Apple is a hostage of its own marketing.

A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it? That would be a sellout.

A convertible Macbook Air with a touch screen? It would be sold out.

Neckband-style airpods with all-day battery life? Might not sell out, but would be popular.

A best-in-class TV powered by Apple TV? Would probably sell well.

But all of these products would cannibalize sales of some other expensive iDevice.

> A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it? That would be a sellout.

The number of people who might actually like this is very tiny. Most of them do product reviews. But their audience is not going to care. Think about your older uncle. Your niece in her 20s who loves to paint and read but doesn't want to replace hardware. That's what most people are like.

Those are the people who Jobs focused on impressing and enabling to do things they wouldn't do otherwise. That is the focus that has been lost without Jobs, IMHO, and it's the focus that makes the products better for people who want to get the most out of their products per unit of time invested in learning how to use it.

And this is why you shouldn’t listen to the “less space than Nomad. No Wireless. Lame” tech crowd [1].

A TV is bulky, race to the bottom commodity that is only replaced every 5-8 years.

> Neckband-style airpods with all-day battery life? Might not sell out, but would be popular.

I don’t think Apple has any issue selling AirPods. But honestly, I do like my $70 Beat Flex for traveling. I don’t have to worry about them falling out of my ears and between the seats on flights and the double flange ear tips block noise better than AirPods Pro.

I’ve had touch screen convertible Dells. I never used the touch screen. They are bulky, the screen ratio is off either way compared to an iPad. On the other hand, my wife now uses an iPad Air 13 inch with a regular old cheap Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and she loves it. Her x86 MacBook Air was getting long in the tooth.

This is before the newest OS with real windows.

[1] or more relevant to the HN crowd “For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”

I get your other examples, but a best-in-class TV seems like it'd be pretty good for Apple. It's an Apple TV device that's jammed into a television and doesn't come out, plus a premium price. Seems like it'd work out great. And everybody else buys the 'Apple TV 4K' standalone doohickey and plugs it into their regular TV.

1. All these devices would sell out, because these are all of Apple's best sellers. I'm willing to bet a replacable battery iPhone will sell as much as the iPhone 6e. Replacable batteries aren't a strong feature.

2. "Current Apple Product" + "My own personal tweak" isn't a product strategy. "A convertible Macbook Air with a touch screen?" wouldn't move the needle sales wise, and would just be a headache for developers. If, for some strange reason, you need a 19inch touch screen, the iPad pro already exists and has better developer support.

Most Apple products are locally maximized. The last great new Apple product was the AirPods in 2016. Neither the Apple Watch or Apple Vision Pro seems like they will define a new product space.

> modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it? That would be a sellout.

Go the other way. Hermetically sealed, no connectors, inductive charging, rugged, with a solid state battery that will outlive the rest of the phone. Solid state batteries are more expensive, but that's a cost issue for car-sized batteries, not phone-sized batteries for US$1000 phones.

Samsung expects to have 20-year battery life in 2026.

> A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it? That would be a sellout.

The same was said about a smaller iPhone. They made it and sales were lacklustre. I know a few people that lament it, but sale's don't lie...

A thicker phone with more battery life would be amazing tbh. The whole industry is focusing on thinness too much.

Apple doesn't care about self-cannibalization. That's how you stay alive and avoid innovator's dilemma.

All of your solutions are bulky and difficult to manufacture compared to current products though.

“A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it?”

Definitely not! This would be an inferior product in almost every respect for 95% of customers.

100% disagree - they all sound like terrible products for various reasons. Apple will probably try and make some of them at some point.

They product they won't make ... the $400 iPhone.

> A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it? That would be a sellout.

And probably a regression on the waterproofing efforts they've made over the last decade. If you're gonna make it thicker, just put a bigger battery in.

> Neckband-style airpods with all-day battery life? Might not sell out, but would be popular.

I didn’t know that it was exactly what I needed.

This is a perfectly HN style misunderstanding of what Apple actually is and does.

An iPhone doesn't need replaceable battery or an easier to replace screen, there are other phones that have these features and anyone is very welcome to buy them. Moreover, the screen is really not that hard to replace and you can charge any phone off a powerbank, you can even have a special magsafe powerbank that you carry in a bag. A 3rd gen SE (relatively crappy for an iPhone) can charge up to 50% in half an hour if your wall block outputs more than 20w. The point of an iPhone is that it's powerful enough to do pretty much anything that anyone needs and has software that's good enough to the point that it doesn't need some shitty skin over it. It's also supposed to be consistent with your other apple devices and supported for absurd amounts of time in comparison to the competition.

Touchscreen on laptops is shit, I'm not interested in fatiguing my shoulders while I work for a 0.01% usability benefit in some niche scenarios. It's a gimmick, nobody actually needs it. My current gen MBAir lasts literally days on battery. If you want a touchscreen Apple product with a keyboard then iPads are right there. They exist. The trackpad on any macbook virtually eliminates the need for a touchscreen and that's why they're the best trackpads on any laptop.

Airpods are the breakthrough product that they are because they aren't neckband style, they're literally the seashells that Ray Bradbury describes in Farenheit 451. For better or worse. They've been around for a long time now and we've forgotten that nothing like them existed in. the mainstream before they did. All the initial criticisms about them have evaporated, they have become normal as has their form factor. No neckbands or wires, the charge case juices them up and the battery on them definitely lasts all day, I've tried. If they had wires or a neckband then they simply wouldn't be what they are. If you want neckband style earbuds like you've descriibed there are plenty of options out there that existed before AirPods did.

Why would Apple make a TV when Samsung has that market fully cornered? In every way. What would be the point of competing with the company that makes the actual display panels that literally everyone uses? Apple can offer it's excellent software and they've done that, you can plug an Apple TV into any TV or, if your TV is 'smart' like all TVs nowadays, you can use the Apple TV app on your best in class TV. As well as the Youtube App, or the Netflix app, or the Prime app, or pretty much any service you want has a smart TV app really. What would anyone gain from Apple making a best in class TV?

None of these devices would cannibalize sales of any of Apple's products because they're all a terrible idea. If you want non-apple products then just buy them. They exist. All that stuff exists, just not made by Apple because those are inherently non-Apple ideas. Apple makes their devices for people who want their devices and everything that comes with their devices.