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iPhones 17 and the Sugar Water Trap 81

Posted by msmash from the state-of-affairs dept.
Analyst Ben Thompson, commenting on Apple's outlook following the launch of the iPhone 17 lineup: Apple, to be fair, isn't selling the same sugar water year-after-year in a zero sum war with other sugar water companies. Their sugar water is getting better, and I think this year's seasonal concoction is particularly tasty. What is inescapable, however, is that while the company does still make new products -- I definitely plan on getting new AirPod Pro 3s! -- the company has, in the pursuit of easy profits, constrained the space in which it innovates.

That didn't matter for a long time: smartphones were the center of innovation, and Apple was consequently the center of the tech universe. Now, however, Apple is increasingly on the periphery, and I think that, more than anything, is what bums people out: no, Apple may not be a sugar water purveyor, but they are farther than they have been in years from changing the world.
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iPhones 17 and the Sugar Water Trap More

iPhones 17 and the Sugar Water Trap

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  • Every spec is an incremental improvement ... that's engineering

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 )
      They used to innovate. Not always being first with a particular feature, but being first to execute it well. And every year there'd be at least one enticing reason to upgrade, even if it was just a better screen or whatever. But lately, the incremental improvements are small, and mostly restricted to the processor (which was already plenty good) or the camera (which for many people does not have to be best in class). I'm still on an iPhone 12 and not planning on replacing it any time soon. Especially s

      • And every year there'd be at least one enticing reason to upgrade, even if it was just a better screen or whatever.

        The base iPhone 17 has a 120hz display now. That actually is kind of a big deal for anyone who doesn't need the rest of the "Pro" feature set. Granted, this has been something of a standard feature in higher-end Android phones for awhile now, but it finally means there's no more "Apple tax" for that buttery smooth scrolling.

        I think Apple isn't making a bigger deal of this because they know how much it has the potential to cannibalize sales of the Pro models. Hell, the entire reason I went with the 15 Pro

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dfghjk ( 711126 )

          "That actually is kind of a big deal for anyone who doesn't need the rest of the "Pro" feature set."

          Except for those who don't care about that either. It's funny how some features may not be important, but not that one. Could not care less about 120Hz.

          • Could not care less about 120Hz.

            The need for a higher refresh rate is a case of fixing a problem that OLED displays created. The older IPS LCD displays had a slight bit of motion blur, which tends to hide the jerkiness of a 60hz screen refresh.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by _merlin ( 160982 )

          My "cheap" Galaxy S23FE has a 120Hz display standard, and it's almost two years old now. I turn it down to 60Hz to save battery. So Apple has added a useless feature that just drains battery faster to their base model over a year after competitors had it on their budget models anyway.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        I just saw someone claiming JK Rowling was the first successful female author. They were properly excoriated in the comments by people who have actually read a book.

        Radically innovative new products every year is not the norm, and innovation in mature product classes normally slows down over time.

    • Every spec is an incremental improvement ... that's engineering

      If only someone would apply that philosophy to space.

  • I guess the sugar water thing is a reference to Scully having been CEO at Pepsi and than latter apple during its struggling period. Trying to make some claim about phones being marketed increasingly as consumable products rather than hardgoods and...

    The whole thing is really forced and seems like a writer who had a few to many convinced themselves they had a good idea for an article, wrote half of it, probably realized it was crap the next day, but figured they could clean it up drive a few clicks with it

  • Apple is not... (Score:3, Informative)

    by MpVpRb ( 1423381 ) on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @02:24PM (#65651390)

    ..."the center of the tech universe"
    They're a fashion company that sells trendy, unrepairable, throwaway devices and expects their fanbois to buy a new device whenever it's announced. They also want the old devices to end up in the trash.
    They oppose right to repair and threaten independent repair shops

    • And despite that, everyone slavishly copies their phones and their UIs, for better or worse.

      It doesn't matter if you think they're bad or not, the claim that they're the centre of the tech universe has been objectively true for years. Where Apple goes, others follow.

      Are we starting to see that fade a little? Maybe. Nothing that you said was a counterpoint to what you quoted, it was just stuff to (rightly) be angry about.

      • everyone slavishly copies their phones and their UIs, for better or worse.

        And that's why all of our devices use thunderbolt cables and connectors while USB went the way of the dinosaur.

        • Apple's phones never used thunderbolt. If you're talking about lightning, you'll note that before Apple made a cable where it was impossible to plug it in upside down, Android phones used micro-USB, one of the worst interface standards. There has been some talk that Apple itself was the progenitor of USB-C and they gave it to the USB standards consortium, but I've never been able to verify that. They WERE on the committee that developed it, though.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        "And despite that, everyone slavishly copies their phones..."

        The iPhone was slavishly copied from smartphones that had existed for a decade by that time. The original iPhone was not even a smartphone, it was a poser that did not offer 3rd party apps. Apple copied everyone else.

        • I mean, you tell yourself that if you want, I guess, but there are two eras: pre iPhone and post iPhone, and the Android phones before the iPhone did NOT look like a modern smartphone. That was Apple. And Samsung and various Chinese brands still copy Apple to this day.

          It's really just a fact, though you can cover your eyes and wish it weren't so, if you want.

    • ..."the center of the tech universe"
      They're a fashion company that sells trendy, unrepairable, throwaway devices and expects their fanbois to buy a new device whenever it's announced. They also want the old devices to end up in the trash.
      They oppose right to repair and threaten independent repair shops

      Informative?!?

      Not even close to accurate:

      https://support.apple.com/self... [apple.com]

  • Just not competitive with any more recent Android Phone

    • Just not competitive with any more recent Android Phone

      To be honest, I don't know enough about what Samsung offers in the phone area, but their appliances are total and complete garbage, and I'm no fan of their "smart" monitors or TVs, either.

      I am glad there are competitors in the market that offer a compelling alternative, though. It's never good for an area to be dominated by one player, and it's good for Apple (and Samsung) to have healthy competition.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        Yeah but lets also recognize that Android SUCKS, it SUCKS hard.

        You need a lot better hardware to deliver the same experience, on Android, especially in terms of memory.

        • You need a lot better hardware to deliver the same experience, on Android, especially in terms of memory.

          Android phones priced in the same realm of Apple's offerings generally do have adequate hardware specs to run Android well. My main gripe about Android is that Google is still sitting there in the background, hoovering up every bit of information they can, in order to sell their ads.

          If someone doesn't mind that their mobile OS vendor is actually an advertising company, well, that's their choice. It's just odd to see how many people are okay with this even after dropping a significant chunk of change on a

        • You suck. You're not pushing back on the notion that a 4 year old Samsung kicks A17 ass, and the only difference is memory?

          Describe in words the magical experience you speak of.

          Signed
          A guy who will give you a wedgie and shove you in a locker if you have a iPhone
          • Comparison with S24 Ultra Single-core performance: The A17 Pro leads by a substantial marginâ"roughly 35â"40%, which directly impacts general tasks, app responsiveness, and user-perceived snappiness. â Multi-core performance: The A17 Pro still holds an edge of around ~10%, though the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is strong in workloads that can efficiently use its eight cores. â Graphics & AI: A17 Proâ(TM)s custom GPU supports advanced features like ray-tracing. Its NPU delivers top-tier

          • A guy who will give you a wedgie and shove you in a locker if you have a iPhone

            I wrote this from a locker, you insensitive dolt! (And my underwear is pre-wedgied, so take that!)

            To each their own, but you can have my iPhone when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

            • ha ha, sorry about that chap :-)
              Let me open that now....

              I get that people have preferences, and they are mostly irrational.
              I'd also admit that tech specs aren't really that important once all specs pass usable minimums.
              While I generally take the time to make fun of Apple announcements, If you want to punch down I want to hear the reasons.
              I've got mine lined up, it's a very old list, from when I worked with a bunch of Apple Adherants, and it hasn't changed much over 30 years.
              I've always wondered why people w
              • Wow, it's like a whole new world out here! So sunny and so much space to move my arms.

                I was a long-time PC user and my first smartphone was an Android (I held onto my flip phone for a long time, so it wasn't an early-adopter Android model). I loved that I could open up my PC and add new memory, change the hard drive, put in additional Blu-ray burners and bays, etc. without buying a new machine. I still have a PC tower that runs Windows 10 that I bought in 2012 that still surfs the web, opens email, burns
                • lol... there's probably some in the science lab....

                  I hear you about the privacy issues, it's, umm, my hobby horse.
                  However, because of Snowden, me and the Tinfoil crowd, don't believe for 1 microsecond that Apple "repects" or upholds actual privacy.
                  The Terms of Service are a legal wonderland of baffegab.
                  In the end, Apple will conform to American laws, and that means, they claim rights of inspection to anything.
                  Also, as far as any encryption, they hold the keys, so, therefore, they can do what they want.

                  I've

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Dixie_Flatline ( 5077 )

      1. That's not true
      2. You'll have to back that up better

      Whether you like Apple or not, the SoC is still the most powerful one on the market, the cameras are still excellent (and better than 2021 cameras from any manufacturer), the video is still better than anyone else (and has been basically forever).

      Like, there are plenty of reasons to not want an iPhone and I could name a bunch if you wanted, but this is a stupid comment that completely ignores reality.

  • Every year there was something exciting with Apple or a significant improvement until recently. Phone differentiation is basically zero and Apple's biggest advantages now are customer lock-in and force to use the app store. When it comes to innovative products and big tech release events Tesla has now taken the top spot with real 'first of its kind' tech like steer by wire for cars, electric semi's, cars and vans without steering wheels, personal self-driving, general purpose robots and solar roofs to name

    • When it comes to innovative products and big tech release events Tesla has now taken the top spot with real 'first of its kind' tech like steer by wire for cars, electric semi's, cars and vans without steering wheels, personal self-driving, general purpose robots and solar roofs to name a few.

      Tesla is in the process of having their lunch eaten by BYD in the rest of the world, and their home market kicked in the balls by both the direct and indirect fallout of Musk's political antics.

      Meanwhile, every Apple release cycle the armchair pundits proclaim their annual "meh", yet Apple still sells boatloads of phones.

  • Gadget prices used to decrease, not increase. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Wednesday September 10, 2025 @02:45PM (#65651470)

    Gadgets are getting more and more expensive, when historically it used to be the reverse. Until the 2010s, we'd see prices of gadgets and electronics drop now they are steadily increasing. I bought 8 megabytes of RAM in 1994 for $400. Yes that's Megabytes with an "M". CD writers were about $2000 at launch and cost $200 within a year or two of that. When the iPhone was released in 2007, it was an "insanely high" $599. People (other than enthusiasts) thought that it was way to expensive so it actually almost started moving into flop territory until Steve Jobs reduced the price to $399 only a couple of months after launch (and yes he pissed off a LOT of people that paid the $599).
    References:
    Apple announcing lowering of price to $399: https://www.apple.com/newsroom... [apple.com]
    Slashdot discussion of Apple price drop: https://apple.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org]
    Pissed off indignant woman suing over it: https://www.wired.com/2007/10/... [wired.com]
    Apple apologizing to people who paid the $599: https://www.theguardian.com/bu... [theguardian.com]

    • That was because the early iphone was exclusive to AT&T and there was a baked-in carrier subsidy with that price. $399 wasn't the true economic price of the phone.

    • Buying on the cutting edge has always been expensive. I remember a particularly well-off classmate bragging that his folks had bought him a brand-new Pentium PC (I'm talking about Intel's first use of that specific branding). The CPU itself would be something like $1.8k in today's dollars. That seems like a lot, but it won't get you far in the Threadripper product line.

      When people say tech prices drop, they mean you get better bang for your buck as time goes on, and even with the iPhone that holds true.

    • It always amuses me how people feel entitled to any price cuts after their purchase, even sue over it, and yet, this never happens when prices go up - nobody sues to pay the higher price because they bought just before the price went up. So many people are just entitled, selfish, and clueless about how a free market works.
      • I don't think you understand how markets work. You don't buy low and buy high. You've got a hallucination in that sentence.
        • I think you're confused about what I said. The way the market works is that each sale happens at a price that the seller and the buyer agree on for that one sale. The next sale is a whole new agreement on the price, between the seller and the buyer (which may or may not be the same buyers). In this case, anyone who bought an iPhone at $599 paid what they agreed to pay and got what they agreed to receive for that price - in other words, the buyer got exactly what they agreed to pay for, at the price they agr
          • Firstly, the stock market is not the iPhone market. The latter is regulated differently from the former, and obeys different rules, they are not comparable. Thus the indignation is justified.

            Secondly, markets always operate on the assumption that participants do not want to pay more, it's an inbuilt assumption that precludes the kind of behavioural symmetry you are invoking in your example. It would be a crazy kind of market if that symmetry was commonplace, for one think it would probably break the theor

            • The stores change prices all the time on all kinds of items. Have you heard of sales, clearances, price increases, or simply the same items offered at very different prices from different stores, no? Pretend Apple in this case just ran a large sale event selling $599 iPhone for $299 - are there indignant people suing stores every time the store runs a sale, is there a surge of lawsuits every Black Friday perhaps?

              I think you're kidding yourself, akin to people who think the government sets prices of all it

  • My video production guys at worked were psyched since they announced the "Final Cut Camera" which is focusing on video production work and the fact that with a Blackmagic dock [apple.com] you can sync your iPhone camera to a genlock signal and timecode and then dump out HDMI to a video recorder, which is neat for a certain crowd but that's like dozens or hundreds that would utilize that.

    It makes hype I guess that movies are "filmed on iPhones" but is that really innovating?

    • It's innovation for the Marketing department, and under the current Apple management, that's all that really matters to them. They've long since stepped away from being a tech-first company.

    • It depends on what you mean by 'innovating', I guess. They deliver a lot of functionality for a price that's much lower than dedicated hardware would. Even for small-time creators on tiktok or instagram (or even YouTube), with no modifications, the iPhones pro are probably the best video camera you can get if you can have only one thing. So yes, I guess? They're miles ahead of anyone else with stabilization, video quality and features, and that happens to be pretty useful these days.

      • Absolutely but they've been that option for years now, stabilization was put into the iPhone 6.

        By innovate I mean brought a new function to the medium of phone. To be absolutely fair I think the expectation on them of that is not really a big deal, the slab smartphone as a physical thing is reaching it's limits within our tech, even the fold-ables have yet to catch on, if they ever do. It's just iterating and improving now.

  • Buy, Sell or Hold? People have been saying that Apple has run its course for the last 36 years. But my stock keeps returning 20% annually. Is it finally time to sell or do I just hold on for another 35 years?

  • Must everything "change the world?"

    What happened to making a thing, and making it really well, better than anyone?

    Is there no more merit in that? Is it all a race to the quarterly earnings call?

  • Physics and engineering dictate what can be "innovated" on in a smartphone, not executives in a boardroom. No one else "innovates" any better, unless there's a vast industry wide conspiracy to not compete we've just reached the max a these little glass slabs can do for the moment.
  • I've had 3 company issues iPhones. The last 3, an XR, 13, and 15 were indistinguishable performancewise. I couldn't even physically see a difference between the 13 and 15 other than the charging port. They could have just handed me the same phone year after year and I wouldn't have noticed.

  • Airpods Pro 3 adding support for heart rate monitoring and hypertension alerts are innovations for which Apple should be commended. But what I'm waiting for is multi-point Biometrics -- building a profile of me which requires my face, my pulse, and my fingerprint simultaneously -- to prove I'm there and I'm alive.

  • the company has, in the pursuit of easy profits, constrained the space in which it innovates.

    Quite so. It's been how many years since something really new came out of Cupertino? Granted, Apple is more profitable than ever, but the company clearly shows what the result of placing a supply-chain expert as the CEO does.

    The really sad part is that there's nobody ELSE, either. Microsoft hasn't invented anything ever, Facebook and Google are busy selling our personal data to advertisers, and who else is there who can risk a billion on an innovation that may or may not work out?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tarlus ( 1000874 )

      What innovations do you still want to see?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tom ( 822 )

        If I knew that, I'd be a tech billionaire inventing them.

        The best part of innovations is that they are NOT obvious, but once they are in the world, you can't do without.

  • ... so maybe they'll get that down pat someday, before Huawei steamrollers them. Maybe they can buy a light field imaging startup or two.

  • WTF (Score:2)

    by Shaiku ( 1045292 )

    Apple doesn't sell beverages, this reads like complete nonsense to anyone who isn't already very familiar with the analogy.

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