Comment by jasonjmcghee
3 days ago
> Apple has offered products with little value over competitors
I'm genuinely surprised by this comment.
For example, I thought there was universal sentiment that apple silicon / M-series computers are pretty unmatched.
The overwhelming volume of Apples sales comes from people who wouldn't notice if their device was running 2016 level hardware.
If software didn't keep getting worse this might be true but the average consumer notices if their computer is slow or dies too quickly.
It's sad how hardware improves leaps every year but software still does the same things but slower.
But competitors do the same
> The overwhelming volume of Apples sales comes from people who wouldn't notice if their device was running 2016 level hardware.
How could we possibly know this? This is just an argument from elitism, as though the plebes should be happy playing Farmville on their gateway computers, while us haughty developers sit in our ivory towers and herald in the end of the anthropocene using machines we can actually appreciate.
> How could we possibly know this?
They make a good point. Apple's most-popular device is a smartphone that doesn't handle workloads any heavier than Snapchat or Instagram. The value prop of the iPhone is not rooted in the performance or battery life (as Liquid Glass showed us) but just the branding.
Apple makes more money selling iPhone accessories than they make selling Macs. The desktop market share isn't going up, the Mac's lifeline is depreciation of old hardware to force Mac owners into the upgrade cycle: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
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> For example, I thought there was universal sentiment that apple silicon / M-series computers are pretty unmatched.
5 years ago, sure, but the x86 world has come a long way since Apple dumped Intel. I'd certainly take a 2026 Intel machine over something with an M1-M3.
I think the point was supposed to be default apps in an OS, similar to default search engine.. What I am missing is that OpenAI is in no way that default. Every OS, browser, etc should be able to find a more profitable default than sending someone to OpenAI.