw these up, great. Anything else is gravy.
I feel your comment subtly implies that if Apple doesn’t start making a self driving car or LLM Siri or robot dog walker or whatever then it’s “boring,” but I strongly feel there is (for all intents and purposes) limitless engineering that could go into refining and gradually expanding their existing ecosystem of products and these efforts would be quite interesting in their own right.
During Cook’s time at the helm, Apple has made major product improvements that greatly improved their value to me including AFS, arm laptop processors, Secure Enclave, camera improvements, and many others.
No. I don’t want Apple to make LLM Siri. I do wish they would become the company unlocking creativity instead of shackling it. I will give you one specific example: iOS has extreme limitations on what it allows app developers to display on the Lock Screen. The area each app gets is limited. What gets displayed and how is very limited. How often the data gets displayed is limited.
This might sound like nitpick. But I guarantee you that if they removed many of these limitations, it will reduce total screen time: because many things that make people unlock their phone can be done from the Lock Screen…if only Apple leadership would allow and incentivize their product and engineering teams. Instead, they want people to force unlocking of the screen to do actual productive tasks because the next thing people instinctively do is…doom scroll. And doom scrolling is profitable for Apple.
It is 2025. I have to unlock and open Google Maps to reliably tell when the next train will arrive. Why? I’ve tried many apps that attempt to fix this. They are all severely limited by the iOS restrictions. Why? What are they optimizing for?
The Camera Roll app is a clusterfuck.
Apple Maps is considering introducing ads.
iOS makes little attempt to tell you about trials: I download an app, I enable the trial, I conclude within minutes this app is not it. Now to cancel, I have to make 5+ taps. Often, I forget until I get the receipt from Apple. You’re telling me no PM at Apple has proposed mechanisms like a reminder or popup a day before my trial ends asking if I want to cancel or keep the subscription? Apple knows after all that I have barely used this app!
I can keep going. Like OP said, it is pretty obvious the focus is on milking the cow. This is unfortunate because Apple’s positioning was to do the right thing for the user who paid a premium for the device. They are increasingly and consistently doing things that makes the CFO happy at the expense of its user base.
Frankly I think it’s the opposite - Apple is one of the only BigCo without an advertising based biz model. Unlike say Meta, Apple didn’t profit directly from increased engagement with your iPhone (at least to a sizable extent), they profit when you purchase a new device. This alignment of incentives is what allows Apple to at least marginally prioritize user privacy in a way Meta/ Google just structurally cannot.
40% (and growing) of Apple’s profits are from services. Margins on services are 3x of hardware.
Apple doesn’t make money directly when you doom scroll but a lot of App Store revenue is a by product of people simply using their device in unlocked state.
Sure fine by me, but the comment I am responding to seems to be longing for a new Jobs like figure that will prioritize “innovation” to take over. I don’t think the GP is talking about an iMessage export feature. We have no reason to believe Jobs himself would care about any of the points you have listed (all of which seem great to me).
For me, I’ve been fine with bean-counter Cook. MacBooks and iPhones are not perfect, but I strongly prefer them to the competition.
My mistake, I misremembered. s1mplicissimus makes a very good point. What I do remember is it's designed to capture telemetry opt-in of people who aren't savvy and just click next, next, next.
Usually, there's a default blue bordered button and a non-highlighted grey one.
Any chance the default blue button says "Share diagnostics"? Because that would still make it an opt-out
With Liquid glAss CarPlay on non touchscreen cars they changed the button colors so that gray is the selected item and blue/green are not selected. Also they changed the back on-screen button to be the default, or sometimes they select the item you want but then a second later change focus to the back button.
When you first use CarPlay there are consent screens so there are definitely people out there who have picked the wrong one.
Technically yes, but most would consider an opt-out some tiny little nearly illegible that confuses the user into allowing it without deselecting. This is a clear choice given to the user. No gimmicky opt-outs.
I've been talking about switching to iOS from Android for over a decade. When Google finally pissed me off enough to get serious last year I just happened to buy my mom an ipad and perform the setup. Bad experience. Then helping my wife with her iphone cemented it: no way. I thought apple would be perfectly polished albeit a little restricted vs android but it was just as janky except in different ways.
Makes no difference to me if Apple does the new “innovative” products or if some other company does it. But if Apple starts getting “visions” and those interfere with the iOS and macOS experience that I have and like now, I’ll be annoyed. I like my MacBook, AirPods, and iPhone how they are now. If they don’t screw these up, great. Anything else is gravy.
I feel your comment subtly implies that if Apple doesn’t start making a self driving car or LLM Siri or robot dog walker or whatever then it’s “boring,” but I strongly feel there is (for all intents and purposes) limitless engineering that could go into refining and gradually expanding their existing ecosystem of products and these efforts would be quite interesting in their own right.
During Cook’s time at the helm, Apple has made major product improvements that greatly improved their value to me including AFS, arm laptop processors, Secure Enclave, camera improvements, and many others.