Because 8 people worldwide own one, and it will stop receiving support shortly, if it hasn't already.
OP doesn't literally mean they haven't made anything, he means that they've made nothing of real substance - which holds true when their biggest recent release is already completely forgotten by the public writ large.
Especially one bound to a future vision they have for computing. Companies are betting way more on a similar future vision with AI than Apple has with Vision.
You're being combative, but it's true. Yes, a new low-effort refresh came out recently. But the product is really going nowhere.
Apple's next Vision product is almost certainly going to be more of a Meta glasses clone leaning more into Apple's fashion pedigree where they've had massive success with the Apple Watch.
But even then, eyewear has the limitation that not everyone is interested in wearing eyewear at all.
We’ll see where it goes, and it may well end up being nowhere, but it’s not currently “dead in the water” when the company is actively refreshing hardware and supporting it.
I’m not being “combative,” I’m correcting obvious exaggerations about the state of the product.
They’ve made plenty of things. I liken them to the Lexus of consumer electronics; expensive for what they are, thoughtfully designed, and conservative in their approach to adopting new trends.
Iphone on your wrist. Most people I know with one have it for two years then once the battery goes they throw it in a drawer and don't buy another one. Most were actually gifted it.
> airpods
They just took the same old earpods they used to give you for free due to ewaste concerns and forced you to buy the disposable bluetooth version if you want to charge your phone and listen to music at the same time.
>homepod
I'm into tech and I'm not sure what this even does. Apple doesn't advertise it at all that's for certain. Its basically a sonos with siri I guess. I know no one with one. I just looked it up. It looks like a chinese air filter, absolutely no signature design language.
>ipad
No one knows why they need one. They get one because there's hype. They use it for three years to look at instagram then its put in a drawer forever. "ipad for education" is a scam/failure; just give kids macbook airs so I don't have to teach new hires what a file is anymore.
All of this is a farcry from the ipod and I feel like apologists like you understand that too.
This sounds like you need to do some homework before derailing the thread. You’re very confidently saying there’s no use for things which millions of people keep buying, so consider the possibility that you might have missed something.
Airpods are by far the best mass-market headphones in existence for apple device owners. The noise cancellation is unparalleled (which is huge if you use public transit or use them in the gym). The audio quality is also among the best you can get for a wireless headphone. This is true of both the Airpods Pros and the Max
Airpods are a joke. Apple killed the headphone jack for no reason, then sold the "solution", and people ate it up. Great business strategy for them to screw their customers for cash, but an abjectly terrible product. They are worse than wired headphones in every way except "they are wireless", which isn't actually a benefit.
> I don't knock it out of my head by having the wire catching on something
> Dealing with the cable and having to pack it back up when I'm done
> It auto connects to both my phone and laptop 99% of the time
> It easily swap between the 2 as I change the focus
Now they aren't perfect, charging can be a bit fiddly over time but they certainly are nicer than the normal headphones. Maybe you just aren't the target audience but clearly they are popular enough for most people.
Bit like marmite, some people love it some people hate it, my wife did not like hers so she got a new gpu instead.
> Airpods
I have used airpods almost every day since they came out including the 1st gen, the pros and the usb-c pros. I will continue to buy them as they are first class experience on iOS
> homepod
didn't even know this existed lol
> ipad
This one is a bit difficult for me. When I was in school I did two years of work using just an IPad, some text books and my Apple Pencil, all my notes were taken on notability and synced with my google cloud AND my iCloud. Any homeworks I could request a PDF copy and fill out easily and submit via email.
Now as a software engineer i really really really really wish that you could program on the IPad (Swift does NOT count) and it was more like a slightly smaller mac, it would crush the laptop market to shreds and nobody would buy a macbook air anymore if that was the case
It sounds like a lot of your opinions are formed within a very niche bubble.
Airpods for example - I see them everywhere, and every person I know that uses them, love them! Especially Airpods Pro 2.
iPad - I think the sales figures speak for themselves. It may not be popular among tech people, given they're used to a desktop environment, but I know many people that use iPads and love them.
Apple Watch, I admit is more of a mixed bag among the people I know and spoken to. But I'd say the majority like it, and have bought another one after their first one gave out/upgraded. Again, the sales figures speak for themselves.
The parent is living in a different reality. They are all hugely popular products, just because he doesn't like them doesn't make it not true. And their introduction made a massive impact. Maybe not on the level of the iPhone but pretty impressive. The vision pro thing is a major flop. Nobody wanted one before it came out and nobody wants or needs one now and it's too expensive. It's a shame, because like e readers they are massively underused as a technology.
TBF, The Vision Pro failed from a sales perspective, no doubt, but after getting a demo at an Apple Store last year, I can see how it is promising tech once they make it a smaller form factor and cheaper.
iPad: i have thousands of music scores on it running ForScore, which I can annotate with an Apple Pencil (the cheap $99 one), I flip pages using a foot controller I built with an ESP32, and I run multiple audio and music apps on it that are extremely useful.
And it just ...works. It sits on my music stand, doesn't call attention to itself, and does the job I ask it too.
Could I do all that with some Android thing? Probably most of it. Truly differentiated tech is rare in the consumer space. It's the experience that counts, and that's what the iPad has.
> I'm into tech and I'm not sure what this even does. Apple doesn't advertise it at all that's for certain. Its basically a sonos with siri I guess. I know no one with one. I just looked it up. It looks like a chinese air filter, absolutely no signature design language.
Ahh, man! I'm a HomePod (mini) fan. I've got 4 of the little things scattered around my house. I use 2 as speakers for my TV, which sounds excellent compared to similarly-priced soundbars. Then, yea, it's got Siri for setting timers in the kitchen, can intercom to other rooms' HomePods, can recognize who's talking to do things like send / read text messages, set reminders, etc. For $99, they're actually incredible little devices.
Hank Green mentioned in passing the other day how ungodly much money Apple is making off of airpods. I still have managed not to get one. But the watch and iPad definitely counts as something after the app store.
Which they didn't really invent the app store either. What they did was break the stranglehold cellphone carriers had on cellphone software, and we should kiss their butts every single week for that. Most people didn't work in mobile prior to the app store and holy shit.
They completely revolutionized laptop processors, were the first to put meaningful health data in watches, and created the first good bluetooth earbuds, but I guess they don't do things anymore.
> They completely revolutionized laptop processors
Tough love: no, they didn't. 99.9% of consumers simply can't detect a performance difference between an M4 Air and a junky Asus box (and what ones can will announce that games run much better on the windows shipwreck!), and while the Air has a huge power delta no one cares because the windows thing still lasts for 6+ hours.
Apple absolutely ran ahead of the industry technically, by a shocking amount. But in a commoditized field that isn't sensitive to quality metrics, that doesn't generate sales.
There's a reason why the iPhone remains the dominant product but macs are stuck at like 9% market share, and it's not the technlogy base that is basically the same between them.
Laptops are done, basically. It's like arguing about brands of kitchen ranges: sure, there are differences, but they all cook just fine.
> Tough love: no, they didn't. 99.9% of consumers simply can't detect a performance difference between an M4 Air and a junky Asus box (and what ones can will announce that games run much better on the windows shipwreck!), and while the Air has a huge power delta no one cares because the windows thing still lasts for 6+ hours.
This wildly, comically untrue in my experience: all of the normal people I know loooooove how fast it is and charging a few times a week. It was only the people who self-identify as PC users who said otherwise, much like the Ford guys who used to say Toyotas were junk rather than admit their preferred brand was facing tough competition.
Your "normal people" are mac owners, and your other group is "PC users". You're measuring the 0.1%! (Which, fine, is probably more like 15% or whatever. Still not a representative sample.) You're likely also only sampling US consumers, or even Californians, and so missing an awful lot of the market.
Again, real normal people can't tell the difference. They don't care. And that's why they aren't buying macs. The clear ground truth is that Macintosh is a lagging brand with poor ROI and no market share growth over more than a decade. The challenge is explaining why this is true despite winning all the technical comparisons and being based on the same hardware stack as the world-beating iOS devices.
My answer is, again, "users don't care because the laptop market is commoditized so they'll pick the value product". You apparently think it's because "users are just too dumb to buy the good stuff". Historically that analysis has tended to kill more companies than it saves.
> Your "normal people" are mac owners, and your other group is "PC users”
No. Remember that Apple sells devices other than Macs: they were all non-IT people who liked their iPhones and figured they’d try a Mac for their next laptop and liked it. One thing to remember is that Windows is a lot less dominant when you’re looking at what people buy themselves as opposed to what an enterprise IT department picked out. There are a ton of kids who start with ChromeOS or iPads, got a console for gaming, and don’t feel any special attraction to Windows since everything they care about works on both.
> You apparently think it's because "users are just too dumb to buy the good stuff".
Huh? Beyond being insulting, this is simply wrong. My position is that people actually do consider fast, silent, and multi-day battery life as desirable. That’s not the only factor in a buying decision, of course, but it seems really weird not to acknowledge it after the entire PC industry has spent years in a panic trying to catch up.
Best I can tell you're arguing that 9% market share by units sold is some kind of failure. Now go look at who has the highest market share by revenue. Hint: it's a fruit company.
This whole take might make sense if Apple didn’t double their laptop market share from like 10% to 20% when the M1 series came out, which actually happened.
That's kind of a weird one because the PC market has notably regressed there over the past few years. Other than the Surface Pro 12 there've been no fanless PC laptops released since 2022-ish, when there used to be dozens.
On a technical basis, fanless PC laptops released now would be better than the ones in 2022 just on the basis of 2022 lineup having a moribund lineup of CPUs (Snapdragon SQ1, Amber Lake, etc.) You could release a lineup now that would be broadly competitive with the M1 at least, but it doesn't seem to be a market segment that PC OEMs are interested in.
Right, so, a K-12 education-oriented PC with an Intel N-series chip, about 1/3 as fast as what you get with an M4 (or worse).
When I asked my snarky question I'm really talking about "fanless laptops that someone would actually want to use and get some serious use out of."
The regression of the PC market is because the PC market didn't see the ARM train coming from a million miles away and just sat there and did nothing. They saw smartphones performing many times more efficiently than PCs and shrugged their arms at it.
Meanwhile, Apple's laptop marketshare has purportedly doubled from 10% to 20% or perhaps even higher since the M1 lineup was released.
I say this as someone who actually moved away from Apple systems to a Linux laptop. Don't get me wrong, modern Intel and AMD systems are actually impressively efficient and can offer somewhat competitive experiences, but the MacBook Air as an every-person's experience is really tough to beat (consider also, you could get a MacBook Air M2 for $650 during the most recent Black Friday sales, and you'd have a really damn hard time finding any sort of PC hardware that's anywhere near as nice, never mind match it on performance/battery life).
Yeah, like we're in agreement about the current state of the market, I just don't think it has to be that way. The Surface Pro 12 is fanless, so presumably anyone else could make a fanless Snapdragon laptop if they wanted to. (My daily driver work laptop is Windows-on-ARM, and most everything works pretty well on it.)
I believe the whole Vivobook Go line is fanless, actually.
But again, the point isn't to get into a shouting match over whose proxied anatomy is largest. It's to try to explain why the market as a whole doesn't move the way you think it should. And it's clearly not about fans.
