912 comments
roddylindsay · 12 days ago
Brilliant move.

The transition of the major social networks over the last 10-15 years -- from being a space for friends to interact to being a space to consume content produced by "unconnected" entities like influencers -- has created a huge opening for someone to claim the friends and family network. There is no one better positioned (at least in the U.S. where iPhones are the majority handset) than Apple.

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happyopossum · 12 days ago
My wife is in a position (board chair for a co-op) that results in her sending out a lot of invites to events. Evite has kinda been the go-to in her social/co-op group for ages, but man it suuuuuuucks these days. Ads everywhere, annoying patterns, and lacks a bunch of nice features that this seems to have.

Very happy to see this

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canucker2016 · 12 days ago
I think some demographic info can be useful in judging the potential uptake.

Apple iPhone ownership amongst USA teens:

2024: 87%

2019: 83%

2014: 67%

https://www.iclarified.com/95177/87-of-us-teens-own-iphones-...

https://www.pipersandler.com/news/piper-jaffray-completes-se...

https://www.pipersandler.com/news/different-new-cool-accordi...

Smartphone marketshare for iPhone in various countries:

65%: Norway

59%: Sweden/Japan/Canada/USA

49%: UK

30-39%: Germany/Portugal/Italy

other countries are lower from my random sampling of developed countries (South Korea is dominated by Samsung).

Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/norway

Change last part of url to get info for another country

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cleverwebble · 12 days ago
I'm in my mid-thirties and most of my friends have ditched Facebook. I didn't really realize this until when I used it to create an event for a house party... I was somewhat surprised that only 2 people out of 15 even saw it. I ended up resorting to good old text message and that worked, but it was tedious. Not sure how popular this will become, but having a social-media-less event invite/broadcasting system would be nice, and having one that most people with an iPhone have access to covers much of my friend base

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PaulHoule · 12 days ago
Even though "... anyone can RSVP, regardless of whether they have an Apple Account or Apple device" I think this being an Apple branded service is going to make this appear exclusionary and will mean some people won't participate even if they could.

I see the same risk involved with Apple TV's branding; Apple TV works great on Xbox, on NVIDIA Shield and on PC. I'm sure though there are a lot of people who just decide that shows like Foundation and subscriptions like MLS Season's Pass just aren't for them. I don't know if it is a 5% or a 20% drop but it has to be real.

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