I don't know, their whole product announcements since they went the way of the pre-recorded ones seem like exactly the type of company they would smash in their 1984 commercial. Feels over-produced-airburshed-perfectly-rendered-ai-generated souless evil corporation trying to pretend to be good, completely disconnected from the real world, but that's just me, and I am deeply into their ecosystem.
It's really interesting to go back to some of the old Stevenotes and compare. They have a soul to them that's just not there with these newer pre-recorded ones. They were still polished like crazy, but there's this feeling of spontaneity and risk. At the very least, he had to stop and wait for applause and laughter. And there was this sense that they had something to prove. Now, of course the new thing is slick, easy to use, integrates with all your other Apple stuff. It's a sales pitch. Look at the original iPhone announcement and it feels like half of it is convincing the audience that, yes, this thing is actually real, we actually built this, it really does work.
Its the reality distortion field. (this term comes from the register)
The original iphone was full of tradeoffs that made it not a great phone at launch. It had no apps, it had no copy paste, it had no 3g, it had no flash.
The browser was good (apart from the lack of flash) and the touch screen was good. The big reason why it became a behemoth is that it had great music support, and it was fashionable.
The apps, and the thing that actually drove it to monster success only really happened because the public gave them the benefit of the doubt (and developers changed their products to fit)
> Its the reality distortion field. (this term comes from the register)
It actually comes right from Apple. Andy Hertzfeld, an early Apple employee, has claimed it was originally said in 1981 by another employee, Bud Tribble, to describe Steve Jobs. It was supposedly a reference to Star Trek.
> The original iphone was full of tradeoffs that made it not a great phone at launch.
Hard disagree. It was a great phone. The only disadvantage was battery life, if you were a heavy phone user you needed to charge it to get through the day, but as a phone itself (phoning/messaging people) it was delightful!
Look at the clip here of Steve scrolling through contacts like it is butter and the awe of the audience: On other phones large contact lists were cumbersome.
Than visual voicemail! On other phones you called into voicemail and had to hear sequentially through all. With At&t Apple had the unique feature that one can scroll selectively through voice mails.
Of course the second iPhone 3G with the wjooshing sounding light saber app and the app were a beer is poured out made it cultural viral. And then Apple noticed withe the 4/4S that a good camera in your pocket was THE must have killer feature (especially for the women and newborn parent demographics). But the first model was a great tool for just phoning people.
The capacitive multitouch screen and the software/gestures to go with it was what made the iPhone a success. All the other feature phones of the time were so much less pleasant to use - I had one, the Nokia N95. On paper it destroyed an iPhone. In practice, it was clunky and annoying to use.
If what you said was true then all the other companies in existence at that time Microsoft, Blackberry, Palm and Nokia should’ve been able to easily answer the challenge and kick Apple to the curb but they could not because they were so far behind…
The area where all the other existing foldable phones are dead in the water is the OS software integration with the hardware and unlike the first time around, they are competing with Apple that has four other ecosystems that can interface with the new phone seamlessly.
And more importantly, all the developers who bothered to follow most of the rules will have most of their stuff running on that new phone on day one.
The original iPhone was amazing to use. Yes on paper the Nokia destroyed it, as my roommate thoroughly tried to convince me, but browsing the web with multitouch was a revelation and just made the Nokia feel like an archaic tool.
The new phone OS destroyed them along with a few features integrated into the original iPhone all the existing companies were caught completelyflat footed and they spent the next three years debating on what they should do and by then it was too late.
The only reason Google and Android took off? Well it didn’t hurt to have a mole/spy Eric Schmidt on the Apple board.
I agree. The demos were great. They really showed off how things you already do today are "better" on two screens. This is in contrast to the Vision Pro where the demos were of things that were neat but I can't see myself needing (watching 3D captures, watching a big virtual cinema screen).
I think this will be a hit, but the $2k is a bit much for me to even consider getting one. Obviously they'll likely drop that price over time.
Samsung is dead in the water. They cannot compete with the operating system or the four other Apple ecosystems that this new phone will integrate with seamlessly. That being said this new iPhone is probably in a 5% at most niche market within the overall iPhone market.
It's interesting that unit sales as a metric was there from the beginning of this kind of discussions (which company is more successful) - and is still in use.
It had not hurt Apple to not have the most unit sold in the past while taking most of the money.
I imagine that the $2000 Samsung Phone has a healthy margin and makes money insofar it's not great for them that apple enters this segment of the market.
But of course you are right: Samsung is of course not dead in the water. But it's obvious that it already lost in regard to mindshare (exemplified by the number of comments here).
The Apple Vision Pro was a rare early entry into a field. Usually they wait until the technology is established and the userbase is just starting to take off, as is currently the case with folding phone displays.
Samsung has already worked out the major kinks for folding displays, over dozens of products used by multiple phone manufacturers including themselves, and Android has worked out how to handle the various use cases between the outer screen and inner screen, when closed, open, or partially open, so Apple can pull from the current state of the art and launch with a more fully developed product, as they usually did before the Apple Vision Pro.
Yeah, I wish they would go back to live, or at least parts of it live. They did a great job during the pandemic but it has lost some humanity and authenticity.
I remember the presentation of the first iPhone and the extreme contrast of Steve Jobs to the representative of the cellular provider. Scroll to 1:11 and see for yourself:
Live resizing apps and dealing with apps that don't have a specified new design for the unfolded screen size is one of the big hurdles for folding phones that's new to the Duo for Apple so it remains to be seen how well that works for random apps.
It'll be interesting to see how many/how quickly apps adopt the UI that lets you make the most of the foldable screen. If it doesn't sell in big numbers app developers might not feel the need to and the user experience will be subpar. ...but I suspect it will.
> It'll be interesting to see how many/how quickly apps adopt the UI that lets you make the most of the foldable screen.
For iOS 27, apps are automatically automatically opted in to resizability. Apple was clear at WWDC that apps need to dynamically adjust to any available scene size at runtime, not just for iPhone Duo, but also for iPad windowing and iPhone Mirroring on Mac. There may be a grace period, but Apple hasn't shared one AFAIK.
Admittedly, software that's influenced by the iPad and iPhone, so there is new software, but it's not that new. Multitasking in iOS has been a thing for a while (iPad).
I'm not trying to discount the efforts involved here, just pointing out that they aren't starting from scratch. And much of the required features to support a dual-screen (triple-?) phone has been in the works for a while.
The marketing pilled postures seem to have been toned down a bit.
I wish they would stop changing speakers every other sentence though. I swear drone cameras were the worst thing to happen to video, I'm gettin seasick over here!
> I wish they would stop changing speakers every other sentence though
Apple employees get to claim very little ownership over their work (even in the context of a large tech company), so having all those speaker slots is one way they can provide that ego boost that is so crucial for long term employee morale & retention
I wish they'd just give them more equity so we can go back to being able to actually name all of the people in one of these videos.
It's also probably better for Apple to lose the immature egoist weirdos as managers because there were thousands of employees involved in shipping all of the stuff unveiled today who didnt get their 5 seconds in the spotlight either, and I don't see any of them crying about it.
Emphatic gestures are one thing and descriptive gestures are another. But gesturing for the sake of gesturing is the irritating part.
You see it a lot on YouTube videos where people are talking to the camera and they're waving their hands around all over the place and pointing for no discernible reason. It doesn't change the information they're presenting, nor does it add to it. In fact, it just distracts you with someone waving their hands around.
So the same applies to presentations from a company. If you watched two people talking in a park, you wouldn't see this many gestures.
Foldable phone experience is already past "interesting and fun" use cases to practical and useful day to day. Samsung Fold for American market and the various Chinese manufacturers in China proves that.
AR/VR market on the other hand is still way more niche than practical uses on a day to day.
Maybe not $2k fun + inherent risk with buying the first generation of an Apple product particularly after the Apple Vision Pro, but still.