Thursday's reveal of new MacBooks was so lackluster I am rethinking my loyalty to Apple. The Apple platform has always been the most productive platform for me. But other firms seem to be innovating and iterating on things quicker than Apple has: rumor has it that Apple will more or less copy the edge-to-edge display of Chinese handsets or the rounded edges of the S7 Edge, wtf, what happened to doing really bold things that nobody else has, or can? I guess we might have just hit peak-phone handset. In any case Apple wants to push into the enterprise but won't make a surface like device (what the iPad Pro should have been). Oh well. OS X is still the killer feature for me so I will remain securely on Apple and I'm not leaving my iPhone for any other handset but this is still very disconcerting.
> I guess we might have just hit peak-phone handset.
This is what happens in mature product segments. The first iPhone was released 9 years ago, and that was the last real revolution -- a smartphone whose front was pretty much all screen. Everything Apple and everyone else has done since then has been incremental -- better screens, larger screens, better cameras, faster processors, thinner chassis -- but definitely the same paradigm.
The same thing happened to laptops before that. Some of the older laptops had pretty odd and uncomfortable designs. Sometime in the 90s, everyone standardized on the clamshell laptop with a 4:3 screen (later moving to widescreen), a low-profile keyboard, and a central trackpad below that. If you compare a 20-year-old laptop to a new one, you'll see the same incremental changes that happened to phones -- larger, better screens, faster processors, thinner chassis.
I think the bottom line is that the smartphone market has become as mature and predictable as the laptop market.
> Sometime in the 90s, everyone standardized on the clamshell laptop with a 4:3 screen (later moving to widescreen)
How did that happen? It used to be that a normal laptop had a 4:3 screen and a ridiculous, huge laptop had a huge, 16:10 screen. Now both of those are gone, and normal laptops have even shorter 16:9 (!) screens. It's hard to think of a more user-hostile progression. I don't want to work in a series of cramped side-by-side windows. I want a screen that can display more than one paragraph of text at once.
> Things like touchId were amazing features in their own right though.
Touch ID is cool and all, but in 2016 calling it "amazing" is a bit of a stretch. ThinkPads first got a fingerprint reader more than a decade ago: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/37017.html
So what? The technology doesn't matter -- what matters is the implementation of the technology as a user-friendly feature. Apple did it better, as they often do in these cases.
As a feature, the Thinkpad fingerprint readers kind of sucked. All you could do is log into Windows with them, if you had the Thinkpad crapware installed. They weren't very reliable, either. I had one, and I gave up on using it after a while because typing my password was faster than attempting to use the fingerprint reader several times, then giving up and typing my password anyway.
Touch ID is built in to iOS. You can use it to unlock the phone, and to authenticate yourself for various Apple applications like the App Store and Apple Pay. There are also APIs for third-party applications to accept Touch ID instead of passwords, if the user wants to do that. It is fast and generally reliable. It's light years ahead of the fingerprint reader on the Thinkpads.
>what happened to doing really bold things that nobody else has, or can?
This mentality is what resulted in them shipping what is essentially a portable media player that doesn't allow you to plug almost every pair of headphones that has been manufactured in the last 30+ years into it.
