Misinformed take IMO.
M-series chips are insanely cool (literally and figuratively) and have no competition even five years in. Same with the W-series SoCs on watches.
Are there any third-party haptic vibration motors yet?
Shoot, even their trackpads, which already stood alone, have gotten _better_ over the years.
Nobody else will have their own vertically-integrated modem out in production. This will make budget iPhones (maybe all iPhones) so much cheaper once they show Qualcomm the door.
That's before the advances they've made in software, like their camera processing pipeline (which only gets better; their video stack still has no equal) and differential privacy.
Oh, yeah, and the Vision Pro, which basically everyone who has tried it has said that it is the most advanced technology they've ever used.
Almost all of this happened under Cook's tenure.
Apple is still in the business of building insanely cool shit.
Vertically-integrated modems are not cool. I mean, they are to me and likely other geeks, but to the general public? Their eyes would glaze over.
Cool is the kind of thing people envy. It's the kind of product that gets namedropped in a music video.
You’re not thinking two or three orders out. It’s not about the modem, it’s about reducing the resource allocation of a boring component to make space for increasing the resources of other exciting components, taking the whole into account.
iPhone will get some new exciting feature and everyone will wonder how they managed to do it at the price point nobody else can.
Name some "new exciting features" iPhones gained in the last 5 years that made their way into music videos like the iPod did
I’m excited to shoot my own music videos with my iPhone now.
Last weekend my grade school friend visited and we took a boat out on Puget Sound. We followed two orca whales for 45 minutes and I shot multiple videos of them in 4k 60fps. They look beautiful and played seamlessly on my TV without any crappy ads. I shared them with our two families easily through airdrop and later through iCloud when we got back to land.
That evening my son was dancing and signing he favorite songs with my friend’s son so I shot a “music video” of them and shared it again.
Both these experiences were exciting to me. It felt insane to do such things with a pocket computer Apple hasn’t screwed up in nearly 20 years.
Like I said, it’s the whole product experience that’s the point. Apple has earned enough of my trust to believe one will come and even if not, I’m satisfied with what I have today and will have tomorrow.
I think we have different definitions of cool
Life would be rather boring if we didn’t.
Memojis and Oscar-winning movies shot entirely on iPhone
Vertical integration is what got us fanless laptops with amazing battery life. Those are cool.
Apple thinks/knows/gambles increasing vertical integration by building its own modems will make things even better.
> their own vertically-integrated modem
I'm kinda jazzed about this.
Integration, power, and UX improvements, sure.
But (as a noob), I imagine having their own base band (?) chip will be like having built-in software defined radios. Opening up new applications and uses cases.
You talk like a nerd.
Cool is a vibe, not tech specs and little things. It's a whole aura.
Apple is not cool.
Agree. There are probably more than a million tiny contextual data points that make a person look at something (whether it’s a tech product or a musician) and go: “cool, man.”
But those millions of data points can (rarely, briefly,) coalesce around a product or company, even though that’s mostly out of the control of those building the product or company.
EG if you asked someone in 1965 if a Jaguar E-Type was cool, or someone in 2000s London whether the Fruityloops DAW was cool, they’d say “yeah”.
I’m mostly agreeing, and it’s a super minor point, but tech specs are part of the unknowable, constantly-shifting constellation of symbols that produce “cool”, and there isn’t a reason an Apple product couldn’t, in the future, align the stars. They did before! The white iPod earbud wire did, briefly, signify cool.
> Apple is not cool.
Says who, exactly? It is very cool for most.
Doesn't make those achievements any less cool to me