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Yes and no. Part of doing a technology leap is getting people to dream. There are always rough edges associated with the new technology, and in those times, it'

Yes and no. Part of doing a technology leap is getting people to dream. There are always rough edges associated with the new technology, and in those times, it's nice to be able to still enjoy the dream. As an example, consider the transition from MacOS 9 -> Mac OS X (public beta days). The tough challenge was what's below the hood, the new UNIX foundation, the NeXTStep APIs, being able to mitigate the conversion pain, etc. Yet in the midst of all these challenges, they added Aqua: an ambitious, over-the-top UI. Was it overkill? Yes. Did it get scaled back? Yes. Did it impact performance? Heck yeah it did. But it did one thing very well: it got people to dream of a (literally) shiny new Operating System. In the moments when Mail.app would get stuck or when one felt the absence of many Classic features, seeing the shiny OS helped sugar-coat the transition and from a UX perspective, it helped people stick with it until the bugs got ironed out.

amelius 9y ago
True, but in this case it's a sugar coating without any cake below it.
- briandear 9y ago
  [citation needed] — how do you know what Apple has or doesn’t have? People are making assumptions based on leaks — leaks, that wouldn’t surprise me if they were actually coordinated and on purpose designed to mislead the media. Five random Titan engineers wouldn’t just start talking to the Times. Not if they wanted to stay working at Apple. So it makes you wonder if their “leaking” is designed to mislead.
  - sjm-lbm 9y ago
    That is, of course, at least partially true. However, in the OSX analogy above, Apple had a very good platform (NeXTSTEP) that had been commercially available and proven in real-world use for ~a decade before they started modifying it to become OSX. There is no similarly mature self-driving car platform for them to be working from, and we can be sure of that.

amelius 9y ago

True, but in this case it's a sugar coating without any cake below it.

briandear 9y ago
[citation needed] — how do you know what Apple has or doesn’t have? People are making assumptions based on leaks — leaks, that wouldn’t surprise me if they were actually coordinated and on purpose designed to mislead the media. Five random Titan engineers wouldn’t just start talking to the Times. Not if they wanted to stay working at Apple. So it makes you wonder if their “leaking” is designed to mislead.
- sjm-lbm 9y ago
  That is, of course, at least partially true. However, in the OSX analogy above, Apple had a very good platform (NeXTSTEP) that had been commercially available and proven in real-world use for ~a decade before they started modifying it to become OSX. There is no similarly mature self-driving car platform for them to be working from, and we can be sure of that.