For most of the twentieth century, you couldn’t buy a Coca-Cola in the Soviet Union. It was one of the most American things in existence, and like Levi’s and Michael Jackson, the Iron Curtain kept it out.
\nWhen the Iron Curtain finally came down and Coke started pouring in, the apocryphal accounts all say the same thing: what people couldn’t get over wasn’t the taste. It was that the bottle a factory worker in Moscow could finally buy was the exact same bottle the President of the United States drank. That was the whole magic of Coca-Cola. A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money or power could buy you a better one.
\nFor almost twenty years, the iPhone has been like Coke. There have been plenty of different iPhones, small ones and big ones, but when a new one came out, it was always the best iPhone you could buy. That might not be true anymore.
\nYesterday I had drinks with a former colleague after work, and we got on the topic of Apple raising prices. Somewhere in that conversation it hit me: the era of the singular iPhone might be ending.
\nWhen you think about it, humanity doesn’t have a good track record of “everyone can have the same good thing.” The fact that the iPhone has been a relatively stable product for almost 20 years is a bit insane, especially because every other piece of technology ends up fracturing to cash in on every angle it can. The iPhone did that in small ways, but none that ever diluted what the iPhone was.
\nRight now, the differences between iPhone models are largely age based. Old iPhone isn’t as good as new iPhone, sure, but what the device is capable of has been roughly the same thing across each generation.
\nIf some rumors are true, we might have bad iPhone, good enough iPhone, and luxury iPhone. You might think we’ve always had these differentiations (e.g. iPhone 16e, non-pro base models, Pro Max models), but camera bumps and screen sizes are superficial changes. With some of the iOS 27 changes available only with Apple’s most powerful chips, it’s looking like this could be the year where how much you pay for your iPhone might mean you and I have genuinely different experiences of what an iPhone can do.
\nWe’ve seen this playbook before in hardware like cameras and home audio, but the major consolidation of technology into our smartphones has mostly eliminated them. Services are really the next frontier of differentation by price. Netflix used to be one singular thing before it fractured into Netflix with ads and Netflix with 4K. It even gates which shows you can watch based on how much you pay. Once any product matures, the only way to grow is to break it into tiers and gouge everyone, the rich for the luxury version and the poor for the privilege of a working one. So how long until we have different Instagrams, different TikToks, different YouTubes, each one rationed by a payment gate?
\nYou might even argue YouTube Premium and Instagram’s paid tiers already do this. But, for now, those only exist to buy you fewer ads. Everyone’s still able to watch the same things and follow the same people. But the looming threat that the internet could be turned into a giant cable bundle always looms.
\nThe pitch is always choice. More tiers, more options, something for every budget. But you’re not picking what’s right for you. They’re picking what people with your budget are allowed to have.
\nSo if Apple does start to intentionally isolate useful features across various price points, the reason will be pretty simple: they think hardware growth is effectively over. The iPhone, the most successful tech product in history, might not be able to differentiate on hardware alone. Instead, they have to also tie software to that hardware. They need to stop selling more of the good enough phones at a reasonable price, and start selling different phones at higher prices to the same people who will pay. Apple Intelligence not running in Europe is the biggest hint I can imagine. Why should Apple put perfectly good, leading edge A-series chips into phones that might never run Apple Intelligence? Just food for thought.
\nEven with the big price raises this week, there’s nothing uniquely cynical about Apple’s approach. This is just what every product does when it stops growing. Analysts will tell us this is normal, that it was always going to be this way, that this is just how things work now in a post-Covid supply chain world. That the iPhone was just an exception for twenty years. Exceptions, even exceptional ones, can still end.
\nBut, we don’t have to believe this. It wasn’t always this way. It was this way for almost twenty years, and they’re the ones with the power to choose to end it. For almost twenty years, the best iPhone you could reasonably afford and the iPhone you wanted were the same phone. That was a key part of what made the iPhone so sticky. I don’t think most people even noticed, but they might now.
", "date_published": "2026-06-25T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://b10g.xyz/2026/06/25/the-end-of-the-singular/", "tags": ["tech","apple","product"] }, { "id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2023/06/05/the-second-screen/", "title": "the second screen", "content_html": "A few months ago I started writing a blog post that is probably never gonna get finished and so this is my attempt to rewrite it while it’s relevant and force myself to finish.
\nWhen I graduated college, my parents gifted me an iPad and I was super excited. I’d wanted an iPad since it launched but I didn’t really know what I’d use it for other than the fact that I just love technology and cool toys.
\n\n\nQuick tangent: The model they got me was the 3rd generation version and it was also the last one to use the 30 pin connector. It was actually replaced nine months later when Apple launched the iPhone 5 and the Lightning port and I’m still bitter than Apple made it obsolete so fast.
\n
Anyways, I was so stoked to have an iPad but I had no idea what to do with it.
\nI tried to write blogs and essays on it, but it felt weird. Trying to type on a large virtual keyboard just wasn’t satisfying. I tried again, writing with a Bluetooth keyboard in this weird origami-style case that propped everything up, but that just also felt weird. I tried drawing with it, but I’m not much of an artist, especially when it comes to drawing with my finger. I also tried watching a fair amount of TV on it, including The Newsroom and the first season of Game of Thrones using the HBO Go app. It was fine, but I had other devices better suited for that.
\nOverall, I was pretty underwhelmed by my iPad. It felt like there was supposed to be something more than just big iPhone apps and watching TV. Because the truth was, I didn’t even like the big iPhone apps. I wanted something that was better than what I might even get on my phone and maybe that killer iPad app wasn’t even available as an iPhone app.
\nThere was one kind of app in particular that kind of got me excited: second-screen apps. The idea is that while you’re watching live television you open an app that is connected to what you’re watching and it gives you a separate but connected and interesting layer on which to look at your TV watching experience. For example, there might be a game or trivia or a Q&A happening while you’re watching a show or stats and alternate camera angles while watching sports. However, the second-screen apps that popped up barely scratched the surface of what was theoretically possible. They tried to be incrementally better versions of existing things (live TV guide, entertainment reviews, social feeds) just fine tuned for monetization.
\nMy first attempt at writing this went deep into the mistakes that were made by the apps that went after this, and rather than go in depth here’s a summary:
\nI say all that because I really just want hit the nail on the head with a giant hammer. Here goes: you can build cool shit, but you need to solve a problem.
\nSocial TV apps were a solution in search of a problem. These startups were able to convince VCs that people were already using their phones, laptops and tablets in front of their TVs — so why not serve up ads on those devices related to the content shown on the TV screen? But that wasn’t a problem users experienced - it was just an opportunity to exploit users’s desire to connect with fellow fans and their favorite shows. Targeted advertising is not, and will never be, a feature users care about, so building your product to suit your monetization strategy instead of your users is how to fail fast.
\n—
\nSo why did I want to hurry up and write this now? Well, it is the eve of another major Apple announcement. Tomorrow we night finally know what Apple’s plans for virtual reality/augmented reality are, and people are going to think they should start building apps/experiences for this new device the way that they did for the iPad and for the Apple Watch.
\nI have two responses to that.
\nThis sounds so basic, so why did second screen apps get it so wrong? The short answer is that the world was in the middle of a digital transformation. People were increasingly more likely to get entertainment through a digital means, and that meant that there was suddenly a giant pot of money if you could use some kind of attribution technology to demonstrate return on ad spend. These second-screen app people thought this was wonderful. They could marry the traditional advertising technology to the digital. Except one problem: interactive advertising does not solve a user problem and so it was a huge fucking flop.
\nThe peak of this kind of thinking was around the time of Apple’s “there’s an app for that” campaign. An article on Vox asks the right question, “do we really need an app for everything?” The answer is of course not.
\nYet someone is going to do this again if they buy into the hype cycle of AR and ship before they have an effective product with a complete UX that fulfills a need for a user. The hype cycle isn’t inherently bad. The hype cycle is basically a natural phenomenon. What’s bad is trying to shoehorn poorly thought out ideas and even worse monetization strategies into a product users definitely don’t and won’t value.
", "date_published": "2023-06-04T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://b10g.xyz/2023/06/04/the-second-screen/", "tags": ["product","tech","apps"] }, { "id": "http://codybrom.micro.blog/2023/01/08/statefullessness/", "title": "stateful-less-ness", "content_html": "The statelessness of modern hardware design really annoys me.
\nRecently I read John Gruber’s comments about a bombshell study about the safety of touchscreens in vehicles. Here’s the specific passage that awoke something in me:
\n\n\nThe reason that cars are largely switching to mostly touchscreen controls is the same reason phones switched — software is more flexible than hardware. Cars today do more than cars from 2005 did. But in the same way that all phones still have some hardware buttons (volume, power, mute), cars should too. The trick is getting the balance right. A couple of recent cars I’ve driven have definitely gotten that balance wrong.
\nIt’s also the case that as cars take baby steps toward self-driving, previously stateful hardware controls need to become stateless. A traditional turn signals sticks in place until you complete the turn. That’s tricky with a car that can turn itself. Or just think about volume knobs on stereo equipment. In the old days, the physical knob indicated the volume level, usually on a scale of 0–10 ( but not always , of course). Nowadays, though, playback volume is generally adjusted directionally, up or down, and the knob or buttons don’t indicate where the level is set, because the level is a value stored in software, and indicated on a display.
\n
In my current car, a 2022 VW, I have two ways to control my volume: steering wheel buttons and a volume knob next to the stereo/infotainment screen.
\nIf I want the car to start with the radio silent, turning down the volume knob before I turned it on will do nothing because volume is software controlled. Both buttons are stateless because they have no power without the software – they do not control the state. Because of this, I have effectively no option to start with the radio muted. Maybe I can hit the power button on the Infotainment screen before it fully boots up, but it pisses me off that my volume knob is powerless until the software allows it to be.
\nIn some older cars I’ve driven, the volume knob was the only way to control volume and it was stateful, meaning the the exact position of the knob controlled the state of the volume (not somewhere else in the electronics or software). This meant you could turn the knob down before turning on the vehicle and it would obey. But the modern car designer would think this is “dumber” design because a single hardware component controlling something isn’t flexible or controllable by software.
\nMy old car, a 2014 Chevy Cruze, had a really buggy Panasonic infotainment system. Sometimes the stereo would crash while I was driving and then I couldn’t do anything until I stopped the car or it rebooted. While crashed, I couldn’t change anything - the song, the station, THE VOLUME. It was maddening and showed the risks of making everything stateless. To allow a control to be stateless is to also allow it to fail when (not if) software fails.
\nI suppose stateful controls will continue to be phased out from products more and more. We recently got a “smart” space heater that is app controlled and also has no stateful buttons or knobs. I willingly sacrificed convenience for control, but maybe a car shouldn’t be one of those places.
\nAlso, maybe it’s because of my years spent operating sound boards that I like to feel getting it dialed in, but otherwise I feel I am becoming an old person who yells at technology. I just think something gets lost when you convert a perfectly positioned knob into a software value.
", "date_published": "2023-01-07T19:00:00-05:00", "url": "https://b10g.xyz/2023/01/07/statefullessness/", "tags": ["product","tech","cars"] } ] }