Both of these products could be expected from any well run company. They are both very polished versions of something that already existed. The direction to optimize in was already clear. No one wants to compare Apple to a generic well run company, they want to compare Apple to itself a decade or two ago.
Others have said that if Jobs were still alive, AR would be ubiquitous by now, and everyone would have a stylish pair of Apple glasses. I think that is exactly right.
Instead there is an incredibly expensive VR scuba mask, with relatively little adoption. It's certainly not changing the way we use physical spaces and transforming society, which is something a previous Apple could have pulled off. Users and developers need to be shown how to get value from something radically new, and Apple hasn't done that recently.
I think the Apple Silicon transition is far from something that could be expected from 'any' company. Microsoft already tried something similar with ARM Surface machines and the whole attempt was an absolute failure.
> I think that is exactly right.
I think that's entirely wrong. The hardware just isn't there yet! The AVP is the closest you can get to real "AR glasses" at the moment (as distinct from the Xreal 'non-context-aware screen overlay with a tiny FoV and fixed position'), but it turns out the hardware needed for that is >1 lb of stuff.
Developers working for Apple platforms are used to their software being broken by Apple every once in a while, so they need to update it to match the latest OS’s expectations. In the Windows world, 30-year-old Win32 apps can still run on Windows 11, as long as they don’t use any egregious hacks. And if they stop working on an Arm PC, Microsoft will be to blame.
It’s not even new. Apple transitioned from PowerPC chips to intel and basically did the same thing again. It’s a technical achievement to be sure. Apple users are unfortunately used to ditching software because backward compatibility isn’t something they strive for. Old Powerpc, 32 bit iOS/Mac osx software for example.
It is a failure because contrary to Apple, the people on Microsoft platforms value backwards compatibility, that is why it is holds 70% of the global desktop market.
Yeah this is a bonkers take.
AR is vaporware. The form factor sucks, the power requirements to do anything meaningful are too high and there just isn't a compelling use case for most of the population. I'd argue that Vision Pro makes the most sense out of anything, being more work rather than consumer oriented.
AR is a folly. Meta almost tanked themselves by going all in and all they managed were a tech demo.
As for the other point, well ipod and iphone were both just "polished versions of what already existed". Thats kind of what Apple does...very very well. AirPods are bigger than Spotify. Apple Silicon was about optimizing hardware, software and supply chain, its really a thing of beauty how they managed to pull it off and completely disentangle themselves from Intel and Nvidia.
Even Jobs wasn’t perfect. NeXT machines were technically amazing and also beautiful but they never really found many customers. He also thought the Segway would transform society but it ended up being sort of a joke and best known for being used by fat mall cops.
NeXT software though became the base of OS X.
BTW Mac Pros did not find many customers either. I bet Silicon Graphics did not sell very many boxes; it was important who bought these boxes.
Yes but the software wasn’t selling until it was forced upon the Apple customer base. You could buy NeXTSTEP for an Intel PC in the 1990s but nobody did.
The right people bought NeXT though. Carmack and his team developed Doom on NeXT computers [1], and the result has profoundly changed the mass-market PC scene.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(1993_video_game)#Engine
In addition, NeXT had a successful pivot to selling a web server framework named WebObjects, which had many big-name customers such as Dell (which infamously abandoned WebObjects once Apple purchased NeXT due to the optics of having an Apple competitor’s web store backed by an Apple product).
It’s conceivable that had Apple not purchased NeXT, even though NeXT probably would’ve ended up getting purchased by another company, its technology would’ve likely lived on. Perhaps a 1998 or 1999 NeXT could have open-sourced the OpenStep API and WebObjects as a Hail Mary move…talk about a completely different “what if” path for the Linux desktop and server!
You're missing OpenSTEP from that picture.
On which NeXT and Sun collaborated on, and thanks to that collaboration, and WebObjects (Java port), Java and Java EE came to be.
Patrick Naughton on what actually influenced Java's semantics and object model,
https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html
Distributed Objects Everywhere genesis, and its evolution into Enterprise JavaBeans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere
While in parallel, NeXT refactored WebObjects into Java as well.
> Both of these products could be expected from any well run company.
I was not expecting Apple silicon from Apple, I didn’t even realize they’d been hiring chip designers for the past decade before that.
Personal computing really sucked before the mid 2000s. You had windows computers which were cheap and fast, but had lots of bugs and were hard to use and didn’t do low energy very well, you had Linux as a powerful novelty, you had expensive well designed Mac’s that were sort of slow but with better battery life. It took Apple’s intel transition to fix all of that, and I basically thought it was finally done and personal computing all of a sudden got very boring. But today I’m running mid-sized LLM inference on a Max 3, and it’s all very exciting again.
What is ARs 1000 songs in your pocket moment though?
There is no thing that needs the ubiquity that Jobs would have channelled the idea into.
In my opinion it would just never have seen the light of day.
> Others have said that if Jobs were still alive, AR would be ubiquitous by now, and everyone would have a stylish pair of Apple glasses. I think that is exactly right.
I don't think this is true. If anything, we'd have ipads with no stylus. Steve Jobs was a visionary, but most importantly a good business man. It's not like everything that made the iPhone was in house and strictly an Apple invention. Apple was lucky in that it bought a company that had developed the multi-touch technology the phone so heavily relied on. Without that, the iPhone wasn't going to happen when it did.
Additionally, a lot was sacrificed to make the iPhone happen. People took some serious physical and mental tolls in order to help ship that product. Marriages crumbled. The pressure was ruthless.
AR has a lot of limitations, that's what they were trying to sidestep. To be able to take a frame of the environment, composite the virtual frame and the real one in unison with various blending ops at your disposal. And finally, present the user with a properly composited image that works anywhere.
Now, if you use multiple lenses, with one masking in grayscale the real frame positioned just before the lens in which you project the virtual frame, you can do some limited blending ops. But it's quite difficult to deal with parallax if the lenses aren't glued together, or even then with refraction.
Apple took a very conservative approach. And made it to market. Now look at the competition. Sure, they have concepts with good compositing, but the ones in the market right now aren't able to produce the same imagery that Apple Vision is capable of.
Maybe I'm wrong, haven't looked at the market in some months, but I always thought of the Apple Vision as a very pragmatic design trying to circumvent AR limitations by being a VR headset.
Most generic well run companies would never take the risk & expense entailed in a platform transition like Intel => Apple Silicon.
You might argue that generic companies are doing that now as we see Windows ARM laptops finally, but I think they only got the courage to do that because Apple went first.
I mean there was Windows on ARM laptops previously. The first Snapdragon 835/8cx/7c Windows laptops predate the M1 lineup. They certainly weren't POPULAR or FAST but they existed.
https://www.cnet.com/reviews/asus-novago-review/
isn't the VR Scuba mask dead now?
I think Apple is hitting a wall that most tech companies are hitting. New gadgets aren't really improving our lives.
We have the internet on our phones, Now the internet is a wasteland.
Probably the biggest cultural innovation of the last 5 years has been podcasts and that's just gussied up radio.
Podcasts were arguably mainstream back in 2014 with Serial.
They definitely were, I remember everyone and their grandmother listening to Serial.
And Apple was involved in that as well, even if it was not planed. The pod in podcast coming from iPod after all.