Apple, on the other hand, sells boutique products into a rapidly commoditizing market, and is having a terrible time with growth right now (the numbers today show less than 1% revenue growth). So profit is the only reason to buy AAPL right now. And the profits? Down almost 13%.

Compare the Apple remote (with the iOS “emulator”), Apple TV, and Airplay to Chromecast’s UX, for instance. Apple does have special sauce. They make tools that work together and are understood at a surface level. Everything, including the new keyboards, fits a hardware market driven agenda (quiet, “appy”, small like a phone). Google and Amazon work backwards from services, and Samsung and co just aren’t even playing the same ballgame. They are much more like traditional prebuilt computer companies. MS is kind of coming close with just computers but they are not nearly as sticky as an everything tech company.

On the other hand, it might just be that I can get used to anything. (Err, I also think the Apple TV UI is fine, too. But, perhaps I lack the imagination to envision a better UI.)

I was responding to the parent's comment about Apple TV (the premise) with my conclusion, which is a subjective opinion. Which ironically is the exact same thing as what you're doing. Wasn't trying to flame-bait, but I really didn't feel the need to add more. In summary, compared to other devices, I really do not like Apple TV.

The music app can get too deeply nested, but in general it is above all a consistent tabbed master-view experience in every app. The apis exposed to developers all lend to a very good, consistent experience for everything I’ve tried except YouTube TV, which doesn’t utilize the standard media transport API.

In general I like the idea that casting, while still as deeply integrated as Google Cast, is supplemental to the hardware remote. It’s not an afterthought, and neither is the remote. Both are good IMO.

Truly my only complaint is that the app switching dialogue uses reversed/“physical” swiping direction (like switching desktops with a trackpad). This makes no sense to me, as nothing else does this, including swiping between album covers in now playing. I get it, but it’s inconsistent with the whole rest of the UI.

Having used both of them, I'd profoundly disagree with you on that statement. I consider CarPlay a much more elegant solution than Android Auto. Particularly that android auto will change settings on your head unit. The early versions of it also completely disabled your phone screen.

Second is their customer lock-in.

Those can carry lots of value. And even strength, maybe. But growth ?

And design ? Google can design well enough. Their interfaces are easy and fun to use. Beyond that, regular people don't care.

For me, Google will always be the company that high-jacked scrolling to use for zoom. That still trips me up every time I have to use Google Maps or any other mapping service that copied them on a laptop with a trackpad.

They could keep that default (misguided as I personally think it is) if they just provided an option to let scroll be scroll but they don't.

I'd much rather pay a premium for Apple's UI. I think they do a better job and it's worth paying for.

So you use that for vertical scrolling. How would you do horizontal scrolling on a typical mouse then?

The default of holding left click and dragging the map across to move the viewport is far more intuitive.

Unless you have some supporting evidence that clicking and dragging is more intuitive I would suggest that it's not and that you're just used to doing it because you use a mouse and not a trackpad.

Two finger scrolling is used everywhere else on laptops. It handles horizontal scrolling perfectly.

It shouldn't be hijacked by Google for zoom without even the option to restore the default behaviour.

If Google were "good" at UI they would offer the option of pinch zoom on laptops and just leave scrolling alone.

EDIT: I guess Google Chrome could go all `el.addEventListener('-webkit-pinch-zoom')` on us.

I'm coming to the conclusion that some people are more sensitive to design issues than others. If you are then there isn't much choice, Google certainly isn't an option.

In the US, the number of people who can’t buy an iPhone on a carrier payment plan is small.

The average person doesn’t even care about computers that much anymore.

Besides, computer sales are only 11% of their revenue.

https://sixcolors.com/images/content/2019/financials-2019-7-...

>AAPL seems to have hit its peak in the device market, and can only grow revenues at this point by effectively raising prices on existing customers (that’s what the services category amounts to). This strategy can only take them so far.

Which is inaccurate. They have continued to add new products, like the Watch and AirPods. So when do you think they hit "peak device" ? You mean peak iPhone? No argument from me, they might have. But there are ways to grow revenue without just increasing prices, as those other products have demonstrated. They have also proven that the can grow revenue with their services, which is now a bigger revenue generator than iPhone.

Everyone loves to hate on Apple on multiple fronts (elitist, expensive, over the hill), whereas the hate on Amazon is really about one thing.. that ol "makes no profit" canard.

CLARIFICATION: I’m talking perception, not my beliefs. Uber’s a scam, as far as I can tell, but they will either pull off a miracle or be the biggest Groupon of all time. And Snap isn’t very good at being a public company.

Ahem [1], and while we're at it, [2]

My criticism to Apple isn't that they're being expensive; it is related to right to repair and their constant efforts to hamper that. Amazon just undercuts everyone, and Turk globalizes cheap workforce. For ridiculous low payment. These are just 2 examples you did not mention. You can read more in the sources below.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Amazon

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Apple_Inc.

And I’ve never had a problem getting my phone repaired

I wish they weren’t targeting the masses so completely. iPhones shouldn’t have the absolute worst charging tech in the box.

I think the stock will pop once news breaks of another breakthrough product...whether its a car or something else.

I'm not so sure it's useful to compare stock valuations in this way. An assessment of "undervalued" should be based solely on the facts of that specific company, IMO.

1. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=p...

2. https://robinhood.com/stocks/PINS [1Y]

In my anecdotal experience it seems like every suburban mom curates several boards near-obsessively.

If one of these major launches is an iPhone X-like phone with a thumbprint reader (home button or otherwise), they will get at least another $1,000 from me.

I think that I'll be upgrading back to the old one going forward.

And I promise that the next laptop I buy (or my company buys for me) won't have a touch bar or a butterfly keyboard.

I also recently purchased a refurbished 2015 with top tier specs as a personal laptop.

Apple has definitely lost out on thousands of dollars of revenue from just me due to the touchbar/butterfly keyboard feel/butterfly keyboard reliability/usb-c only decisions. And don't even get me started on my inability to replace my iPhone SE with a decent, small phone.

It was never about Apple having better marketing. It was about Apple owning tech loyalty.

When the macbook is no longer the favored dev machine, Apple is going to lose a lot of market share.

http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207358

I have two solutions for you, though: firstly, download BetterTouchTool[1] and install the GoldenChaosBTT[2] preset. It's the killer app for the Touch Bar, it turns it into a genuinely useful feature that you'll find yourself using all the time, and BTT in general is an incredibly powerful tool for customising the way you interact with your Mac.

Secondly, switching Caps Lock to the Esc key[3] has been one of the biggest productivity improvements I've made in the last decade, seriously. I wish I'd done it sooner. I've made the switch on every machine I use, even the ones without a Touch Bar.

Hope that helps!

[1] https://folivora.ai

[2] https://community.folivora.ai/t/goldenchaos-btt-a-complete-t...

[3] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/127591/using-caps-lock-a...

The TouchBar is nice on paper, actually adds to some applications, but the current implementation is a world of hurt.

As long as it's optional, I could see people not liking this.

I'm never going to retire my 2013 MBP at this rate.

You can create a rule to change caps lock to control if pressed with other keys, else escape if pressed alone.

I have no affiliation with it, just ran into this issue myself and it solved it for me.

Instead we have Karabiner Elements which has been of mixed stability in my experience.

Many times I've had it completely disable the internal keyboard on my late 2013 MBP to the point where I have to plug in a USB keyboard to recover or if on the road do a force power reset.

There are many valid criticisms of the touch bar macs, losing one key in particular is pretty low on the list.

The whole reason to remap caps lock to ctrl is that ctrl is in a terrible location.

I use vim and switch between a butterfly/touchbar Mac (work machine) and a Thinkpad (personal machine). Using the Mac keyboard has actually negatively impacted my typing speed when I use other systems! I remapped my vim keybindings, and now my muscle memory has atrophied.

This dumb machine has actually made me a worse typist. I am so frustrated.

If they make a one-handed iPhone again, they will also get money from me.

For now, I'm sticking with the 2015 MBP and the SE.

Personally I would like to see an iPhone X with TouchID under the display WITH FaceID. So if I have gloves on or my finger is wet, no problem, FaceID takes over. If I'm laying in bed and holding my phone to close to my face, no problem, TouchID authenticates. It also means I can unlock my phone without picking it up off my desk with my finger.

You would get the best of both worlds and none of the drawbacks.

Plus, it lets the phone not display sensitive notification details until you are the one looking at the screen(with attention detection on, the default, you have to be really looking at it), only then it will display the details(including actual messages, depending on how it's configured). This is great in many scenarios.

This is a tradeoff though, as FaceID doesn't work if you're wearing sunglasses.

I like to be able to unlock my phone when it's flat on my desk without picking it up.

Alternatively, maybe Macs would increase from 10% to 15% if the product wasn't broken and over-priced. Maybe it would be 20% or 25% if Apple could cross-sell/convert those iPhone sales to Mac sales.

https://sixcolors.com/post/2019/07/apple-third-quarter-2019-...

There is no world where any computer manufacturing is seeing a large growth in PCs in the last 5 years.

iOS can't replace Mac OS (yet) for serious work. So instead of letting Macs atrophy, they should invest in making Macs the best possible desktop and laptop computers for serious work. Own whatever amount of that market they can. Keep those users in the Apple ecosystem.

https://sixcolors.com/post/2019/07/apple-third-quarter-2019-...

Based on everything else they've done, I figure it will be $3500+ build though and push into the $5k range.

But I was interested in his/her reasons.

The contrast between some HN comments on the "Wetbulb heatwave omg it's the end" thread and this one was pretty striking.

Because the shift to services is exactly what everyone has been clamoring for. Looks like a pretty great quarter for Apple. I think it is the biggest June quarter revenue wise ever.

A nitpick, but I wish people in business would diversify their vocabulary and learn to use words other than "exciting" to describe everything. Calling something exciting does not make it so. Show why it's exciting, don't just claim that it is.