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Yes, we know what a modern smartphone looks like and how it works.

Saying there is no more innovation in the space is ludicrous. Here are a few areas where there is a ton of innovation.

  • Battery Technology (weeks on a charge, organic cells)
  • Camera Tech (DoF, Color, resolution, white noise)
  • VR / AR
  • Digital Assistants (We're not even close to samantha from her yet)
  • iPhone as the only computer you need. just keep a keyboard, mouse & monitor at your office & home and move the iPhone between them
  • CPU speeds
  • RAM miniaturization
  • 1 terabytes on a smart phone
  • Multi-users on phones or tablets
  • integrated fingerprint sensors on the LCD scree itself
  • Completely eliminating the wallet
  • Eliminating the need for house & car keys
  • embedding a lot of the functions in our own bodies (the watch is step 1 to having computer abilities connected to our skin)
  • Wireless charging or the complete elimination of needing a lightning port at all
  • Wireless cell data that is just as fast as your home cable connection

Over the next 15 years, a lot of this will come true and Apple is spending billions to make sure the iPhone is that. Apple may fail but to say the age of smartphone is behind us from a supposed technology person is laughable.
 
I see a lot of people defending Apple and calling Peter Thiel a bozo, but you have to be honest -- the age of the "wow" factor is over. That's not much more that we can do with phone or computer hardware anymore. They've become quite refined. And even with breakthroughs do happen, we don't ooh and aah with googly eyes as we've just become numb to new things. There's some truth to what he's saying.

edit -- The next frontier of breakthroughs are going to happen with software (AI), in my opinion. Not hardware.
 
Just having a phone that will charge remotely would be a huge innovation and one that is rumored. A flexible screen would be nice if implemented well. Siri and assistants have only scratched the surface. And really thinking down the line, what about developing a pinhole sized projector that could be streamed to a wall. Your phone could be your 65" TV. Lots of things possible.
 
I know Bill Gates has denied this quote repeatedly, but I think Thiels' comment, like the one below, is one of those that we will all chuckle about 10 years from now- "No one will need more than 637 kb of memory for a personal computer. 640K ought to be enough for anybody."
 
How can Peter Thiel confirm anything about Apple? When did he start working there? Shouldn't this headline be Peter Thiel 'predicts' the 'Age of Apple is Over,' But Says It's Not Tim Cook's Fault in the Article 'Confirm or Deny'?
 
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I'm sure this guy is long gone from PayPal, but if Apple Pay supported person-to-person payments and they also released an app for Android that allowed Android users to receive electronic Apple Pay payments, that could be a huge blow to PayPal's business.
But we both know that Apple won't implement something like this, untill the year 2030.. by then Apple pay will seem like 1990 old techs..
 
What a load of hot air. The customer will decide if Apple is over. Nostradamus here has no power in his confirmation.
Well, he is right. just look at the iPhone the last 3 years.. Same old design, no killer features, gimmicks..
Innovation is a roller coaster. No company in history has been able to innovate yearly at an exponential rate.
 
Nobody knows what the next big thing will be, but there is no reason to believe that Apple won't be a major player in whatever it is.
At a minimum they have their hands in the next three obvious areas; Home automation, Voice controlled personal assistant and Self driving cars.

Not interested in any of those things, but cool :)

I think there's a lot of room for innovation with a phone. In fact it has the most room for innovation out of any of Apples products. But Peter Thiel is an attention-whoring douche.
 
Thiel is an a-hol3 of the highest order, imo of course. But this:

Apple chief executive Tim Cook has routinely teased about what's around the corner. Last year, he said Apple has "great innovation in the pipeline,"
I wonder how many times Cook or someone on the Exec team can say this before they realize that repeating the same statement over and over doesn't make it true. In a cursory search, I found references to that line from 2014, '15, and '16. I didn't look to hard, and I am sure someone can find earlier references. Personally, I think Cook has done a good job driving Apple to heights never seen... even under Jobs. I just wish the entire E Suite would retire this inane meme level quote.
 
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PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel "confirmed" that "the age of Apple is over" based on his belief that smartphones will lack further innovation.​

Apple chief executive Tim Cook has routinely teased about what's around the corner. Last year, he said Apple has "great innovation in the pipeline," including "things you can't live without that you just don't know you need today."
I'm not Thielin' the love... nor the intelligence.

These devices are prototypes for all sorts of innovation yet to come. Will Apple lead that innovation? I am not certain of it, but they have a good chance to do so, if management pushes and has vision and tenacity to market inventiveness.

Augmented reality will become giant. It needs to be developed and marketed, but it is obviously something huge in tech future. So is AI, like Siri, where voice command becomes "human" and truly fluid and intelligent. Computers haven't reached their potential yet! They, as they have been, now do the basic work people desire from them, but there is a constant need for speed and storage and higher capability to make workflow quicker with less effort... there is a GIANT leap of innovation needed to take away the esoteric side of computing and put it in the hands of the neophytes, like Jobs always tried to do (but few are still pursuing today). And there is always the need to make it cheaper, so complex devices that can instantly report and tally all sorts of complex measurements can be purchased in everyday products. Using the computer as a book still hasn't been developed beyond making the book come into the computer!

My goodness. There is endless innovation yet to come, but this little rant only scratched the obvious surface. Thiel has no idea where the iPhone will take us, nor where the rest of the tech industry can lead us in the next 10 or 20 years. If he did, he would shut up and become a part of it by investing in it.
 
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Meh. This is just another face of the argument over "what is innovation?"

If the question is: is there any room in the smartphone market for disruptive innovation, i.e., truly "game changing" concepts, there is a reasonable argument that can be made on the "no" side, and that's where I lump Thiel's comments.

But it's not like these are dead products. There's still worthwhile incremental innovation going on all the time, by Apple and their competition: battery/power management improvements, display improvements, durability (e.g., waterproofing), camera improvements, new uses for Bluetooth and NFC, etc. A fair number of these will be significant changes that spur additional changes down the road... but the open question is whether or not these changes or features redefine what a smartphone is? I tend to fall into the "not likely" camp myself. That doesn't mean I don't look forward to my next phone being significantly better that my current one.
 
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Here's the thing though:

a) You could have made this statement about any of Apple's products throughout history. "We know what a computer looks like and does." See what I did there?

And considering the number of PC sales vs Mac sales, that would be a valid point.
 
Apple chief executive Tim Cook has routinely teased about what's around the corner. Last year, he said Apple has "great innovation in the pipeline," including "things you can't live without that you just don't know you need today." Likewise, he told employees last month that Apple has "great desktops in our roadmap," and earlier this week he said "the best is yet to come" for iPhone.

Exactly this. It's just CEO talk which is all fluff but no substance. Show us something. Don't keep telling us how much great stuff there is instead of promising the world but not delivering.

Maybe it's all true.. all the iphone updates have been painfully slowly incremental.
 
I am a shareholder and I voted today... And not in Tim Cooks favor. Apple needs new leadership... Apple should be developing its entire ecosystem, for all it's wide range of customers, not just one corner of it... The fact that they simply failed to release updated monitors every year says so much, Mac pro's updated every two years, minis every year, stale software, updates that take away or break functionality, thin over function, and so on... Apple is letting so many great lines slip into nothingness. The MacBook Air with a retina display should have been the MacBook, and it would be selling like mad. It would be so perfect, as long as it kept it's ports and magsafe... The MacBook pro, kept the SD card slot a few MM and the battery size. How do you just abandon magsafe? Sodering and gluing everything together is terrible for the environment because it's impossible to upgrade and repurpose older products, and very expensive to repair if something like the SSD or Memory go bad. How come they don't have a simple Mac Computer? Something like an Mini, but with desktop class hardware? There are so many obvious things that can be done to bring the mac back from the brink...the whole brand from the brink. What Apple is seeming to forget is if you push your customers to hard, they will go and check out the alts and right now...they are really good. The list goes on... Adopt USB-C in the iPhone, iPad... Going to bed, I'm tired of this trainwreck
 
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Bozo indeed. Apple 3.0 is right around the corner, once they move into their new campus and align their forces properly.
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I am a shareholder and I voted today... And not in Tim Cooks favor. Apple needs new leadership... Apple should be developing its entire ecosystem, for all it's wide range of customers, not just one corner of it... The fact that simply failed to release updated monitors every year says so much, Mac pro's updated every two years, minis every year, stale software, thin over function, and so on... Apple is letting so many great lines slip into nothingness. The MacBook Air with a retina display should have been the MacBook, and it would be selling like mad. It would be so perfect, as long as it kept it's ports and magsafe... The MacBook pro, kept the SD card slot a few MM and the battery size. The list goes on... Adopt USBC in the iPhone... Going to bed, I'm tired of this trainwreck

You covered the issues perfectly.

I really hope that Apple executives read these forums and discuss these public perceptions in great depth.
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Apple chief executive Tim Cook has routinely teased about what's around the corner. Last year, he said Apple has "great innovation in the pipeline," including "things you can't live without that you just don't know you need today." Likewise, he told employees last month that Apple has "great desktops in our roadmap," and earlier this week he said "the best is yet to come" for iPhone.

Exactly this. It's just CEO talk which is all fluff but no substance. Show us something. Don't keep telling us how much great stuff there is instead of promising the world but not delivering.

Maybe it's all true.. all the iphone updates have been painfully slowly incremental.

I disagree with the iPhone updates. That's the only area where Apple HAS continued to push forward. It's the Macs that they've allowed to take a back seat, and that darn well better change in 2017 and going forward!
 
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Many here are mocking him as if perfecting a product isn't possible.

Look back at the iPod. What happened to it? Eventually it stopped getting updates because the iPhone replaced it. It did everything the iPod did, but better. No further innovation has happened to the iPod since.

I see no reason the same thing couldn't happen with the iPhone. Eventually something will come along that does everything we need our iPhone to do, and then some, and it won't be an iPhone anymore.
 
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