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Comment by nunez

16 hours ago

Misinformed take IMO.

M-series chips are insanely cool (literally and figuratively) and have no competition even five years in. Same with the W-series SoCs on watches.

Are there any third-party haptic vibration motors yet?

Shoot, even their trackpads, which already stood alone, have gotten _better_ over the years.

Nobody else will have their own vertically-integrated modem out in production. This will make budget iPhones (maybe all iPhones) so much cheaper once they show Qualcomm the door.

That's before the advances they've made in software, like their camera processing pipeline (which only gets better; their video stack still has no equal) and differential privacy.

Oh, yeah, and the Vision Pro, which basically everyone who has tried it has said that it is the most advanced technology they've ever used.

Almost all of this happened under Cook's tenure.

Apple is still in the business of building insanely cool shit.

Vertically-integrated modems are not cool. I mean, they are to me and likely other geeks, but to the general public? Their eyes would glaze over.

Cool is the kind of thing people envy. It's the kind of product that gets namedropped in a music video.

  • You’re not thinking two or three orders out. It’s not about the modem, it’s about reducing the resource allocation of a boring component to make space for increasing the resources of other exciting components, taking the whole into account.

    iPhone will get some new exciting feature and everyone will wonder how they managed to do it at the price point nobody else can.

  • Vertical integration is what got us fanless laptops with amazing battery life. Those are cool.

    Apple thinks/knows/gambles increasing vertical integration by building its own modems will make things even better.

You talk like a nerd.

Cool is a vibe, not tech specs and little things. It's a whole aura.

Apple is not cool.

  • Agree. There are probably more than a million tiny contextual data points that make a person look at something (whether it’s a tech product or a musician) and go: “cool, man.”

    But those millions of data points can (rarely, briefly,) coalesce around a product or company, even though that’s mostly out of the control of those building the product or company.

    EG if you asked someone in 1965 if a Jaguar E-Type was cool, or someone in 2000s London whether the Fruityloops DAW was cool, they’d say “yeah”.

    I’m mostly agreeing, and it’s a super minor point, but tech specs are part of the unknowable, constantly-shifting constellation of symbols that produce “cool”, and there isn’t a reason an Apple product couldn’t, in the future, align the stars. They did before! The white iPod earbud wire did, briefly, signify cool.