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One fun aspect of Apple's moon shots is tracing back tech dependencies, which they often ship earlier permutations of for years in mainstream products (see: M1)
by CharlesW 3y ago
One fun aspect of Apple's moon shots is tracing back tech dependencies, which they often ship earlier permutations of for years in mainstream products (see: M1). In the case of Apple Car that will include computational image capture¹, sensor fusion², lidar³, and now the R1 SPU (Sensor Processing Unit) used in Apple Vision. What else?
¹ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/01/shot-on-iphone-12-portraits-cityscapes-the-night-sky-and-more/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/01/shot-on-iphone-12-por... ² https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coremotion/cmmotionmanager https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coremotion/cmmotio... ³ https://www.apple.com/pl/newsroom/2020/03/apple-unveils-new-ipad-pro-with-lidar-scanner-and-trackpad-support-in-ipados/ https://www.apple.com/pl/newsroom/2020/03/apple-unveils-new-...
- RicoElectrico 3y agoI think you meant iterations, not permutations.
- xattt 3y agoWhy not both? It’s iterative improvement, but also combining bits and pieces.
- SnazzyJeff 3y ago[dead]
- reikonomusha 3y agoPedantically, a permutation is a rearrangement of a given set of pieces. (Mathematically, any bijection between a set and itself.)
- ducttapecrown 3y agoNormal language and mathematical definitions are often orthogonal!
- mlyle 3y agoYah, so Apple is working on dependencies for a moonshot... and choosing sets of those dependencies to put into other products. (Perhaps combinations, perhaps permutations, perhaps something in-between how much of an ordering there is on those pieces).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- snowwrestler 3y agoThe Vision Pro in its entirety seems like a cog in a much larger strategy. It seems like a platform to test ideas, concepts, and reactions related to “spacial computing” that will show up in much higher-volume products later on… as opposed to being a high-volume product itself. Essentially like a lot of other people I’m wondering “how many of these clunky ugly things could they sell?” But thinking that maybe they know that too, and they’re working toward something more compelling.
- amelius 3y agoLike what? My guess is they just wait for the market to figure it out, then pull a Sherlock and corner that market.
- crooked-v 3y agoFor me, it's very obviously step 1 of their long-term plan to have everyone wearing Apple Glasses in 10-15 years.
- amelius 3y agoWell it is somewhat obvious by now that big companies are all after our eyeballs, so you could be right.
- paul7986 3y agoApple Glasses is something they should already be working on and releasing sooner then later. Meta's most recent released Smart Glasses are solid and work solid especially for taking pictures and videos (just using them to film my ski runs this weekend; use them few times a week as my sunglasses and to snap pics). The smart features on this latest addition aren't terribly reliable though and need user experience work (i.e. audio just starts playing an inopportune times.. annoying).
- crooked-v 3y ago> Apple Glasses is something they should already be working on and releasing sooner then later. My point is that AVP is step 1 of working on and releasing Apple Glasses. Rather than start with whatever minimal features they could fit into wraparound shades, they started with the feature set they wanted, built the minimum hardware that could do that, and from here out will keep iterating and improving until they eventually fit it into a pair of glasses. In other words, it only looks like and functions like a VR headset by accident; the form is a side effect of the current hardware, and the VR functionality is just a nice bonus on top of what they actually wanted to focus on.
- zitterbewegung 3y agoThe greatest pivot was Project Purple which eventually was revisited as a tablet (iPad) but pivoted to the iPhone[1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone
- genman 3y agoEdit: I remembered it wrong. It was LG Prada that came before iPhone - that's the reason why iPhone did not feel completely novel at the time. iPod Touch was released few months later and was very similar to iPhone minus the cellular connection - a logical cheaper followup to the iPhone.
- 1_1xdev1 3y agoI think the iPhone came first before the iPod touch
- ricktdotorg 3y agoyes -- iPhone announced in June 2007, iPod Touch was September 2007.
- macintux 3y agoNitpick: iPhone was announced in January, started selling over the summer.
- madeofpalk 3y agoThere was no touch screen iPod before the iPhone. iPhone came before the iPod Touch or the iPod nano (the one with the small touch screen).
- eigen 3y agowhile the LG Prada phone was announced (though not for US) about a month before iPhone [1], it was not available until after the iPhone announce so it not like it was a known item at that point. However, it was available (not in US) [2] a few months before iPhone was available so maybe there were people that used LG Prada then iPhone so a touchscreen phone was not completely novel. however, the LG Prada was >$800 at launch so it seems that the impression was fairly limited to people who would spend $800 then $600 a few months later in 2007. additionally, while the LG Prada had a touchscreen it wasnt really a smart phone. there was no full keyboard, texting and contact entry was with T9 [3]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070108070435/http://www.lge.com/about/press_archive/detail/AB_NARCH%7CMENU_1_20302.jhtml https://web.archive.org/web/20070108070435/http://www.lge.co... [2] https://macdailynews.com/2007/01/19/lg_unveils_iphone_like_prada_mobile_phone/ https://macdailynews.com/2007/01/19/lg_unveils_iphone_like_p... [3] https://www.gsmarena.com/lg_ke850_prada-review-145p2.php https://www.gsmarena.com/lg_ke850_prada-review-145p2.php
- runjake 3y ago> they often ship earlier permutations of for years in mainstream products (see: M1). I still get a kick out of the ARM transition happening laregely in public with the T2-chip Intel Macs. Vast majorities of a T2 system ran off the ARM-based T2 for its ISA.
- whynotminot 3y agoDo you have any further reading to provide about what all the T2 was doing in those Macs? I too have long suspected that the T2 was Apple playing with transition right in front of us, but would love a more comprehensive look at what all that chip was doing. I know it was providing the Secure Enclave, some hardware encode/decode media blocks, and I think FileVault for the SSD. But would be curious to know if it was even more than that.
- dwaite 3y agosecure storage/secure boot while acting as the SSD controller, crypto functions via the Secure Enclave with TouchID processing. Video codec for encoding/decoding H.264/H.265. Also handled the hardware for the microphone/speakers, camera, light sensors so that these would be isolated from the main OS. It handled Hey Siri voice command recognition. It also had independent power/sleep levels from the rest of the system, and handled power/thermal management from what I understand. Probably because it didn't operate as the NIC, they didn't move system/application background tasks like watching for push notifications or checking email.
- zaptrem 3y agoDidn’t it also power the Touch Bar which was technically a whole separate computer? I remember people booting other OSes on it.
- philistine 3y agoYup. It did. To me the transition happened in front of our eyes because the T2 chip was Apple stopping development of new hardware features on Intel. All that came to T2 could have been done on Intel but Apple was already committed to the switch so they started the work early and made it so they didn’t have to do it twice.