This hyperbole is not really necessary on hackernews. Apple alone makes 20 billion on a single product: airpods.
This article notes 2025 saw a 3% increase of 15m. That means total sales are 0.5b, or 2.5% of Apple's airpods product.
In other words: tiny market with a growth in line with inflation after years of decline? Let's call that 'exploding sales' and farm some clicks.
Yes perhaps there is some newfound interest, but since bluetooth headsets took off they keep getting cheaper to buy, easier to pair and connect, longer lasting batteries, easier to find, smaller to pocket, more varied, more comfortable to wear, and with better noise-cancelling. Plus every year fewer devices carry the headphone jack.
It's on the way out, though it'll be a slow death. I have a pair of wired headphones, I prefer them on corporate laptops for meetings because corporate laptops suck with pairing. But that's about it.
Wired and wireless will always co-exist. Your casual consumer prefers wireless. Professional audio equipment for mixing and critical listening will never favor wireless over wired. For pros, $20-50 wired IEMs beat $250 Airpods every time.
The same applies to pro gamers. Latency and empty batteries are a big no-no.
> It's on the way out, though it'll be a slow death
At the very most, it's on its way out in the same way normal computers are on their way out for non-IT professionals. There are situations where wired is a must, not a preference (studios being the most obvious).
Aside from that, wired offers the highest sound quality possible, plug-and-play, and all at a lower price. Wireless headphones don't appear to even be trying to catch up.
Wired were deliberately killed by Apple in order for them to make that $20 billion. We should not celebrate billionaires making the world worse so they can make more money.
For one the EROEI isn't 4 for renewables under ideal conditions, it differs wildly depending on the type and location and installation. It's true that for solar in Ireland (which are NOT ideal conditions) its on the low end, though still about twice as much as 4, and it's certainly not the case for wind which can have them as high as 20.
Second, I've got no clue what 'albino' is. Do you mean albedo? In that case, it's completely irrelevant for wind power. Ireland produces 20x more wind than solar, the latter is completely irrelevant in Ireland.
For solar albedo is relevant, but only if you have bifacial panels, which are still the minority.
In Spain albedo is relatively low but it has some of the highest direct sunshine hours in Europe. Albedo is high in places like the Nordics, which have fewer sunshine hours. In other words, EV is brilliant in Spain due to the abundant sun, yet surprisingly is still viable in a place like Norway precisely because of relatively high albedo, not in spite of it. This is why EROEI for solar in Spain can get up to 20. The idea that you get as much power as it took to make (EROEI of 1) is so wrong, and so obviously wrong, that it seems like you just don't have any idea what you're talking about.
> We've graduated from providing cheap energy to now importing most of our energy. We've seen huge energy price increases as a result.
Wrong. As you can see Ireland always produced a very limited about of electricity from coal, around 11% ten years ago when wind was 10% less. In other words, wind simply replaced coal, not imports.
For the last 50 years gas provides the bulk of your electricity, but Ireland produces virtually no gas and has always imported it. The jump in prices was due to these gas prices increasing due to the Russia/Ukraine war as of 2020, it had nothing to do with import changes. Had you invested more in wind/solar, you'd be affected less.
In fact Ireland barely imports anything at all, over the last ten years the net import are close to zero. 2025 was a peak year for imports but even then imports constituted a small 13%, whereas 2024 was a year where Ireland was a net exporter, as was 2020, and 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. In fact of the last ten years it was a net exporter 7 times, more than twice as often as the 3 years it was a net importer. And its imported when the UK has cheaper electricity prices, otherwise there'd be no reason to import.
So your entire argument isn't true. Wind/solar can beat coal on a cost-basis now, evidenced by the fact that the average existing coal plant isn't running half the time because it's more expensive, let alone building out more coal. The smartest thing to have done is mass-invest in solar/wind in a country with a population density 4x lower than the UK.
But: EU is the only effective player in the world that drives energy policy outside its borders, by being a massive market with regulatory power regarding its imports.
If you look at three figures: energy use per capita, emissions per capita, and GDP per unit of energy/emissions, and include imported consumption, the EU's are all trending in a positive direction for many years now.
So stating the EU has de-industralized and its progress on shutting down coal is therefore 'fake' and misleading because it imports its industrial consumption from other countries to which it has simply offloaded its emissions, isn't true.
It's more expensive if you want Touch ID, and on par ($350 + $250) if you don't. However, the $250 Magic Keyboard is heavily overpriced, the actual keyboard can't be more than $10-20.
I've seen Musk note in an interview that at year-end the bottleneck will not be CPU/RAM etc, but electricity. And new powerplants are backlogged for years.
That's why he wants to go into space (10x solar potential because you don't have a day/night cycle, no clouds, no dust/rain, no temperature loss, no orientation issues, and no atmosphere reducing solar).
To me it seems ridiculous, for one because sending 150kg to space costs about $500k, and this is about the weight of a solar installation that costs $800 to install and generates about $1000 worth of electricity across 20 years at utility wholesale prices.
But suppose it was cheaper and viable, and earth-electricity was indeed capped, you could argue (if you believe the hype) that developing AI is an existential arms-race objective for US/China.
But from what I've understood that's just not the case at all. Something like 170+ coal plants are scheduled to be decommissioned, and the average coal and gas plant runs at 40-50% of capacity, because wind/solar is eating their lunch (cheaper marginal $ per kWh). i.e. there is so little demand that these plants keep using less capacity and shutting down superfluous plants.
You'd think if experts believed electricity was going to be a bottleneck, that venture capital / AI companies, or even traditional capital, would be buying up plants or signing guaranteed-usage contracts. But it doesn't seem to be the case.
The point of your whole argument is that “financial experts” are always rational and are not affected by bubbles, it took months from energy experts talking with media/investors to the Big Tech would start talking about “energy crisis”.
In fact, Nadella publicly stated that he has a large amount of hardware in inventory that has already been purchased but cannot be utilized due to insufficient energy.
So why did Nadella not pour a few billion into buying the 50% capacity that the average coal/gas plant has spare, that they're not running due to insufficient demand?
Seems like a strange take. It wasn't per se a luxury brand, it catered to providing cutting edge consumer technology. That's still the case. Which company makes better phones, laptops, tablets, headphones, smart watches and consumer software?
The fact it stood for quality doesn't mean you can't keep offering quality at lower budget and lower spec levels, while still pushing high-budget and high-spec levels. In fact it seems very succesful in doing so and keeps capturing more of the market.
You could say there is limited growth in the hardware (total pie), and that there is are increasingly smaller shares of the market share pie left to conquer. And that's mostly true.
But Apple has built out its Services business, from $12b in 2012 to $110b last year. That $110b revenue is more than Tesla's revenue, and that has a market cap of $1.2 trillion. And unlike hardware, services (i.e. software) are extremely high-margin. It's estimated that $110b revenue constitutes something like $80b in gross margin, whereas Tesla's $100b revenue lead to <$17b in gross margin, and just 3.8b in net profit.
A push into budget offerings increases users and scales service revenue, a high-margin and fast growing business. Apple has been a tremendous success. I won't make predictions of the future but its push for affordable devices was a strategic win, to the contrary of your point.
>it catered to providing cutting edge consumer technology. That's still the case. Which company makes better phones, laptops, tablets, headphones, smart watches and consumer software?
I think their marketing pretends they are cutting edge, but I always found them behind. iOS was years behind Android in features. Macbooks don't even have Nvidia in them.
Apple is never 1st place in tech quality. At best they are 2nd place.
Differentiation is king. If you have 25% of the market just doing e-mail, taxes, youtube and news, and 25% of the market running local LLMs, you don't want one machine that offers an average RAM, giving one group too much and making them overpay and the other group too little and making them underpay. Everyone gets a bad deal.
Instead you differentiate. This does that. Does the Neo cater to everyone? No. But it's better to put 8GB in a machine for your mom, than making her pay for 16gb she doesn't use and also creating more RAM scarcity for the people who need more RAM.
No it isn't. It's 1.08kg vs 1.23kg, or 13% heavier.
And indeed it's 13 inch but the dimensions are quite similar, there is a 0.8% difference in width (with the 11 inch being wider surprisingly, due to the bezels) and a 7% difference in height (11 inch being shorter). At its thickest point the 11 inch is. 33% thicker. In terms of volume the 13 inch isn't any bigger.
They already have! It's essentially what you wished for.
Below respectively 11 inch MBA vs NEO in cm
- Height: 1.7 vs 1.27 (thickest point)
- Width: 30 vs 29.75
- Depth: 19.2 vs 20.65
- Weight: 1.08 vs 1.23
11 inch was thicker and wider, neo is longer and heavier. But more or less the same form factor.
But you get 1.4 inches extra in screen size due to slimmer bezels, double storage, double pixel density, double ram, almost double battery life and a LOT more CPU, for half the price (even before adjusting for inflation, leading to a further discount).
Only thing they didn't do was keep the taper model, but I think that's a smart move even if it made for a fantastic picture at the time.
I'm a bit too lazy to look it up, but this is surprising to me. I still have an 11-inch, and it has a huge bezel around it, but it still feels way, way smaller than a 13-inch MacBook Air.
If the Neo has the same size screen as the MacBook Air, it's just a little confusing to me where it could be smaller.
> If the Neo has the same size screen as the MacBook Air
It's two things that explain the optics vs reality are surprising.
One is bezels, they're quite large on the 11 inch.
Two is rounding, the 11 inch actually undersells things as it's 11.6 inches, the Neo is exactly 13 inch. So it's not 2 inches but 'just' 1.4 inches bigger, and with its thick bezels it bridges that 1.4 inch gap mostly.
While the 13 inch MBA is actually 13.6 inches.
In other words, the MBA has a 5% bigger screen than the Neo, despite being marketed both as '13 inch macbooks'.
5% doesn't sound like much, but it's the diagonal, meaning the height/width also scale by 5%, and the surface area therefore scales by 1.05^2 i.e. the screen of the '13' inch MBA is actually more like 10% bigger than the 13 inch Neo.
You answered your own question, its the bezel. They've gotten _much_ thinner since the 11 inch MBAs were a thing. Remember screen size is measured in diagonals, so even a 5mm reduction of bezel size both horizontally and vertically gains you a little over 7mm in screen size without a physical size increase. to gain 2 inches in screen size (50.8 mm) you'd only need to eliminate 0.74 inches (roughly) from all 4 sides. I don't know the exact measurements of the bezels on those older devices but I can tell you my M4 Air is less than half an inch on all sides.
EDIT: My math was bad. Its still not precise but its much more accurate now.
This article notes 2025 saw a 3% increase of 15m. That means total sales are 0.5b, or 2.5% of Apple's airpods product.
In other words: tiny market with a growth in line with inflation after years of decline? Let's call that 'exploding sales' and farm some clicks.
Yes perhaps there is some newfound interest, but since bluetooth headsets took off they keep getting cheaper to buy, easier to pair and connect, longer lasting batteries, easier to find, smaller to pocket, more varied, more comfortable to wear, and with better noise-cancelling. Plus every year fewer devices carry the headphone jack.
It's on the way out, though it'll be a slow death. I have a pair of wired headphones, I prefer them on corporate laptops for meetings because corporate laptops suck with pairing. But that's about it.
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