Picturing a real-world situation here in my recent past...

We start with the pinnacle of engineering, a SPA, could be built in React, Vue, whichever.

It loads, which on slower smartphones takes a long time as they suck in running JS. When it's booted, there's nothing there. It has to reach out for data.

And so it does, to the microservice. Which might start doing something in 20ms or 200ms, it's all very intermittent due to excessive virtualization. It can't just go and return the data, no...it has to take the authentication token that was passed in and authenticate it with yet another service, which is vendor managed and even slower. Then there's rate limiting, logging, all types of overhead. Eventually, it returns 3 product rows.

Sadly though, for each of the product items we have to make an individual call to get related data, part of it coming from yet another microservice. All of these calls having their own startup time, authentication and overhead.

So for what one might call a classic "join", we're into multi-second territory. Which is fatal territory. Not to mention the shit state of data, as it's all no-sql garbage. Mind you, this is about 1/10th of what users are supposed to see on the initial dashboard.

We're talking one tiny part of a small- to midsized "app". It all costs a fortune and it produces garbage that users hate.

Old dinosaur me used to code up a CRUD app like this by the dozens. Using LAMP, .NET, whichever. Performance would be near-instant, I wouldn't allow any query response time to go over 10ms.

Every part of our stack is "best-practise" and enterprise-grade. And it just doesn't fucking work. It's 10 times more expensive and 100 times slower whilst the very idea of such an app is that it's supposed to be more interactive/responsive compared to the traditional stacks.

Luckily though, these services are multi-client. Except they're not, because then the mobile app team needs different data, and it's all just bolted on to the "generic" service. Services teams independence is a problem, not a solution. Plan a UI feature and good luck getting it orchestrated across teams each having their own roadmap.

And let's end with comedy gold where Lamda developers now need to calculate the running costs of their logic line by line. Whoops, slightly inefficient loop, that'll be 30$ extra per month on the bill. Now "scale" that problem to dozens of such developers building hundreds of services.

What a joke we've become. Distributed computing is an error, not an architecture. The point of computing is to put compute and data as closely together as possible. As the brightest minds on the planet deliver in stunning hardware advances which us software developers piss away.

But hey, the God of Complexity pays well and those footing the bill have no idea what we're doing but it does sound impressive.

Exactly. Software developers will never learn that the separation of concerns is a myth. In reality, UI, business logic and data are deeply entangled. Hence, moving these things apart makes everything worse.

"Splitting a system into subsystems allows each team to focus on their piece of the puzzle while minimizing the amount of peer-to-peer coordination."

The coordination is still there because a microservice team does not live in a vacuum. They build services based on demand from other teams that typically build web apps, mobile apps, sometimes server-to-server.

Hence, the "independent" team now becomes a roadblock for higher order features.

A large part as in 1 minute?

A large part as in the part of the presentation where Silicon was being talked about. GPU is the main focus of A17 Pro, with the performance cores being upto 10% faster and no significant numbers to show for the efficiency cores.

That currently seems to be the case, but it's a puzzling strategy.

It's a digital company that is trying to increase revenue with services instead of just hardware.

How can you ignore gaming whilst offering your own streaming service? The gaming market is many multiples in size of all of Hollywood.

Gaming has a high cost of entry. Xbox posted its first profit in 2007, six years after the Xbox launch.

I would imagine that they don’t think they have much to bring to the table that would leaps and bounds get them over the current competition; their entry point would probably look like a premium Steam Deck or maybe the Vision Pro for AR gaming, but is that an Apple-sized market to sink their teeth into? Particularly when none of their other devices are traditional-gaming oriented.

I assume they don't want to compete with their customers on gaming, not just yet.

The entire announcement is an exercise in masking that they're running out of ideas.

Excessive lectures on environmental footprint. Lots of cultural/humanitarian story telling, a pile of non-relatable tech info where they only briefly showed the embarrassing "up to 10% faster", dull/static presenters with their fake excitement.

Even the Pro model, typically the only model where they might add some actual features of any significance just to seduce you to pay more, is now nothing more than an "extra bling" model.

No fresh new demos of 3rd party developers either. All of this shows the maturity and advanced state of the platform.

Here's an idea that would actually impress all of us regarding environmentalism: user-replaceable batteries. As simple as it was 15 years ago. And no, I'm not interested in tech apologies about glue or there not being space. There's space. It's purely a matter of will.

It's not just the lack of ideas, but the direction they are taking their existing ideas in is just not interesting anymore.

One thing I'm kind of having a mini midlife-crisis over is that I'm slowly realizing that I am no longer the target market for tech products. I didn't see anything... anything today that resonated with me. Aren't marketing materials supposed to do that?

It's all about things I don't care about, like the camera. Oh boy, more megapixels. Yawn. I don't really even use my phone's camera that much. Dynamic Island notifications? I turn all notifications off to avoid distractions. Display brightness? I'm constantly turning it down because it blinds me at night. Gaming? I have an old Playstation 3 and a nice size TV for that. Carbon neutral? Unpopular opinion but that doesn't even rate as a top-10 driver of my purchasing. As you say, give me a replaceable battery!

The marketing all depicts people 20 years younger than me horsing around taking selfies, people who, I suppose, care about things I don't. I didn't even recognize any of the music. I'm a boring, frugal, old white guy, who uses his phone as a tool, not as a lifestyle, and my wallet is apparently not interesting to Apple. Sad to be left behind.

Brother, what would actually excite you other than the replaceable battery? You game on a PS3. You're self admittedly boringly frugal. At this point, frankly it's not just Apple that isn't marketing to you -- no one is going to market to you except maybe Depends in a few more years. Companies make products for people who spend money.

This is not Apple's problem.

Wow, that Depends comments cuts to the bone, LOL oh my! Well done..

I guess what I'm looking for is a "Wow, that improvement is significant enough that, this time, early-adopting will make a huge difference" announcement. I remember around 2011 when hard drive prices-per-gigabyte took a huge drop to the point where what you got for your money was astoundingly better than what you could get a year earlier. I haven't bought a hard drive since then. Yes, prices have continued to go down, but the slope is not what it used to be. I'm still on a computer from 2014 because that was the last major increase (in my judgment) in what you got for your money. CPUs and GPUs are getting better, but only incrementally so. I typically look for those inflection points/discontinuities to make a tech purchase.

For example, if a phone manufacturer suddenly came out with a huge sci-fi level leap in battery technology, where, maybe paired with a stripped down OS I could get a week of battery life... That would be exciting. Or, if the phone's hardware and OS suddenly became powerful enough to plug in as a true desktop replacement and run desktop applications natively, where I could actually throw away my desktop workstation, that would be pretty awesome.

OK but you changed, not Apple. Apple was leaving behind older people when you were young, so I don’t see why everyone is entitled to be part of a product’s target market.

Some of us do still appreciate these improvements. I greatly appreciate a better camera for example. I actually don’t know if the 15 has as an appreciable improvement but the 14’s camera is still a far cry from the quality of a professional camera in every situation but a un-zoomed shot in moderately bright daylight lighting. There is still major work to be done.

Do you need a high quality camera? No. The movie Tangerine was shot on an iPhone for example… but visually, it does not look fantastic. Some people don’t care about image quality but for the people that notice and care, they appreciate it.

Do you feel like the changes Apple is making to the camera are improving the camera along the axes you care about?

I went from the 10 to 14 and that was a massive improvement. Highlights (the brightest areas on a scene with both very dark and very bright spots) were massively overblown on the 10.

It’s much better on the 14, for example, although you can still tell the parts that would have been overblown previously, especially with HDR mode on, and I don’t love it — but at least you can still see some detail now.

Was 12 to 14 an improvement? Don’t know - didn’t have a 12.

Is the 15 improved from the 14? Until I get my hands on it, I couldn’t say. It’s just a lot of marketing right now.

> The marketing all depicts people 20 years younger than me horsing around taking selfies, people who, I suppose, care about things I don't. I didn't even recognize any of the music. I'm a boring, frugal, old white guy, who uses his phone as a tool, not as a lifestyle, and my wallet is apparently not interesting to Apple. Sad to be left behind.

Today a company announced a marginally better product to remain competitive with it's competitors. When you need to buy a new phone, Apple is hoping that they've made the n+1 (or the n, or n-1) version that you will prefer to buy.

You haven't been "left behind" because a company made an ad with young people in it.

It's okay to just not care. "My phone/pocket computer is good enough" is a nice place to be.

It's just the routine of it. It's been 15 years of "better than last year". It's hard to be excited about that for so long. It's just a slightly better phone. And that's OK.

I think I’m in a same demographic (maybe not old, but not young), and… I have no idea what Apple couple possibly add to their phones that would interest me.

Like, please, no more resolution or LIDAR on the front facing camera, it might start picking up wrinkles.

Same, I'm a middle-of-the-road user. I piggy back on the better hardware once every 3-4 years but haven't noticed a meaningful difference in my total experience since the iPhone 6s. Almost every new iOS feature is also entirely lost on me. I recently even needed to Google how to fully shutdown my phone. If there's any growing value, it would be in apps. There's an app for everything.

Nothing wrong with any of this. Most products in my home are no longer exciting.

> Oh boy, more megapixels. Yawn.

There aren't any even any more megapixels this year. It's the same 48 as last year.

The cameras seem to have the same number of megapixels. Maybe you, as a frugal old white guy, would appreciate having USB-C and no longer having to pay for the proprietary Lightning connector.

I’ll take the better water resistance/proofing/reduced engineering cost from not having user replaceable batteries any day.

Had to replace an iPhone battery exactly once over the last 3-4 years and it was done for free with applecare, in and out in 30 mins.

Regarding "better water resistance", there have been a ton of phones released in the past that have had water resistance standards of at least IP 67 and that had a user replaceable battery. That part of your argument doesn't hold water.

I see what you did there!

Quartz wristwatches have replaceable batteries since their invention and waterproofing the is not really an issue.

> free with applecare

That's true in your case, but if someone buys a used model then they might prefer to do it at home especially because of budget issues.

My iPhone's battery health has been stuck at 83% for nearly 15 months. It was only 9 months old (purchased brand new) when it reached 83%. Apple will not replace with Applecare unless it is below 80%. Something doesn't add up there.

Let me guess...fast charging?

Don't do it. Ruins batteries.

>better water resistance/proofing/reduced engineering cost

This is a myth. Look at the Samsung Galaxy S5 (IP67) & Sony XP10 (IP68). (Yeah, I'm a big Louis Rossmann fan; I learned this from his videos.)

Even if it were true, are you telling me Apple couldn't engineer a solution to the problem and turn it into a key marketing element boasting their innovation?

> free with applecare

So about $200 depending on what model you have then? I pay for AppleCare+ for my iPhone 11 (mostly because I like not using a case) and it's not free.

Don't you pay a subscription for applecare? So not exacty free

Waterproofing in terms of actually being able to use the phone under water or not breaking when it falls into water (i.e. it will switch itself off when submerged and after it dried it will work again)?

I had an Android phone from Motorola (that cost $10) that could be fully submerged. The seal mechanism was bulky and the phone was hot garbage.

For me, battery life for days in airplane mode is good enough if it means never worrying about liquid

There is a technology called “rubber o-rings” that has allowed for waterproof/resistant user replaceable battery designs in cell phones since they came out.

And paid how much for Applecare over the 3-4 years?

Nothing wrong with that, it's a mature platform. Features for features sake isn't very interesting either. Besides maybe the price I'm happy with small refinements, as I dont need a new phone every year, my iPhone 14 Pro is 100% as useful as it was last year and is extremely rugged, I'm sure it will last another year+ absent a bad accident.

A slightly faster CPU+slightly better battery+slightly better screen(?)+better camera is all I really care about.

Not like any of us are having performance issues with the last few models for 99%+ of use-cases. Software is extremely stable too.

1. ability to begin capturing 3d video for the devices of tomorrow to render is a sea change. I want as much as my video as possible to be captured this way, starting today. Can't reshoot the past

2. dedicated hardware button for programatic software execution is fantastic

3. wearable turning your fingers into a button allowing execution from simply moving your fingers is insanely cool

These three things alone are more exciting than anything I've seen in a while. All in all, great ideas that are absolutely pushing the envelope of how we interact with these devices. Love to see it.

I'm sorry, man. This is Stockholm Syndrome.

The 3d capture and the wearable finger thing could have been a software update.

The dedicated button is just bollocks. You lose the visual indicator of silence, which was a great thing.

I'll take one click activation of any software script humans can dream up and string together via shortcuts.

You can keep that reminder of whether you muted your phone.

:)

its not that they're running out of ideas. It's just as good as it can ever get, period. I mean the paper clip came out 100 years ago and you don't see 15 versions of that. Every device reaches a point after which it's way more than good enough.

personally, I'd only like to see them get cheaper and maybe longer product life ( i hate replacing everything after just 7 or 8 years).

It is strange to see that sentiment on HN, given the context: this is what commonly happens to mainstream tech.

The desktop PC has been in that boring mode for 15 years or more now. With small, incremental improvements, if you're lucky.

DDR5 instead of DDR4. A 4tb HD instead of a 1tb HD. A faster SSD. A 25% faster processor. etc

personally, i'd like to see big tech get into new areas that actually matter. It only takes a quick look at maslow's hiearchy of needs to get good ideas: take a look at that lowest tier (shelter, food, water, medical), that's where over 60% of consumer spending goes in a developed country, considerably more for the latest generation (now in their 20s). And in poor countries, the lowest tier is like 99% of their spending.

"Running out of ideas" isn't how I'd characterize it.

I'd put it this way: the device (ie a phone) is now a fully-developed mature product and platform. It browses the Web, runs apps, takes photos/video and plays music/video.

Phones pursued the largest possible screen, first by removing the home button (which, to this day, I still hate and I find gesture replacements to be inferior and inconsistent eg swiping up depends on orientation) and then with the "notch". We lost Touch ID (which I vastly prefer) for Face ID, which is pretty much the sole cause of "iPhone is unavailable for 27 minutes" when the phone sits in your pocket. There are lots of threads all over the Internet about this.

So what Apple (and Samsung) now do is fight commodification, which will lower prices. Forced obsolescence, phones the only really last 2-4 years, incremental component upgrades, sleek materials and a moat of app availability (ie Android vs iOS).

There's really no reason a fully-featured phone should still cost $1000+.

Let's hope more companies to run out of ideas and put the focus on environmental impact.

At some point every product category become functionally feature complete.

The price increase signs to me that they expect people to upgrade less often.

There is NO dirth of ideas. I was hoping for duel screen, full satellite communication, 48hr battery, 3D audio/video/photos etc. These are the things that are very challenging to get right and I think only Apple can make it happen in a way to make mainstream. But nothing came through.

They allow bi-directional satellite communication with rescue team, 29 hours of continuous video playback, just announced 3d photos coming later this year.

Sounds like they are pretty close to what you are hoping for.

There are "3D photos" exposed through apps like Polycam. The model building is an OS framework though.

"What losers, they didn't even change the world this year!"

That's unkind. The forward extrapolation is unkind and untrue: Generative Siri and AR are clearly in the pipeline. You can see the infrastructure if you look.

It may be worth forcing replaceable batteries with legislation, but I'm inclined to wait until after AR settles to do it, since executing on AR will involve pushing the limits of what's possible with battery/display/compute tech.

Remember those memes of people looking down at phones and running into telephone poles / glass / wet concrete? Those will come back once there's a good alternative.

> That's unkind.

Apple has a 2.75 trillion dollar market cap. You don't need to feel sorry for them. At their valuation and multiple they better damn well be delivering the most amazing stuff you've ever seen on a regular basis.

No one says that they have to release new phones every 12 months though.

It's a hedge against the degrading performance of software. There's definitely some feeling of "your phone can only be so old before it functions incredibly slowly", no matter how it feels at launch.

But why shouldn’t they? Incremental upgrades are great for both Apple and the consumer as long as Apple supports their old hardware (which they do better than just about anyone)

I guess I deserved that. I will agree that iPhones are incredible and that we're a spoiled bunch. But still from a iteration point of view, this one was historically underwhelming.

Which might indeed mean some longer running projects weren't ready yet and the next edition is better. I think generative AI is coming.

I guess what I'm looking for is purpose and meaning.

"Titanium is harder" Well, so what? I don't use my phone as a hammer.

"We made up a name for a core and added more of them" Yes? And what does that do? Will this enable new software? Or just run it slightly faster? And whilst that is a good thing, if everything is near-instant already, what does that bring?

> Generative Siri and AR are clearly in the pipeline. You can see the infrastructure if you look.

You mean the M1 chip on iPad Pros wasn’t enough, but the A17 Pro on the new iPhone 15 pro is the “infrastructure” for better Siri? But wait, they’re not announcing that yet, so maybe we need the A18?

> Generative Siri

LLM's that are actually good are about a year old now. I'm surprised that wasn't enough time for them to get them into Siri.

Thanks for this. I just bought a Watch Ultra two weeks ago, so wondered if I had missed out not waiting for this announcement. I can't see that the Ultra 2 offers anything new. Battery life, form factor, feature set - I'm at a loss to identify anything meaningful that has even changed let alone improved.

Not fair I think... in a world where most companies produce profits without a single care for the world we live in, I welcome a company like Apple that has shown a path to a better future in some areas. They still have a long way to go I think... but advancements like that are also advancements.

What can one expect when the majority of people that are employed by a particular company share the same values?

How can there be any innovation with group think and a small minority of decision makers insulated in their bubbles from the rest of the world and simultaneously need the share price to stay stable?

There's no ideas, there's nothing else to improve here. We don't need nothing new in phones for several years now. Except maybe more battery life, but it is out of Apple's control.

I am writing this from 5 years old Android phone, and all I really need now is a fresh battery.

You don't think usb-c is a bold and incredible new enhancement to the iPhone?

I once met an Apple engineer at the first iphone centric WWDC, they told me... in quotes, but not a quote- "the products that wow people are the ones that steve uses himself, if steve doesnt us it, its shows"

It took literally 7 seconds to put in the cover correctly, and if you got the warning all you had to do was press on a bit more.

The Galaxy S5 Neo did not have any flaps over the ports.

And out of the 130 million phones that Apple sells a year, what are the chances that you think someone will do it wrong, a connector will break, etc and you will hear sone more hysteria about it or another *gate?

And what could possibly go wrong after a couple of years with this design?

https://www.androidcentral.com/samsung-galaxy-s5-mini-review

> The plastic battery door still has a rubbery seal on the inside, so you'll want to make sure it's securely snapped on each time you replace it. (And yes, the phone still reminds you to do this each time you start it up.)

I said S5 Neo, not S5 mini. Thr link you sent is completely unrelated.

I've had an S5 Neo for years and had iPhones as well. It was a completely fool proof design. The worst thing you could have done was break the back cover, which no one did, and that's a 5$ fix. It's a non issue, and no one would have complained if Apple did it.

And the S5 sold only 15% less than the iPhone.

Well, not anymore. You can now take a wide landscape shot of some beautiful scenery, and then go home and sit on a couch all by yourself to look at it with a VisionPro. Allegedly, it's impressive, almost like you were there ;)

If I have to believe several recent articles, there's an interesting gender imbalance as well. Whereas young women are making spectacular gains in higher education (in numbers, scores, degrees), young men are not going to college at all, do go but drop out or they under-perform in comparison.

If you brush aside male-dominated studies like tech, the new baseline is 60-40 female/male. Not even that because some are already affirming men, without the correction it could easily be 70-30 and there's a case known of 80-20.

In part this is due to old reasons (men going into trades) but also for new reasons (men preferring to benefit of a decent economy) as well as some men just staying home and playing video games.

This growing female dominance has a lot of interesting side effects, many not particularly positive. Life on campus is different as it comes to dating/romance/sex. The men tend to not commit to anything as they are in a luxury position. Whilst surely a good time for the men, this destroys any hope of genuine intimacy and scars women for the rest of their lives into thinking that all men are trash.

To men, female dominance is bad in the sense that there's a lack of male role models. They possibly had none at home, then again none in early education (90% female teachers and growing), and then very few in higher education.

Recent cultural orthodoxy (excessive safetyism, "woke-ism", mob justice) is also a somewhat feminine invention that is unappealing to (some) men. Which leads to an ever-growing political gap between men and women.

I'm honestly shocked at how high property tax in the US is.

I'm from the Netherlands, where property tax is based on the municipality. A 400K home where I live amounts to 423€ in yearly property tax. Rate increases over time are capped. And there's many ways to protest against the market value the taxation is based on.

I suppose the basis for this relatively low taxation is that a huge amount of home owners here have a relatively valuable home (even the simplest of homes is expensive) whilst having a fairly moderate to low income.

If property tax would be 10x as your example suggests, I'd suspect 75% would go bankrupt.

I'm sure you mean that in a financial way, but let's not forget about the social aspect.

I'm currently in a phase where the boomers in our family are moving into permanent elderly care, as well as a few that have passed on already. What is striking is their rich support system. Most have several siblings, partners of those siblings, their own children, partners of those children, grandchildren. So there's a relatively large amount of people able to contribute to the care, even if just by doing the occasional visit. If each does a little, that's still plenty for a humane type of care. A lot of this care is done by the women in the family whom in the post-boomer generation still often had the traditional role.

The social care will be dramatically different in the future. Most people have few siblings if any. Few children if any, whom may be less capable to help out as they're busy staying afloat. And most women aren't housewives anymore either.

In other words: you are mostly on your own compared to the current retirees.

Importantly, we should not use this to bash the elderly. Rather we should strive for a world where working two incomes until you're 70 is curtailed. We're over-asking people.