No doubt it's annoying, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

Just saw this.

It generated hundreds of comments of discussion on Apple's advertising practices. I don't view it as unsubstantive.

It was snark (which is against the site guidelines) and didn't add any information. That makes it unsubstantive. Please don't post like that to HN.

The comments it generated were mostly not particularly good, and the resulting thread was of lower quality than we're trying for here.

Every single company that sells things does this. You are talking about an Apple event and promo page where they are quite literally giving a sales pitch for their new products. That they (over)hype their own products is not only not notable or interesting, it's entirely expected.

It is a bit bizarre that your comment, or variations of it, appears for every single Apple release. For those people so jaded and annoyed at the existence of Apple, why not just skip those threads?

There's something unique about Apple that draws in the detractors, however (seriously -- just look at the comments! What a junkyard of noise). It's a bit like a thread about the Super Bowl having hundreds of comments by people announcing that they aren't interested in the Super Bowl. Neat.

You are right that it's just sales language, but people, tech folks in particular, don't have to like it and it's nothing wrong to voice their complaints. In fact it would be quite freshing today if some company start talking down to earth languages, like "hey we are giving you basically the same phone as last year with slightly better camera etc. It's useful though."

Fairphone did exactly this with the Fairphone 3+: they emphasised that they were just upgrading two components of the Fairphone 3 that had attracted criticism (the camera and speaker) and otherwise didn't want to change anything about their super-easy-to-repair phone with promises that replacement parts would be available for many years.

Fairphone's marketing is rather unusual in the marketplace in this respect.

It's interesting you mention that because I went to their website today and they are running a secret product campaign at the moment:

> The ...............* that can change a whole industry

> *Coming soon. Subscribe for updates and a chance to win big!

So it may be a laptop, a fairphone 4, a DIY geosync satellite. Or simply the old trick that tickles curiosity and get them subscribers to their newsletter. Not that unusual. And as a techie I say "fine, keep your secrets then" though.

What’s a fair phone though. You don’t make money with bland marketing. Nobody knows what that is.

Edit: lol @ people downvoting because I judged their phone. As if I cared about imaginary points on throwaway accounts.

> You are right that it's just sales language, but people, tech folks in particular, don't have to like it and it's nothing wrong to voice their complaints.

Except it gets old real fast. These comments read like "first".

No signal, all noise.

Same thing with the PHP, electron and Facebook topics for instance. First top comments have been saying the same thing for years.

Yeah, I don't think those statements would seen positive by the shareholders. I imagine shareholders would interpret them as lack of innovation and would probably trigger a sell on stocks.

yes, an underappreciated aspect, splashy advertising has mutliple audiences, not the least of which are (potential) shareholders. tim's (and many others') comp literally depends on it.

Obnoxious overhyping is not normal in most cultures around the world.

honestly, as someone who has lived in over 20 countries and on 5 continents, I would say the US has more restrained tastes in marketing than most cultures. Western Europe is generally more low key than ours though. Almost everywhere else I have been has a more aggressive sales/advertising culture.

What cultures are they not common in? I know you aren't talking about China, at least. Definitely not Japan, not most of East Asia. Probably not western Europe either, and it's pretty common in North America.

There's not a lot of new product hype in Amish communities.

You've clearly never been shopping for Amish furniture.

I was literally just watching a video the other day from an amish buggy producer. they were going over the different options and prices. 7k for the top of the line model

Streaming video doesn't seem like the most effective way to reach your Amish customers...

New barn designs maybe?

What? Yes it definitely is. Look at every single traditional market in every single European country, or in South America. You’ll find people screaming about the worlds best this and world best that. If you walk down a random street in England you see 14 of the world best beers and 7 of them will be the worlds oldest pub. Naturally all the commercials are the same.

You’d have to be a recluse to think that overhyping in sales pitches is not normal.

Haven't been to Scotland then.

Yeah, the place that proudly claims to be producer of most mediocre whiskies in the world.

To be fair no true Scotsmen would do such thing.

Marketing for Scotch is done by people in the local markets and is not representative of the true Scotsman.

I am not sure what culture you are referring to, but as someone who has lived in four very different cultures for a long time each, this is very normal, human behavior. Every tech company does this too, not just Apple. And every other company too, not just tech. And artists, and hollywood, and... humans.

must be fun to live in a culture of subtlety

What is a company that doesn't do obnoxious overhyping?

Casio

Ouch, true, underhyped even. I had this simple, stylish enough for me, just heavy enough watch, sold with 10 years battery. Not only did it take lots of damage (daily driver, never removed it but for cleaning) but the battery lasted 15 years then died a bit later. That was 100eur well spent.

Casio is a sleeper, they don't over extend and they are the best at what they do (which is to provide durable, cheap digital watches)

And graphing calculators. And audio synth. ;-)

And Citizen, maybe?

Most of Asia begs to differ, if not all of Asia.

Well, when things like superbowl or similar events are happening the overspill tends to get inacceptable.

Rave and rant all you want about it on appleinsiders, mac rumors, or whatever.

Regarding the expected (over)hyping, why is that an exuse? It's like the commercials for washing powder/liquid, toothpaste and all the countless other non-sense.

In other words a lie, or euphemistic reality distortion field.

Who does that? Fraudsters!

edit: and just for the fun of it

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

&

[2] http://www.sutjhally.com/articles/advertisingattheed/

[3] https://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Advertising-at-the-Edge-...

&

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live

> Every single company that sells things does this.

Software companies moving from update releases to subscription models are a great counter-example. There's plenty of bad sides to a subscription model, but at least PR and marketing departments can be much more honest about slow and incremental updates.

Marketing links have no place on HN, but until the mods recognise this fact, it's actually refreshing to see people call out marketing bullshit.

We're allowed to point out hyperbole! Comment threads always have criticisms of everything. What's bizarre is Apple defenders that always show up feeling personally slighted somehow.

Sure, point out the hyperbole. I'll point out how predictable it is.

The universe is balanced.

> There's something unique about Apple that draws in the detractors

I think you've almost figured it out. Apple and the Super Bowl both have something in common: really obnoxious fans.

If Apple didn't do it above and beyond not just what is normal but what is reasonable without an eye roll, then it wouldn't appear in every announcement, would it?

Everyone overhypes their product releases. But the reality is that most of us just don't pay attention to them. Microsoft talking about Windows? Eh. Samsung announcing something? Neat.

Apple announces something, however, and the detractors just have to flood in and give their hot takes. I suppose that speaks to the influence of Apple now.

No need to get defensive. People are allowed to be unimpressed with Apple's marketing speak.

Yes, they are allowed, of course... but being "unimpressed with Apple's marketing speak", a topic having been thoroughly traversed, seems counter to Hacker News's stated desire for comments that substantiate new thought, or create new or interesting discussions.

To the contrary, it's sparked quite the deep discussion about marketing hype, software companies, and views about the same across the world.

More valuable, perhaps, than discussing an incremental upgrade to the iPad Mini?

That's fair, I agree that it has sparked interesting discussions. Looks like we can't write off topics just because we think it's been thoroughly discussed already.

How "new" are the discussions though? Maybe we should try to find a previous thread where someone said the same thing and compare the discussion there?

They really don't. most of them make a bad commercial with a attractive people using the product and call it a day. Maybe list some features. I can't really think of any other company who's brand is to self label that every thing it does is some breakthrough for humanity. Segway?

Penis enlargement pill pushers!

> Every single company that sells things does this.

Nope.

> It is a bit bizarre that your comment, or variations of it, appears for every single Apple release. For those people so jaded and annoyed at the existence of Apple, why not just skip those threads?

For those people so jaded and annoyed at people critiquing apple - why not just skip those threads?

> There's something unique about Apple that draws in the detractors, however (seriously -- just look at the comments! What a junkyard of noise).

Maybe the only unique thing here is your need to defend apple with no arguments other than your own annoyance at apple being criticised?

Apple also lies

Steve Jobs with his distortion field used to say RISC was better than Intel right up until they switched to Intel, then the story switched.

They acted like they invented the omnibox for safari browser…

Also they used to tout the size of their phones as perfect, then unceremoniously eliminated that size for nearly a decade (until this year!)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AptLR1gS-Pg

In fairness to the size thing, until last year I was still using the older se and had that form factor since my first smart phone, the iPhone 4.

When I got the 4 it was great. By the time I finally changed the form factor last October, the world had changed and by that I mean much of the web was unusable due to the screen size and how no one optimized for non-phablets.

What’s perfect one year may not be perfect the next because things change. Accounting for an allowance of standard marketing hyperbole on top of that, i don’t see anything particularly wrong with that one claim.

> Steve Jobs with his distortion field used to say RISC was better than Intel right up until they switched to Intel, then the story switched.

He generally made specific claims which were true — for example, when they added AltiVec they talked about media processing and other SIMD-friendly tasks — and then let the press/fanboys generalize that. Towards the end they also started talking about things like battery life or software features when there simply wasn't a compelling comparison like that.

> Steve Jobs with his distortion field used to say RISC was better than Intel right up until they switched to Intel, then the story switched.

What are you talking about? He never changed his story about RISC, and guess what Apple is using now? The only reason they switched to intel was because nobody else was manufacturing a chip that was competitive.

And each release is "our best camera yet" or "fastest processor yet" or "best battery yet". I mean, yeah, you're probably not going to release an update that has worse performance.

Apple is the master at emphasizing things like this.

>Yeah you are not going to release an update that has worse performance.

Except keyboards in 2016 to 2019

But they probably announced it as a breakthrough innovation that would change typing forever.

And it did! You've never before typed with such softness, savoring each keystroke as if it were it's (not your's) last.

Sorry I couldn't help myself... But I'm gettin the Mini ok?

Hey, that's "Magic Keyboard" to you.

Would you, as a company CEO go on stage and announce "this camera is pretty much on par with the one last year and the CPU is the same too and actually we kinda lost a bit of battery life"? :D

While the wording is hyperbole, going from a A12 to an A15 is quite the performance bump.

And what will I be able to do with that performance bump? I use a tablet mostly for taking notes, email and looking at websites. I can’t see how the former can get any quicker. The latter is slow mostly because of the websites themselves. Will games or office apps get faster or have new possibilities?

Apple has kind of disappointed me with the software situation on iPads. I have an iPad Pro that I use as a laptop, but the reality is that the processing power available is underused. It has a 120Hz screen, but websites can't render to the canvas at 120Hz. There is no CAD software (which is nice when you design something and head to your makerspace to actually manufacture it -- I just print plans out on paper, but it's annoying if you need to change something while you're working). There is no software development software. (iSH is neat, but TestFlight-only, and probably something Apple doesn't like. I assume it will be removed from my device at any moment.) I can kind of download pictures from my digital camera and edit them, but the experience isn't great.

I think Apple's problem here is that they don't want to cannibalize OS X sales with tablets, and they don't want to cannibalize App Store revenue by letting people type in code to solve their problems.

Anyway, I've been relatively happy with the crippled mobile device model for a while, but it doesn't seem sustainable. I'm waiting for someone, anyone, to produce a 5nm ARM chip that anyone can buy, and then just having a Linux laptop like a normal person. As it stands, nobody other than Apple seems to be able to produce a decent mobile chip. This is very bad for the field of computing in general.

> they don't want to cannibalize App Store revenue by letting people type in code to solve their problems.

This seems implausible as a reason for keeping dev tools off iDevices, because 1) what percentage of their users would do that in the first place, beyond using spreadsheets, which are already available? Would it even be 1%? 0.1%?, and 2) they've made moves to add features like Shortcuts that enable that sort of thing, but which productivity-nerd non-programmer project managers and such are able and willing (and eager) to use, unlike dev tools—and those aren't just toys, they can absolutely replace certain kinds of what might could have been paid apps, before.

I think it's more likely that it's hard to add them without opening up security holes and making it easy to bypass the App Store and/or offer a 3rd party store, without making the tools so crippled that they're insufficient for actually developing & deploying serious software for oneself (in fact they've already released something so-crippled, in Playgrounds), coupled with their expecting extra sales of iDevices from adding dev tools to be tiny (so, not worth the cost & risk).

I agree in general, but it really depends. The iPad port of Clip Studio for example is literally, 100% the desktop version. I mean exactly, it has the top bar menu (file/edit etc) and everything.

Most of the other painting applications like Procreate have no real desktop equivalent either. From an art perspective, the iPad is at or ahead of the desktop experience. There are digital artists right now who have had 100% of their career on an iPad.

I completely agree with your point but just wanted to note that iSH is available on the App Store (and hasn't been booted out as of now by some miracle) and love it to bits.

> I think Apple's problem here is that they don't want to cannibalize OS X sales with tablets…

This seems unlikely. Tablet sales are way more of their business than the Mac. My guess is they’d be happy to Tablets consume the Mac altogether.

> …by letting people type in code to solve their problems.

You must have missed the announcement that Swift Playgrounds will be able to build complete apps and submit them to the store.

Why is it acceptable at all for you to work on a platform where the vendor has the power to remove anything at will?

It’s a sub 500 dollar device aimed at casual users and students. You sound like a power user, you should opt to go for the MacBook Air bare-minimum.

The comment you're replying to says they have an iPad pro, that's not a sub 500 dollar device.

The M1 is neat but it's not worth it for me. I hate everything about OS X. BSD command-line tools, a slow-as-most-glaciers Terminal.app, constant nagging about some menial task I need to perform for the computer. Nope, nope, nope. ("But if you just screw around with it for 20 years, then it will be just perfect." I already spent 20 years screwing around with Linux, so that cost is sunk. Sorry.)

I really don't like doing "computery" stuff on more than one machine, and I already have a 32 core desktop workstation for normal work. That will never go away, which means the laptop can't be at all "computery". I want to touch an app with my finger and have the app start up. Every time, no matter what. (And to be fair, the iPad Pro absolutely delivers on that.) To me, a laptop will always be the second fiddle, something I use once a month or so. I find that if I don't screw around with my computer for a month, everything has stopped working -- but with a tablet, it just turns on and all is well. So you just throw the thing into your backpack for a trip, then when you get to the airport it turns on and 4G connects to the cell network, and everything is great. You have a computer, not computer problems.

(Other laptops I've used in the past... Surface Pro 4. Left it turned on on my desk, went to get it ready for a trip... BAM brand new version of Windows and everything was broken. I didn't take it on the trip and just used my phone to browse the Internet at night. Chromebook Pixel: basically no problems, but just as limited as an iPad. Various Linux laptops: honestly, most of my vacation memories involve wpa_supplicant.conf, and a lot of problems 10 minutes before whatever conference talk I was giving. Not sure if conference WiFi or Linux bugs, but it wasn't pleasant.)

Casual users and students will go with the base model 10-inch iPad that's about $200 less.

Ever since the Mini 4, Apple's set premium pricing on the Mini. This is the most expensive one yet.

Of course not.

We all know that there have been no functional improvements to software enabled by processor speed increases since the 8081. Everything since then has been programmers slowly using up their "wait()" calls placed in code in the 70s to fake it.

"The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry."

— Henry Petroski

We need to bring back the Turbo button.

Generally better battery life. Mobile devices are generally get task done, go to sleep or wind down whatever cores/systems possible. So by doing it faster, it’s generally using less power for the same task. This is often spent in areas like smaller systems, lighter, brighter screens or radio’s though as they work towards a battery life as the budget.

Then buy a lower end device. Some of us rely on these things to do productive work, or play resource hungry games.

I wouldn't say that slow websites are because of slow network traffic in most cases now, though. I think this will make the web much quicker on this new edition, and that's a useful thing in itself.

Gaming performance and capabilities should be very much improved. Whether you will use or notice the improvements is an entirely different question, of course.

It's down to personal preference, but my wife went from an iPhone 8 to 12 (A11 to A14) and it was a night and day difference in speed.

About to go from a 7 to a 13 Pro, and expecting a nice bump in speed...

The performance is to help you add more work types into your current workflow.

Things will be faster for a little bit then will bloat up to be just as slow as soon as the new hardware is standard

People who say this obviously don't remember watching the screen slowly draw itself on old text terminals when you hit page down.

Now, we complain when it drops from 60fps to 40fps while rapidly slinging high resolution text + images with our fingers, and also that this is somehow "slower".

Its amazing how much our expectations have changed.

Yep. Not much inventive to keep their software fast - if it gets slow, people buy more hardware from them!

It can monitor for 3rd party payments in the app store three times as fast.

Do you have a source for the claim that they use the A15 in the iPad mini? It stood out to me that they left the details of the SoC out of the announcement.

lede of the linked post:

>iPad mini features [...] the A15 Bionic chip

whoa a performance bump!

Reminds me of that scene in Transcendence [1] where the super intelligent AI person announces another breakthrough and the AI / person's wife says "oh great honey". At a certain point, incremental innovation loses its wonder.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film)

I feel like this title needs a less advertorial overhaul, at least for HN

> I love how everything has to be a "revolutionary breakthrough" with apple

Really, really great. Absolutely incredible. Boom. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx7v815bYUw

Is there a "Tim Cook Script" generator? it shouldnt be hard to make and it always makes me smile with how goofy it sounds

It's amazing how Apple was able to get general public to be excited about things like "20% brighter display". Benefits of being rockstar I guess. But all rockstars get out of fashion...

Also "iPad mini features an all-screen design" while immediate picture underneath still shows significant bezels. Turns out they are just talking about the home button.

>With iPadOS 15, powerful new ML features include Live Text, which uses on-device intelligence

The chip enabling this has recently turned out to be used as an on-device intelligence agency, that reports estimates of crimes back to the mothership and could go very wrong in some countries.

Didn’t they put this on hold for now? Or did I misread a headline and it’s still happened/happening

You make it sound like Apple won't spend billions in advertising that 20% brighter display. People don't get excited for no reason. Someone somewhere is engineering that nudge from apathy to interest.

Apple is such a massive company, it's easy to forget that each of these variations sells millions of units to customers who want that one product.

For example, many pilots have an iPad Mini for maps and charts. In a cramped cockpit, the regular iPad is too big. With much faster graphics and support for Pencil 2 it's a big upgrade, so I fully expect this to be the #1 choice for that crowd.

The funny thing is this actually is one of the most substantial upgrades they’ve done on any of their iPads. The performance stuff sure whatever that always happens, but the form factor + pencil support is significantly better. If I were looking at iPads anytime in the last 5 years the mini wouldn’t have been on my list, but now it would.

The only thing less original and meaningful are the complaints!

"This is the best iphone we have ever made!"

Well, yeah, I hope so...

They always have a bit of fun kicking sand in their opposition's face as they lap them again.

Revolutionary spyware.

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