iPhones 17 and the Sugar Water Trap
- Reference: 0179136526
- News link: https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/09/10/1812206/iphones-17-and-the-sugar-water-trap
- Source link:
> Apple, to be fair, isn't selling the same [2]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, [3]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.
[1] https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/25/09/09/1844201/apple-launches-iphone-17-lineup-featuring-ultra-thin-56mm-iphone-air
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sculley#cite_note-23
[3] https://stratechery.com/2025/iphones-17-and-the-sugar-water-trap/
Not innovation at all (Score:3)
Every spec is an incremental improvement ... that's engineering
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
> 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
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"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.
Re: (Score:2)
> 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:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
> Every spec is an incremental improvement ... that's engineering
If only someone would apply that philosophy to space.
I guess its is Scully (Score:2)
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
Of course it's "forced" (Score:2)
Competent "editors" would never have posted it.
Apple is not... (Score:2)
..."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
Re: (Score:3)
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.
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> 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.
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"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.
The 17 Pro Max is a 2021 S21 Ultra from Samsung (Score:2)
Just not competitive with any more recent Android Phone
Re: (Score:3)
> 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.
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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.
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> 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
Re: The 17 Pro Max is a 2021 S21 Ultra from Samsun (Score:2)
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
Re: The 17 Pro Max is a 2021 S21 Ultra from Samsu (Score:1)
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
Re: (Score:2)
> 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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Apple used to be at the forefront (Score:1)
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
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> 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.
Re: (Score:2)
> Mac on the other hand are for coders that havn't [sic] learned linux yet, ...
I used Linux and Solaris for many years, but then MacOS X came out and I switched since it's a BSD-ish environment and all normal Unix software compiles and runs just fine on it. I'd much rather focus on actually coding than doing sys-admin stuff. I gladly let Apple take care of that.
Gadget prices used to decrease, not increase. (Score:5, Interesting)
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: [1]https://www.apple.com/newsroom... [apple.com]
Slashdot discussion of Apple price drop: [2]https://apple.slashdot.org/sto... [slashdot.org]
Pissed off indignant woman suing over it: [3]https://www.wired.com/2007/10/... [wired.com]
Apple apologizing to people who paid the $599: [4]https://www.theguardian.com/bu... [theguardian.com]
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2007/09/05Apple-Sets-iPhone-Price-at-399-for-this-Holiday-Season/
[2] https://apple.slashdot.org/story/07/09/24/0226204/apple-legend-woz-blasts-iphone-price-drop
[3] https://www.wired.com/2007/10/apple-sued-over/
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2007/sep/07/11
Re: (Score:2)
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.
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There was an exclusive, but there was no carrier subsidy. The price didn't change when the exclusive expired.
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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.
Very niche additions (Score:2)
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 [1]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?
[1] https://www.apple.com/shop/product/HS8B2ZM/A/blackmagic-camera-prodock
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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.
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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.
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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? (Score:2)
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?! (Score:2)
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?
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Yes.
If your last bowel movement didn't change the world, you must have done it wrong.
Bullshit analysis (Score:2)
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.
No innovation (Score:1)
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.
It means what it usually does on /. (Score:2)
Usual msmash trash self-evidently intended to prevent Slashdot ever rising to its old importance.
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot has always posted weird stuff from tech analysts. It's good for the point and laugh comment count.
Re:OK Shakespear (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know, but there is a link to a citation on an Wikipedia article about some guy named John Sculley, who apparently used to work in marketing at Pepsi until Steve Jobs recruited him.
There is a in the article from Steve Jobs: "do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?"
I guess it was meant as a disparaging remark for selling a commodity whereas selling Apple products is a "higher calling." Not sure what the "trap" is though. I guess if you sell enough world-changing products, they eventually become as commonplace as sugar water.
Re: OK Shakespear (Score:2)
I think the intent was disparaging pepsi as bad for kids. Stratechery seems tonhave missed the how badly smart phones and messing up kids with the attention economy and mobile games that weaponize human psychology. At least Pepsi had a diet option that didn't rot your teeth.
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> What's "sugar water" mean in this context?
Poking fun at the soda pop industry. Though in all honesty, new smartphones are fast approaching the same level of innovation as soda. It's all the same shit, with slightly different packaging. Specs may change, but it doesn't change the fundamental use-cases. We've been well past what the average user needs for a smartphone for quite a will now, and no amount of spec-changes are going to really move the needle on what we need. Maybe what the edge-cases *want* could change, but nobody's pushing modern smart
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> Smartphones are becoming a commodity. Which makes it especially funny that they've become so damned expensive.
Actually, the original iPhone's launch price of $499 isn't far off from the iPhone 17's price of $799 once you adjust for inflation. Granted, the original iPhone did get a substantial price cut early on, but that's because people weren't used to paying so much for a cell phone at the time.
Of course, nowadays the price just gets chopped up into monthly payments with carrier financing.
Re: OK Shakespear (Score:1)
If you consider the number of days you end up using the phone in its lifetime.. you are probably paying about 50c a day for it.. seems like a good deal
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The thing is the quality of your phones modem makes a huge difference which I found out buying a cheap Motorola with the media tek chipset only to have to replace it with a pricey OnePlus that had a newer Qualcomm chipset. The difference in signal quality and just plain usability is night and day in the same places and obviously the same network.
I'm here on T-Mobile though so maybe it's less of an issue on Verizon and at&t. I have generally heard they get much better service it's just they also cost
Re: (Score:2)
If you follow the link, it goes to Wikipedia that goes to a transcript from a PBS show where "sugar water" is mentioned once. As best I can tell it's a metaphor for uninteresting, uninspiring products that don't change but that people keep buying (i.e. Pepsi/Coke).
And let's be real, this whole article is intellectual masturbation from a dude that just writes about tech to people that care about tech (so, us the Slashdot crowd). Most people irl don't give a shit about innovation other than "does it make my
Re:OK Shakespear (Score:4, Insightful)
Go to the grocery store and go to the isle of sugar water drinks.
Lots of different flavors of sugar water. All the same except for the flavor and color.
Smartphones are the same.
Lots of different flavors of smartphones. They all do pretty much the same thing with slightly different specs.
The main difference is the degree of hype and fanboi loyalty.
Sugar water.