McDonald's makes billions selling ultra low quality food. Sales dollars means nothing.
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Is the Magic of Apple Fading or Are We Just Chasing Nostalgia?
- Thread starter benroberts3
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McDonald's makes billions selling ultra low quality food. Sales dollars means nothing.
The American Consumer Price Index includes all expenses not just the cost of Interned and cellphone services). In 2008 the annual cost of living for the entire year rose an average of 3.8% at an index of 215.303. This total was higher than previous years. There are a few years in between where the 'index" was high, but not as much as from 2016 and now.
2008 = 215.303
2016 = 240.007
2023 = 304.702
2024 = 313.515 (up to the end of November only)
The point I was try to make is that back in 2008, not as many Americans could afford an iPhone, like it is now, and also that as the US population increases, so does the workforce and income. While the cost of living is very high in 2024 compared to 2016 and even 2023 (for example) our yearly earnings are also higher in both 2023 and 2024. If you look at the table from Statistics I posted above, you will notice the increase of iPhones sold from 2008 to 2023.
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That is true. The housing market has skyrocketed in recent years, and it is quite possible for the housing markets bubble to burst in the near future (?).
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Funny you should bring up Mcdonalds, as I have been eating it pretty often of late. The food isn't all that bad (particularly their buttermilk chicken burger), it's admittedly gotten pretty pricey of late (but other options like Subway and Mos Burger cost even more and are even more inaccessible), and it doesn't help that there aren't that many other viable options around me. And I will probably have it again later this evening, either before or after I go for a jog.
I can see why Mcdonalds make the money they do. They know their target market, and I know what I am getting each time - consistency. Perhaps rather than dismiss Mcdonalds' success outright, it may be more useful to understand why, in spite of serving what you deem as "ultra low quality food", tons of people continue to patronise them even when there are other alternatives.
It's the same reason as to why I keep buying Apple products, which I mentioned near the start of this thread. They do work for me, and at this stage of my life and my career, I want things to work more than I want them to be cheap. I am also willing to wager that there are tons of other people just like me. You can dismiss me as "sheep", but at the end of the day, I am not the one losing out here. You are, by continuing to believe in a lie (that Apple sucks and is doomed) that you so desperately want to be true, but which hasn't been for decades (and at least since I started using Apple products at 2011).
We should all be trying to explain Apple's success here, not explain it way.
didn't get a "wow" when I upgraded to my M1,2 or 3 or 4 MBP's. no wow on my M series iMacs, same with my M1, M2, & M3 air (No plans to get the M4) airs and currently typing this on my intel Air. *Shrugs* last iPhone I was "wowed" by was my X. I gave away my 15 to my nephew and my 16 is collecting dust because its really no different than my 14 except for Ai (no use for) and the camera (I have a real camera no use for one on my phone that can only do half o what it does.)
Possibly the new 19 inch MBP or the iPhone 17 Slim will have some wow factor, but most likely they will just be the same thing as the last 4 years with just a size and speed bump as usual. I doubt anything "wow" will come out of apple until they finally drop the foldable iPhone they have been working on forever,
My last upgrade was from the iPhone 11 or maybe 12 to the 14 (I usually let three model mumbers pass by before upgrading), and and upgrade for my wife's iPhone 13 to the iPhone 15. Even then she didn't want to upgrade the iPhone 13 to the iPhone 15, but I offered it to her as a birthday present.
I haven't noticed anything that makes any of the upgrades past the iPhone 14 Pro any better. There may be little changes in the camera, including the shutter's button location in the iPhone 16, but that's about it. I find the iPhone 14 useful enough as it is, and find the 16 as boring as my iPad, or even the new M4 iMac.
Intelligence? Well..., I don't even want it in my iPhone 14, and my wife does not want to use it in her iPhone 15. She says, "I have to continue using my own intelligence as I progress into old age and memory loss." She may have a point, since she prefers to rely on her memory to dial (tap) her contacts' phone numbers. 😆
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Oh, we FINALLY disagree on something. I was getting to the point where I wanted to ask whether anyone has ever seen the two of us in the same room
(you save me time from posting because you basically express my opinions most of the time, and do so more eloquently and patiently than I could).My switch from the hackintoshed Lenovo Yoga C930 to Air M1 was like this. I was opening Photoshop and closing it just to watch how fast it happens. I got the M1 in the summer and where with Lenovo I went through ice blocks at unsettlingly fast pace to keep it less hot (cool? Lenovo? hahahaha) I jokingly complained that the M1 is so cold it’s uncomfortable. It was magical.
My first iPhone with FaceID was XR and I had the same feeling. Like, this is surely either magic or fake or half the world can unlock my phone, I am wearing glasses, I trimmed my beard, dyed my hair blonde, it still recognises me? This is IMPOSSIBLE. Later I got 12 which I passed to my husband when he rolled his office chair over the XR (while always telling me to be careful, nyah nyah), replaced it with 14, now I’m on 15 Pro. They were…familiar. I quietly hoped to feel this way about Dynamic Island and Apple Intelligence. Dynamic Island excited me for approx. two seconds and by excited I mean mild amusement. 🍎I – ‘oh dear, oh dear’.
But not everything has to be a firework eruption. I’m really looking forward to finally having the M4 MBP later today and I’m trying to decide which adapter to use to expand storage. (Expand! Storage! In an Apple product!) It’s a pleasant feeling of anticipation. I don’t quite expect to spend 15 minutes opening and closing Photoshop, though
Skeuomorphic design was fine for its time, but it's a cutesy, idiosyncratic style that aged poorly. It has a small amount of nostalgic value, but I am so glad it's fallen to history! A couple of years ago I found my OG iPad, plugged it in to charge, and fired it up. I was amazed at how dated and OLD iOS 5 looked compared to iPadOS/iOS 15 and Catalina!
I don't know what the next stage of OS design will be when they move away from the flat style currently used, but I can just about say for a fact there will be legions whinging about it, and looking misty-eyed at the old flat style they've lost, and getting all angry with Apple for changing the look.
The quality of my iPhone 14 is great, and my '23 MacBook Pro is amazing. I expect that when I am able to upgrade my iPad, I'll be pretty happy with that too. I don't like every move Apple has made, but I can't find the doomer perspective so many seem to share. I'm looking with interest to see where Apple goes in the future.
Yes, iPhone sales are significantly higher today than they were in 2007-8. I have commented about that in other posts in the past. My comment here was simply disagreement with the post that Apple "was never more expensive than it is today."
Problem is, "skeuomorphism" became a scapegoat for just plain bad "form over function" UI design.
The fundamental point of skeuomorphism was that making the interface elements look like "real" objects (whether it's a physical pushbutton, trashcan or floppy disk*) suggested to users how they worked and made interactive elements stand out from content. It was an essential part of classic MacOS although the 3D realism aspect (which isn't really the point of skeuomorphism) came later.
In the case of the classic bêtes noire of "skeuomorphism" - such as the green beize games table or the stitched-leather address book & calendar - the eye-candy (apart from being tacky) at best told you nothing about how they worked, at worst mislead you by providing irrelevant elements or false hints - ISTR (ages since I've seen it) the address book looked like it was an open book showing facing pages while in fact it was an "index" window next to a "content" window, both scrollable, just like the current version - if it doesn't work like an address book, there's was no point in making it look as if it should work like one. What was helpful was making it clear what the interactive elements (buttons, input fields etc.) were by using familiar visual cues.
"Flat design" didn't just throw the baby out with the bathwater - it threw out the baby (clearly defined UI elements and familiar iconography) and kept the bathwater (doing nothing to improve "discoverability"). Throw in some questionable icon symbolism (the old "sunflower" icon for Photos wasn't great but why replace it with an icon that looks like a colour picker wheel?) and some horrible new Fisher-Price (no, sorry, that's an insult to Fisher-Price) icon designs...
The original GUIs, such as classic MacOS were designed based on a lot of actual behavioural research and the style guidelines were comprehensive about things like choosing icons with distinctive outlines (iOS had already forgotten about that) and how to word button labels and menu entries. Another major - but overlooked - factor in the success of classic GUIs was that they brought standardisation to UIs - suddenly, most of the common actions - such as load/save/close/copy/paste/select - and the way you navigated menus were the same in all applications - which was actually a revolution c.f. the bad old days when Wordstar, Visicalc, dBase etc. (I won't Godwin this thread by naming certain text editors) all had competing, different key shortcuts and menu systems.
* Yes - some icons were getting dated but they were widely recognised. So what if the "save" icon in some apps is a floppy disk as long as everybody recognises it as the "save" icon? The UK roadsign for "Speed Camera" is an old-fangled bellows camera of the kind that had largely fallen out of use before anybody knew what a "speed camera" was - everybody recognises it as a "camera" though.
You make some great points here, but I am also old enough to miss all the skeuomorphism anyway. I miss the way all those apps looked back then!
This!
Maybe we all should just appreciate real life more than some tech stuff that we try to buy to make ourselves more happy than usual. I honestly stopped being happy about new iPhones after I got my second one – 6s. Switching to Android doesn’t make me happier either. Then maybe there are other things in life to be interested in. 100%
Yes, all us Apple fans are just unapologetic fanboys and not people who know and understand what is out there and realize Apple is better.
I use Windows every day for work and I find it poorly designed and less intuitive compared to MacOS. I don't have to have some anti-virus program running. I don't have to worry about drivers for my hardware.
I bought an Android phone and used it for 2 years when Steve Jobs was CEO, because he refused to make an iPhone with a bigger screen, insisting he knew what size screen iPhone users wanted better than we did.
And I hated that Samsung Galaxy. There were never OS upgrades because you had to wait for Samsung to put their bloatware on top of the OS and that layer had a bunch of preinstalled games and stuff you didn't want. And even stuff at the time that was considered great, like providing an SD card slot for more memory, worked horribly. As soon as I was upgrade eligible, I was out (and Apple had bigger phones by then).
It seems like steps have been made with the Pixel that offers pure Android, but FaceID has been around for 7 years on iOS and Android still can't get it right.
Where Tim Cook has succeeded is he created an integrated ecosystem that works together to create the best overall user experience. I can use my Apple Watch to unlock my Mac. I can copy something on my Phone and click paste on my Mac. I can use my iPad as a second screen for my Mac. All of my apps and data are synced across all devices and it all works.
Not everything is perfect, upgrade costs are high like they've always been and the ability to customize after purchase is gone. And if you take one piece out of the puzzle it can fall apart. I bought an Android tablet recently to use for work trips and couch-based internet surfing and ended up returning it because I didn't have access to my Messages, Pictures, an Apple TV remote or the TV app with all my movies.
And I already did my rant on Siri, the one area Apple is really lagging behind. But as I said there, to me the problem is Apple is trying to be something that it isn't. It isn't Google and shouldn't try to be Google and should just partner with Google or Amazon like it does with Safari Search. Smart Home is a shortcoming as well, I use HomeKit and am often left wishing for something that isn't available, but even there, the industry moved toward Apple with Matter and there isn't anything that doesn't work with an iPhone at all, it just doesn't work with HomeKit.
But when I do all the pros and cons, I prefer the Apple ecosystem by a wide margin and that isn't coming from a fanboy, it's coming from someone who uses and researches a lot of tech.
macOS become to low priority than ever. Not improve since Jobs gone only add gimmick feature and change skin.
remove welcome animation, remove glowing Apple logo, remove Macbook text same as iMac remove apple logo. Design still good but looks plain not unique anymore. Hardware inside still good.
remove welcome animation, remove glowing Apple logo, remove Macbook text same as iMac remove apple logo. Design still good but looks plain not unique anymore. Hardware inside still good.
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I think that those companies that continuously reach out for new and innovative goals will be with us in one shape of another.
Most of us have gone through many changes.
On the “computer” side I started with a Coleco Adam, Vic 20, Commodore 64, Apple ][, Apple ][ C, Apple GS, Apple Lisa, many many many PCs most of who have fallen away (any AST people out there?). I still have a few Dells, one HP and back with the Apple Mac Mini M4.
I am not a person who jumps out for the newest, but does test systems and infrastructures and keeps somewhat up to date in the tech world.
I see Apple stumble again and again and generally they come back stronger.
I forgot my favourite computer from the mid 1980s…the Commodore SX64 “portable” computer with a 5” (?) colour screen. Lol
Most of us have gone through many changes.
On the “computer” side I started with a Coleco Adam, Vic 20, Commodore 64, Apple ][, Apple ][ C, Apple GS, Apple Lisa, many many many PCs most of who have fallen away (any AST people out there?). I still have a few Dells, one HP and back with the Apple Mac Mini M4.
I am not a person who jumps out for the newest, but does test systems and infrastructures and keeps somewhat up to date in the tech world.
I see Apple stumble again and again and generally they come back stronger.
I forgot my favourite computer from the mid 1980s…the Commodore SX64 “portable” computer with a 5” (?) colour screen. Lol
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That is a superbly well argued post.
Personally I like the current design language of macOS, but I’ve been using it since OS X Jaguar, so I’m already comfortable with how things work, and I guess I haven’t needed to look at anything from an outside perspective.
But the thing was that we can’t really say that that was part of classic Apple because it didn’t exist for very long.
The leather calendar for example, people are talking like it was something that Steve and Scott kept around for ages when…
It was first introduced in a lion developer beta (10.7) in march 2011 and released to the public that July.
It was gone by 10.9 in 2013.
Same goes for the pool table in Game Center, introduced in September 2010 and gone by 2013.
This “eye candy” came and went quicker than a US presidential term lasts, it’s not like it’s something that Scott and Steve planned from the beginning of OS X.
I popped into Apple Store today to try out a 16. I have a 13PM but have an inquisitive itch to see if the grass is greener with the 16.
That camera button & how it operates & moves through functions is a total mess. I struggled to keep it at aperture mode, press hard in or lightly swipe finger it was just awful to use & confirmed to me that I’ll not be doing trade in for 16 or any with that stupid button. Will see what upcoming SE has to offer but may go 15 before it disappears or get my 13PM to last as long as possible. Although given how annoying the predictive text function has become the last couple of months I’ll likely throw it into the wall soon! iPhone design has now peaked & the software is definitely on a downward slope.
A device should help you with your task not help you on a journey to having an anuerism!
That camera button & how it operates & moves through functions is a total mess. I struggled to keep it at aperture mode, press hard in or lightly swipe finger it was just awful to use & confirmed to me that I’ll not be doing trade in for 16 or any with that stupid button. Will see what upcoming SE has to offer but may go 15 before it disappears or get my 13PM to last as long as possible. Although given how annoying the predictive text function has become the last couple of months I’ll likely throw it into the wall soon! iPhone design has now peaked & the software is definitely on a downward slope.
A device should help you with your task not help you on a journey to having an anuerism!
Depends on what sort of "skeuomorphism" you are talking about - reading around, the core seems to be a UI object that mimics the appearance or a real-world object with analogous function.
Using icons of pages with turned-over corners as files, icons of cardboard folders as directories, dragging them to a trash can to delete them are all examples of "skeuomorphism" (even using a word in a little lozenge-shape box to represent a "button" probably counts). These date beck to the Apple Lisa if not before - and many of the icons are still in use today.
I think those infamous iOS Apps with green beize and stitched leather were the peak of a trend towards purely ornamental, photo-realistic UIs which (as per my earlier post) were badly designed and failed to add anything to usability, and may have sparked the backlash.
The main change with "flat design" was the removal of the shiny 3D effect, drop shadows etc. which aren't the only form of skeuomorphism (but were important in some apps to help identify the interactive UI elements).
No one is going to care when Apple moves away from their flat boring OS becaues it's as ugly as #$#. Aqua was simply sublime in its elegance. Today's macOS is a shell of what Aqua used to be. Utter trash thanks to the feckless Tim Cook.
a place where skeuomorphism is still very prevalent and works very well is audio plugins
If you pull up a compressor (for example) and it looks just like like a real compressor in a rack then you instantly know how to use it
I think it's also easy to forget how much less iOS did (on iOS 5 and earlier) in exchange for that supposed stability. Remember when app extensions came only with iOS 8 and you needed to open the WhatsApp app in order to share a link or photo prior?
Well yes exactly, and I hear what you're saying (on the other comments too) and well said and agree with lots of it.
Just to make my case yet one more time...
TBH I hope I'm wrong, but I think the inertia has already stopped we just haven't felt it yet. Apple is a bit like a deer shot while running, their still going, they don't know the consequences of their actions, but they will stumble soon. Microsoft was this way under Balmer. It's not a fatal shot mind you, they're too big and talented to die, they'll recover, and I don't think Tim Cook is the worst ever or a mistake by Jobs, I'm not going that far as others are saying here.
I'm just saying... he and the other current executives have made mistakes, chasing the wrong things as most big companies do (things ironically Steve Jobs warns about in several interviews talking about how Apple can out compete bigger MS and IBM) and I think they will become readily apparent in the next 5 years, hurting the stock and value over the next 10 years.
For example, the iPod as "just a walkman with a hard drive" or iphone "just a blackberry with a touch screen" seriously does not understand the technology nor common sense thinking of the time. Apple had to invent entirely new technologies, firmware, touch interactions, and more to make those things not just work, but work well.
Apple hasn't done that kind of deep work since... well visionOS and Vision Pro, and to be frank, that outcome is just not as compelling. It feels a lot more half baked, despite all the technology in it. I hope they fix Vision Pro over time, but the OG iPhone was still compelling on day one. If you could go back to 2007 and be amazed by a touch screen keyboard you will know what I mean. Its not that blackberry didn't consider a touch screen device, they felt a touch keyboard was impossible to do well. They criticized the iphone for years until the joke was on them and they went bankrupt. It was the innovation to make a really useful touch keyboard, that at least partially, saved and made the iPhone. No one else could do this, and it actually took Android several years to have a touch keyboard that didn't suck.
Anyways, so all of this comes to robotics, yes I love all these examples you mention about what AI should be and what "droids" could be! This is clearly the future, embodied, real world AI! It needs privacy, on device processing, Apple should be the leader! But are they? Not even close, and yes it's not any of those other companies you mentinoed, its Tesla. Tesla is maybe a decade ahead of everyone else in robotics, manufacturing, and AI all together. And in the next 10 years, that will matter a whole lot more than whatever rectangle one has in their pocket.
So my criticism is Apple is stumbling with their current software, stumbling with XR on the Vision Pro, and missing this next wave of AI and robotics all so they could sell a few more iPads at different price points, and thats the real shame of the current apple leadership team.