Ask HN: How long will Apple get away with releasing small incremental updates?

Apple has taken this approach will all of their products and the numbers show its working. However, nothing lasts forever. When do you think Apple will lose its appeal as the number one consumer electronics company in the world?

cruano · 2 years ago

Ah yes, the past years have been only incremental upgrades like the Airpods, Vision Pro or the completely boring M1 chips that literally no one bought because intel was just as good.

tizio13 · 2 years ago

Exactly, extremely boring!

Also can we talk about their software updates too? Who wants to have a device that gets so many updates years after purchase. How annoying.../s

gabelschlager · 2 years ago

Just talking about the software-side of things: I think they actually have been adding very neat features with the past few updates. Automatic image OCR, so you can copy/paste text, inserting text via camera, the transformer-based keyboard and such are small, but very useful features.

I much prefer that over Microsoft's way of adding a new UI that can do less than previous iterations, while also being less performant and tons of half-baked features like their newly-planned Copilot, still unfinished Android subsystem, worse search, etc.

Of course, neither approach is perfect, but I actually prefer system that change little on the surface and mainly adds small, but well-integrated features over time. Not saying Apple is perfect (there's tons that could be done regarding user freedom on iOS, backwards-compatibility and gaming), but neither are the competitioners.

dave4420 · 2 years ago

Which of their competitors is releasing revolutionary updates?

My point being, if your thesis is that releasing incremental updates is a long term problem for Apple, then you should be able to identify a competitor who is releasing non-incremental updates.

muzani · 2 years ago

I've been switching to Apple products lately so it works. Not the iPhone; that's a rip off, but iPad, Apple Pencil, and the M1 chips were just good enough to be worth the jump. The touch bar on MBP was a downgrade IMO and I'm glad they learned from it and removed it.

As others say, what's the number 2 option? My number 1 for a smartphone is the Poco/Xiaomi line, but iPhones aren't that far off. Poco/Xiaomi, Samsung, and Huawei are happy to enshittify themselves, while Apple charges high but doesn't disappoint.

syndicatedjelly · 2 years ago

I don't know where this narrative of "the last great thing Apple made was the iPhone" came from. There seems to be a new generation of Apple fanboys that love Steve Jobs, and think everything he did was magic. Apple has innovated an enormous amount in the past 10+ years, so saying that everything they do is "incremental updates" is just completely facetious.

jstx1 · 2 years ago

What’s the alternative - exponential growth which goes on forever? Seems unlikely. They stop releasing new devices every year? Doesn’t make sense from Apple’s point of view and as a consumer you can always skip a release - which people are already doing and Apple are still making money.

What would you do differently if you were running Apple?

theandrewbailey · 2 years ago

Two scenarios come to mind:

1. Someone will out-innovate them.

2. Their products and services become less relevant or obsolete.

warthog · 2 years ago

Oh you don't wanna know...