Same. When the iPhone was still relatively new and every art kid had a MacBook pro and Apple was innovating and coming out with new things, it seems like there was more excitement.

Now way more people buy iPhones even on launch day, but they're delivered right to your house instead of standing in line.

It ended ever since they stopped innovating.

They only incrementally improve the status quo now.

I hear this a lot. The products are basically on the top of the maturity curve now so incremental improvements is all it is likely to be for a long time. Some of the big "innovations", an example being folding screens, aren't really viable at the moment and possibly never and Apple are quite conservative on their engineering. This is a good thing for those of us who see these as utility devices mostly.

In fact most of the time I'd rather people just left stuff the fuck alone.

> The products are basically on the top of the maturity curve

People said that about phones in 2006 as well, they had looked the same for a while then, why would you want more than a phone that can call, make messages, and has a built in calendar?

No they didn't. They sold like crazy which is why everyone has them now.

Apple got very lucky in the sense that Google's own incompetence and lack of reliability makes people want to join the Apple 'ecosystem' for a stable, predictable experience.

And I say that as a major Android fanboy for most of my life. Apple doesn't surprise you. The products are damn good, and they don't change too much, too fast.

Also Gen Z doesn't understand why SMS messages degrade image quality, so they blame Android.

Apple's reputation for reliability mixed with extremely manipulative tactics are a lethal combination.

> Google's own incompetence and lack of reliability

Google are not a hardware company, they are an advertising broker. They aren't in the least bit interested in anything that doesn't increase money from that core business. They only started making phones so as not to lose control over that advertising space, but they remain mediocre at it at best because that's enough for them.

Apple are a hardware company, that's where their focus is.