Apple reports fourth quarter results

I have literally watched my in-laws plan and book a vacation from their smartphones. From their house, where they also have computers.

They're quite different from my side of the family, but the biggest thing is that they've never been big planners. Everything is by the seat of their pants. If you're like that, you're probably OK with taking one of the first three SEO-optimized search results and making it work.

Meanwhile, I'm not booking anything until I have a proposed itinerary.

How often do you get a meaningfully better result than google.com/flights? Outside of booking with points, it's all basically the same thing and I can book on google on my phone in under a minute

I live in a place where I have to fly to a nearby bigger airport to go anywhere outside my province. In other words, everything is a compromise on routing, layovers and cost. When I lived in a big city, it was just timing and cost that mattered.

Frequently it isn't that google flights on a phone doesn't find the same flight, its that it is much easier to figure out the tradeoffs with more screen real estate. E.g. I can see that a flight is cheaper, but it involves mixing airlines, and a terminal change that I probably can't trust on a tight schedule in winter.

For tasks like planning travel I often am trying to optimize multiple goals at once. I might find cheaper flights on certain days but more expensive hotels. This is much easier on larger screens because you can view more information side by side.

It's not that you get a meaningfully better result. It is that you can open an arbitrary number of results and trivially compare them side by side. Essentially multitasking multiple concurrent searches and scenarios. Smartphones limit you to one view at a time on the screen and make it somewhat clumsy to flip through tabs in comparison.

I hope you don't think booking travel ends with the flights. There's so much more to getting the most out of a trip than the flight, or the hotel.

That's the thing for us whose life is mostly "by the seat of their pants", there really isn't. You book the tickets, you go there, see what you feel like doing, do those things, and go home. Done that for all my travels more or less, never felt like I missed anything and had a blast most of the times.

I still do everything important on a computer and wouldn't book the flight on a smartphone, but that probably says more about my age than anything else.

I could go into detail how being able to have a dozen tabs open almost always gives a better result than simply picking the first flight on google flights. But let's assume there's no difference:

Do you really want to use a phone's on-screen keyboard to type in your family's passport details, address, then credit card numbers, then review all of this to ensure your $2000 purchase doesn't have any typos or mistakes? If you have the choice to use a real computer for this, then why not? It's not like booking a big trip is something you do while sitting on a bus.

Then of course there's accommodation, itineraries, visas, trip research...

Even that presumes you already know when you’ll want to leave and come back. For me, I’ve got a vague idea, but it’ll depend on how much time I want to spend there. And that’ll be based on what I want to do, which may only be available certain days of the week or times of day. And that’s before factoring in the prices of those things relative to their availability and how much I want to do them.

To figure all this out, I’m going to need to keep notes across several browser tabs, likely while communicating asynchronously with whoever else is going on the trip. All of this is dramatically easier with an actual computer.

I mostly use a computer because you can get a better idea what is a good deal, and fits in my budget. If I had stacks of cash, I could easily see myself booking everything via my phone.

But I'm too much of a penny pincher..

But I do often only pre-book the first night/s accom, then book the rest as I travel and know where I will be when. But I do travel with my laptop, and often will park up somewhere and hotspot it, to find that days accom. (+ I get cash back deals on computer)

Dude, you've got to check every possible combination of departure and arrival dates from each different nearby airport then check everything again as one ways using different carriers then compare paying cash to using points then compare Airbnb to hotels then recheck the flights to make sure that paying slightly more for different dates or routes wouldn't be offset by saving more on the hotel... then you can book. Takes about 50 tabs.

At this point, don't AI agents help a lot with this and diminish the need for the workflow you're describing?

I don't over plan trips, but I still want to make sure I'm not overpaying. There's all kinds of combinations of things to check. Also thinking through routes through areas. Fly in, take a train around. Things like that. Also getting hotels or vacation rentals and go through the reviews and seeing which neighborhoods you want to stay in

I admire your style, and envy it, at least a little.

But I couldn’t do it, especially with the presence of which I’ll call “expectations of planning” in my immediate circle. Some people want the best possible experience and can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research.

just for the record, I completely agree that _research_ is way easier on a computer.

But i take issue with this concern:

> Do you really want to use a phone's on-screen keyboard to type in your family's passport details, address, then credit card numbers, then review all of this to ensure your $2000 purchase doesn't have any typos or mistakes?

My iphone (safari) auto-fills almost all of those details. It’s also likely that semi-frequent travelers have an account with the airline in question, so passport and TSA precheck info is pre-saved too.

It’s simply a non-issue in my experience.

Apparently the anxiety of making big purchases on phones is only a thing for the millennials and not really a thing for the younger generation.

Use an iPhone or Macbook Pro, pay more.

Use an Android or Linux laptop, pay less.

Not kidding, pricing is based on these bullshit assumptions more than you might think. For the German market, for example, it's also cheaper to buy tickets on Thursday evening around 22:00-23:30. Paid around 400$ less for a 2k trip, multiple times, reproducibly, not depending on seasons or years.

Why would you trust current gen AI to make decisions when paying thousands of dollars for flights and hotels? That’s an insane amount of risk to take.

Which it should be noted, may not even have a laptop. Probably not a desktop even.

> Probably not a desktop even.

I'd be more surprised if they had a desktop than a laptop.

Gaming PCs are very often desktops, though I think those tend to be used more like consoles nowadays, not general purpose computers.

My anecdata is that the households I know that have desktops are gamers, yes, but:

- the desktops in question tend to be "exclusively" used by one member of the household

- the desktop owners usually also have a laptop

- the desktop-owning households are well in the minority of households I know

Yes the results are pretty much all there on Google Flights

But if you want to shuffle times/dates/different choices of flights to find the "best one" (which does not mean the cheapest one with weird connections)

You will still need to verify their hallucinations.

Indeed. I often complete purchases via mobile because the experience is better. For example, using Apple Pay. The ability to have details auto-fill works on desktop, but it works far better on mobile I find.

The idea of manually typing any of this stuff in is very old fashioned.

> especially with the presence of which I’ll call “expectations of planning” in my immediate circle

Yeah, when traveling with others who do like/need to plan I'll go with their plans and flow unless it gets too boring. When traveling with my wife I'll even stick around even if I'm bored.

> Some people want the best possible experience

I mean, I do too! :) Just different methods of getting there.

> can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research

Man, just daily life must be tough if they're feeling FOMO from such low stakes situations, I couldn't handle that myself :/

> There's all kinds of combinations of things to check. Also thinking through routes through areas. Fly in, take a train around.

For me, not knowing those things and figuring them out on the spot is part of why I love vacations, and going through review of neighborhoods or figuring out the exact place where to stay would remove a lot of the fun.

No level of planning can match the raw joy of spontaneously enjoying something with like minded friends.

> Some people want the best possible experience and can’t be confident they aren’t missing out unless they have done the research.

The majority of such people perform what I call “checkbox vacationing”. It’s not about actually enjoying any particular thing, it’s just about checking the boxes of whatever some online list says is the current “best XYZ”.

There's a book out there (I don't remember the author, title, or anything really) written by a guy who traveled around the world, over several years, in a VW bus(?). The thing that struck me is, he got home within a couple days of when he planned to, before he even took off. The entire trip was planned.

This. its enough to check a couple of alternatives, the prices are nearly the same most of the time. If you can move dates for your travel, that is far more impactful, like if you have the option to avoid major holidays or such. Note that I am not in the US, and I do agree that it is much better to do research on my desktop!

My personal experience is that Chrome on my PC is more reliable/predictable than Safari on my iPad.

Now I am wondering if this is Safari/Chrome thing and not a mobile/desktop thing.

Certainly if the autofill doesn't work and I do need to to type it in, the PC is way easier. I'm thinking international travel for 5 people - all my responsibility and I don't want to get held up half way across the world when no one has slept for a day, work visas beign contingent on correctness, etc.

I find it so charming that people from the first world just assume that unplanned trips are the norm, and coming back as per expectation is can sometimes be surprising (even if it's a very long trip).

Do take a look at what people from developing countries go through - sometimes you cannot even get a visa without all your lodging booked and a confirmed return flight ticket.

Or you are accepted to go to a conference in the USA to present your research and the USA conveniently grants your visa for you one week after the conference occurs.

I guess if you have money to burn that works. Shopping around for flights can save hundreds though or hours of time on the travel days

You missed plenty, and you wouldn't even know it because you didn't even do the most basic research about where you were going. It's a very lazy way to travel, and I guarantee I got way more out of my travel than you did if we visited the same places. But I don't know you, maybe your idea of a good time is getting drunk in whatever corner bar there is nearby.

If I'm spending thousands on plane tickets and hotels, and taking time off from work, and I know I'll likely never visit a place again (because there are so many other places to visit), I can't understand not doing some basic research on the things that the area is famous for, to visit those things. But whatever, you do you.

> It's a very lazy way to travel, and I guarantee I got way more out of my travel than you did if we visited the same places

It's funny, I'd say the same to you! :)

How often do you sleep over on the couch or floor of strangers homes, waking up when they wake up, participating in something that isn't overflowing with tourists already? Or got to experience how a day is for someone who works and lives in the place you're visiting for the first time?

Granted, it's not for everybody, but we both feel the same about each other, which hopefully means we at least enjoy our own lives, even if we wouldn't like each others. But I won't say you're lazy just because you don't try to truly experience other cultures when you travel, we just have different ways of traveling and enjoying life. And that's OK, as long as you enjoy what you do, and I enjoy what I do :)

I bought a Tesla in 2018 on my phone, only ever having seen one, and without ever having driven one. In a quiet/stalled moment while traveling.

But that says 1000% more about impulsivity coming to my rescue, with reckless disregard for the risk of regret at the first sign of boredom, than any trust in mobile interfaces.

I didn't (and would never) book the trip that cost a fraction of that on a phone or pad.

> Do you really want to use a phone's on-screen keyboard to type in your family's passport details, address, then credit card numbers, then review all of this to ensure your $2000 purchase doesn't have any typos or mistakes?

Not only do they type it in, they let them save their information...

>How often do you sleep over on the couch or floor of strangers homes, waking up when they wake up, participating in something that isn't overflowing with tourists already? Or got to experience how a day is for someone who works and lives in the place you're visiting for the first time?

You have the strangest travel goals I've ever heard of.

Fortunately I don't have to sleep on floors when I travel. That sounds awful.

I can't imagine anyone would want to "experience how a day is for someone who works and lives" in my life, they'd be sitting on a couch in my office watching me type in lines of code all day. Thrilling.

I spent 3 months living and working in a city abroad (again, coding), so yeah, I know what it's like. We travelled all around the region, saw and did amazing things instead of "winging it", and the horror - there were tourists there too! Avoiding tourists just to avoid tourists means you missed out on things that are interesting, because why, you don't like being around other people? But I don't actually care why or how you travel, you do you.

Yeah non issue for frequent travel people. If you only travel 2x a year always with different airlines then it’s a hassle.

I’m wondering what the sample size is for this assessment. I know gen z people that don’t buy stuff on Amazon out of anxiety, let alone booking a 4 figure flight.

Let’s not forget that a plurality exists.

Old-ish data, but US Census states that 81% of American households have at least one laptop or desktop. Tablets at 61%.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/computer...