Apple is always behind on industry trends, but when they adopt them eventually, they become mainstream and cool. This is what will happen with the folding phones this year, if rumors are true.
Folding phones have been around for half a decade and sold tens of millions of units. Same with VR.
Apple is in the value extraction business these days: their devices are conduits for advertising Apple services. The Vision Pro flopped because they wanted to charge and arm and a leg for a platform that was actively hostile to developers. It's not 2008 anymore.
Apple is rarely first to the party. They wait until the tech is ready for prime time and until they have an implementation that makes sense and feels inevitable. Then the rest of the industry tends to uses that as the model and shifts to copy them.
Apple didn’t make the first MP3 player, but once they made the iPod, everyone wanted an iPod. It was cool. Most other players pivoted to be more iPod-like.
Apple didn’t make the first smart phone. Smart phones were semi-niche devices for businessmen and nerds. Once the iPhone came out, everyone wanted it and the whole market changed.
Apple didn’t make the first smart watch, but once they did, their smart watch was more capable and integrated than the others and went on to outsell Rolex.
Apple didn’t make the first tablet. Microsoft tried to push the idea repeatedly 10 years earlier. Apple waited and came out with the iPad once multitouch was a thing and they could build an OS around touch. 15 years after its launch, it’s still the only tablet anyone actually talks about.
Steve Jobs talked about putting the customer experience first and selecting technologies that will be around for the next 10+ years, rather than chasing the latest bleeding edge tech, just to say you’re using it and trying to find a way to shoehorn it in.
To know what tech is going to stick around and to find how to best implement it takes time for things to mature a little bit. This means sacrificing the bleeding edge for a more thoughtful and stable approach.
Tim Cook doesn’t have the same kind of vision as Jobs, so I think some of this has been lost, but this has been their history for a long time, and one of the reasons why they’ve been so successful.
Everything you said is so true, but it doesn't negate the fact that Apple has been all-in on LLMs since GPT-3, but they've been struggling to integrate LLMs into Siri while being fully aware of market demand... Going so far as to sell an entire line of new AI iPhones without ever actually shipping core features from the keynote.
In your examples market demand from existing customers of iMacs wasn't pointed at Apple to create the iPod. iPod customers weren't demanding that Apple create the iPhone. And iPhone customers weren't seething over the lack of a first-party watch option. Apple customers are looking across the landscape and can see every other phone manufacturer running circles around Siri, and this integration with Gemini really feels like they're throwing in the towel.
You’re right. This is where Cook lacks the clear vision and stubbornness of Jobs to either keep quiet publicly, or say that the technology simply isn’t up to Apple’s standards yet to release… and tack the lumps in the meantime. Jobs did this a lot.
The thing is, Siri doesn’t need an LLM for Apple customers to use an LLM. The App Store exists and iPhone users can download ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, etc, etc, etc. They can map their favorite one to the action button if they want quick access.
I don’t see a major need for Apple to rush something out the door that doesn’t live up to their quality standard. From my use of LLMs, I still don’t think it lives up to the standards needed to hand out to a billion people and say “use this, you can trust it”. Even if their internal models were as good as the best ones on the market, I still think the press would treat it as another Apple Maps situation. I’m saying that with LLMs of today, not even the ones from the GPT-3 days.
Cook is too eager to say stuff that will please the stockholders, so he teased the AI stuff and had a big AI phone release before they had a product that was viable to release. That’s a theme with him.
Tablets; Soldering SSD's and ram to the motherboard.
Microsoft had tablets for a decade before the iPad came out. You rarely ever saw them in the wild. In fact, you still rarely see a Surface tablet. At least, I don't.
When I was at Rice University around the turn of the century, I remember playing with a large expensive monitor running a Windows computer. It was so futuristically fantastical that you could touch the screen to do things. Extremely clunky, but cool. Just a bit too tedious to do anything more than play with it, because trying to get actual work done on it all the time would have been a chore.
Many years later, I was working for a startup called kWhOURS in a little old house in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our target users were engineers used to paying thousands for the rugged and expensive Windows laptops we needed to deploy our Adobe AIR tablet app onto since they had a touchscreen. Still a clunky UI, but our software was usable. Then the iPad was released, and it was literally worlds apart, something people have long taken for granted. All of us, including Adobe, were taken by surprise, because all attempts at tablets prior to that were so far inferior to Apple's version, and competitors spent many years trying to catch up.
Tablet were pretty commonly used by delivery drivers and other employees of national corporations who came to my apartment building, but I don't know for sure that they ran Windows.
Who's buying those Samsung and Walmart ONN tablets by the truckload then? Tablets for kids are the equivalent of portable DVD players in the 2000s - a commodified device to play Netflix and Youtube on. There is no point in paying an Apple premium for something that's likely to be easily broken and need replacing.
That would be what is referred to as a market for lemons.
Apple tries extremely hard to be durably differentiated from products in the same category to avoid being dragged down in a price war to have cheap quality.
That in turn makes it hard for others to compete with them - you don't have differentiating features that would pull existing users off a mature product like iPad, and you can't come out with a cheaper product without discriminating consumers being concerned that it is fragile, clunky, and/or incomplete.
Weeeeelllll that was mainstream a long long time before they adopted it. And I'm still annoyed that the only devices with Lightning in our house are my Airpods en iPhone mini 12 and wife's iPhone 14 Pro.
Always need to attach an adapter to my Anker chargers and powerbanks.
It's funny, I was mad at them for getting rid of magsafe for years, and super excited when they brought it back with the AS macs. Used the cable for a year or two and then decided to simplify my life but just using USB C for everything.
I hope they can forgive me for doubting their benevolent wisdom, I promise never to do it again.
Same… I love MagSafe and would prefer to use it. I’m always worried about yanking the computer with the USB-C charger in and breaking the cable or the port.
But I have a bunch of USB-C stuff and so when I go to charge my laptop it’s just easier to find that cable and use it.
The battery life is sufficient that I never feel the need to leave it umbilical-ed to an outlet across the room. I'll leave it docked at my desk, or use it wirelessly, or charge it at a conference room table, or recharge it after the day is done in my hotel room as I sleep.
Thats the real difference - it now easily lasts until I would want to take an extended break anyway.
I might as well just use the official magsafe power cable that came with my macbook if I were to do that. The point was more convenience. I have a USB-C charger at my desk, at my bed, at the couch, etc. Anywhere I am I can just plug in without fiddling with other cables (or connectors). Ultimately I'm lazy and just want to simplify my cable management :)
Huh, I always thought it was the other way around (whether people liked it or not): ditching floppy disks, ditching cdroms, prioritizing BT over wired earphones, etc. I am glad, though, that they were forced to stick with USB-C if I'm not mistaken.
This is very much what apple wants you to believe; they have very good PR.
In actual fact, though, apple is a very effective fifth or sixth mover, and has been for a very long time. They watch everyone else fuck it up and get it wrong a bunch of times, and then throw scads of cash at threading the needle.
Bluetooth sucks, needing to charge headphones sucks. I'm still bitter :p
> I am glad, though, that they were forced to stick with USB-C if I'm not mistaken.
Now I have a boatload of apple chargers which will all be made into landfill for the good of the planet when i next upgrade my phone. Thank you so much.
Apple went USB-C on chargers starting in March 2016 (with USB-C to lightning cables on the iPad Pro). They started shipping them with phones that fall.
USB-A chargers are so brutally slow, but you can use a USB-A to C cable if you really want to spend 3+ hours charging a modern phone.
The switch prompted cables to go into the landfill. The USB-A chargers should have been there half a decade ago.
other people have a load of USB-C charging cables and are frustrated with having to buy Lightning ones and clutter their bags with more wires than necessary.
although Lightning was better-designed for being routinely used (pins on the outside of the wire end rather than inside the device, easy to clean and no protruding pieces in the device to damage/snap off), and the ideal scenario would have been making it an open standard
It's short term annoyance for a long term greater good. I'm not oblivious - but of course the impact on me is simply negative (and I'm not going to leave the walled garden anyway so what were we ever achieving really)
They did still overpromise and that should not be the way Apples does things (although it was hardly the first time; the AirPower mat was announced in 2017).
To be fair, all tech companies do this. Sell first, implement later, hype hype hype. Of course we’d like to think Apple was better, but well.. it isn’t.
Google certainly shipped Magic Cue as their tentpole new AI feature on the Pixel 10 despite it not working.
> “The right info, right when you need it.” That’s how Google describes Magic Cue, one of the most prominent new AI features on the Pixel 10 series. Using the power of artificial intelligence, Magic Cue is supposed to automatically suggest helpful info in phone calls, text messages, and other apps without you having to lift a finger.
However, the keyword there is “supposed” to... even when going out of my way to prompt Magic Cue, it either doesn’t work or does so little that I’m amazed Google made as big a deal about the feature as it did.
It’s just how Apple does things: They still have no folding phone, under-screen finger print scanner, under-screen front-cam, etc.