8 ms·

I know being late to the game and doing the tech "right" in terms of design and usability is kinda Apple's thing, but lately it seems like they have been only p

by paxys 3y ago

I know being late to the game and doing the tech "right" in terms of design and usability is kinda Apple's thing, but lately it seems like they have been only picking areas that weren't successful for a reason, like insurmountable technical difficulties or lack of customer interest, and no amount of Apple's design or marketing magic can fix that. See – self driving, AR/VR, smart speakers, folding phones, now home robotics. I know for a fact that they have been hiring a bunch of engineers from Google's Everyday Robots division (which shut down last year), but I really can't see why the same people will be successful under a new corporate overlord.

petre 3y ago
Good luck to them. Xiaomi has been already doing it for years at approachable prices. They now also have a car, the Su 7, a project which Apple gave up on. Of course, it possibly comes with th CCP/PLA embedded spyware.
rain_iwakura 3y ago
that failure is much more a leadership issue than a talent issue. Google was founded by PhD students and it shows. (I am one.) It's like a giant lab where things get prototyped and innovations are pushed, but where product ends up sidelined by bloated admin (how many levels are there and why does it feel like an MMORPG i.e World of Warcraft) and lack of clear capitalist vision (I'm actually anti-capitalist but even I can admit to this LOL). Honestly, it sounds exactly like a university. I used to think Google was slated to be the king of AI back when I starting out because they had ALL the talent (even OpenAI is its offshoot if you consider early employees and Ilya himself). I feel like it was so lateral that it was a loose federation of small tribes of smart people that live under the same banner, but not a tight organization where each team had its purpose within a giant mechanism. But as the saying goes too many cooks spoil the broth. Apple is WAY different internally. For all its dreariness and corpo atmosphere (not allowed to talk to each other, teams siloed and laser focused on shipping a specific product) they have much clearer vision of what will sell and what not, usual company missteps (AR glasses) notwithstanding.
7thaccount 3y ago
I also can't imagine a home robotics use case that I would get excited over. Can anyone think of anything? I would guess any new product would be more complex, less efficient, and a security risk. It'll be cool and trendy for a few months and then die off. Just like the Alexa and Google speakers that can tell you the weather or adjust your lights...is it REALLY that useful outside of entertaining your nieces and nephews? My guess is that they'll make some revenue from collecting user data and selling it to data brokers or something. Edit: someone below said laundry folding robot. I'd see that as useful.
- ravelfan 3y ago
  We need a word/concept for technology that has just slightly more utility than a Minsky/Shannon's useless machine but that small amount of utility obfuscates the actual uselessness of the technology.
- rustcleaner 3y ago
  >I also can't imagine a home robotics use case that I would get excited over. Well, there's always the all-in-one washer/dryer combo which also does auto-foldi... >Edit: someone below said laundry folding robot. I'd see that as useful. I mean there is the automated chef kitchen machine the size of a large fridge which cooks dozens of meals which all intersect with the unit-prepared ingredients. Essentially a compact home version of what you'll all soon be seeing at fast food joints all over. I myself am flipping out about Flippy™!
- exe34 3y ago
  I imagine an ageing population with social isolation might be the golden ticket for this kind of work.
- nostromo 3y ago
  I'm shocked by your comment. Everyone that doesn't enjoy cleaning, cooking, doing laundry, mowing the lawn, or taking out the trash would LOVE a home robot that really works. Of course, these are very hard problems to take on -- much harder than a "smart" light switch -- but the market is absolutely there.
nostromo 3y ago
I like that Apple is taking on big hard futuristic problems, like AR/VR, AI, and home robotics. But from a business perspective it seems unlikely to be successful. Apple could "easily" sell a luxury car and TVs and print many billions of dollars right away. They wouldn't need unproven tech -- they could just use their design skills along with vertical integration to have very nice products that people would want to buy. Apple should eschew some of Silicon Valley's obsessions, like self-driving cars, which most people do not care about at all, and instead focus on their strengths.
- azinman2 3y ago
  Sounds like you’ve never been in a Waymo. It’s so much better than an Uber it’s not even funny, and that’s worth many billions right there.
  - layer8 3y ago
    Apple just recently cancelled their car project after ten years of R&D and spending over $10 billion.
    - PopePompus 3y ago
      But Waymo is essentially building an automated taxi service, not self driving cars to be sold to consumers. Replacing taxis would probably never produce the margins that Apple expects. Self driving cars would only make sense for Apple if they could produce what Elon Musk has claimed Tesla would produce (and probably never will) - level 4+ driving.
npunt 3y ago
One thing about Apple is things can make sense for them to explore that don't make sense for others to. They have a big enough ecosystem, enough cash to do R&D on an idea for decades, and a culture of killing things that aren't good enough that make them an ideal place to determine whether ideas are a conceptual dead end versus just haven't been executed well enough (or tied to the right ecosystem to make them work). Foldables make sense for Apple to explore because even if it's ~5% likely to be able to be productized, the return is measured in the tens of billions. Smart speakers were comparatively cheap and are probably profitable, so even if they're not a huge market they made sense. AR/VR remains to be seen. Meta's still learning how to build hardware and operating systems and still learning how to sell actual products, so they're probably not the right ones to test concept risk when they already have so much execution risk. They also don't have the leverage or insertion point that Apple does if e.g. AR/VR turns into an alternative to computers & iPhones instead of an alternative to consoles. It may also be that Vision Pro is just a prelude to AR that ship in ~2035 but lays so much groundwork that nobody stands a chance at competing by the time the tech is ready, letting Apple secure the next trillion dollar product. Cars were expensive and cancelled, that's the one that required Apple to stretch the most in terms of both brand and execution. In your Google example, remember they invented transformers and yet did nothing with them. Any failure in Google's robotics efforts are likely due to Google having an absolutely horrible record of shipping and standing behind products. I wouldn't trust a Google robot because I wouldn't trust a Google product.
- PopePompus 3y ago
  Yup, Google has the attention span of a gnat. I've used Pixel Phones for years, and I wouldn't be even slightly surprised to see that entire product line dropped tomorrow. I'm very glad to see Apple's Vision Pro, because I believe that if it succeeds it will be wonderful, and if it fails it means the AR/VR product category will never (well, not for a very long time at least) be anything but an unimportant niche product, as it is now.
  - mamamis 3y ago
    I wonder if it is because of how its promotion package works. A middle manager thinks up of a product and executes in it. It launches, the manager get a promotion, and then it gets kill for not getting enough users. By then the manager got their pay raise and no longer needs the project.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
Not playing everywhere is an existential risk. Because IT is so integrative, if anyone gets a huge leg up in any sector, Apple risks getting shut out in a lot of other sectors. Spatial Computing/iVision is, for example, a claim in vr. It gives them some exposure to the market, some ability to extend & integrate their existing application/computing ecosystem into this medium. Ditto for all the other pieces; they're all integrative. Smart speakers work with airplay. iWatch works with iPhone works with iOS. The close integration lets them rebuff innovation in any other field: no one small can come along and build the next VR headset or the best watch to compete with Apple in any of these sectors, because no one can integrate like Apple. No one else has all the products. You have to have complete over the horizon horizontal control to keep your intense market power, and Apple is invested above all in there never being a chink in that armor, in making sure they can completely dictate the shape of all products by producing & owning all the products themselves. This is Apple. Hence, Apple has to dabble everywhere. It maintains the most, it prevents real competition from forming, and it earns them a couple % revenue here and there to boot. Expressing an entirely different brand of cynicism, I'd also ask: where else could Apple look to expand into? None of these sectors has been a runaway success. But it's not like Apple's missing the boat on some massive new tech that a huge new Total Addressable Market. It's been absent from Crypto and AI but generally it's just expanding wherever there's any opportunity, and why not when you have the cash & when any sector could become huge?
- nxobject 3y ago
  That's true, _and_ I think there's a tendency to think that Steve Jobs only launched things he knew were immediate hits – when products that look influential in retrospect, like iPods and the MacBook Air, took a few years to really take off.
nxobject 3y ago
For what it's worth, I don't know whether we'll ever know all of the Jobs-era skunkworks projects that were shut down before they ever saw the limelight. The lid on the rumors was much tighter back then.
ssivark 3y ago
A substantial fraction of households that can afford Apple devices likely owns several of them. So if Apple wants to multiply their revenue, they need to create products with wide appeal with margins (in raw numbers -- not just percentages) comparable to their current offerings i.e. margins of $1000+ per household. That might help understand the kind of products they are pursuing. Apple is uniquely situated (cash surplus, deep tech + manufacturing expertise, consumer product + marketing expertise) to take on such multi-year product-oriented R&D. Even if one out of N (serious) attempts pays off, the scale of success will justify the amortized ROI.
ksec 3y ago
Because they Need to do R&D and spend some money on this category. They also have way too much cash with Execs having very little idea of where Apple should be heading. Tim Cook has zero product understanding. That means he has to rely on engineers. Most of the original product people that were with Apple ( the design team ) has all left Apple. So what makes a successful company more successful? The sales and marketing people.

by paxys 3y ago

petre 3y ago

Good luck to them. Xiaomi has been already doing it for years at approachable prices. They now also have a car, the Su 7, a project which Apple gave up on. Of course, it possibly comes with th CCP/PLA embedded spyware.

rain_iwakura 3y ago

that failure is much more a leadership issue than a talent issue. Google was founded by PhD students and it shows. (I am one.) It's like a giant lab where things get prototyped and innovations are pushed, but where product ends up sidelined by bloated admin (how many levels are there and why does it feel like an MMORPG i.e World of Warcraft) and lack of clear capitalist vision (I'm actually anti-capitalist but even I can admit to this LOL). Honestly, it sounds exactly like a university. I used to think Google was slated to be the king of AI back when I starting out because they had ALL the talent (even OpenAI is its offshoot if you consider early employees and Ilya himself). I feel like it was so lateral that it was a loose federation of small tribes of smart people that live under the same banner, but not a tight organization where each team had its purpose within a giant mechanism. But as the saying goes too many cooks spoil the broth. Apple is WAY different internally. For all its dreariness and corpo atmosphere (not allowed to talk to each other, teams siloed and laser focused on shipping a specific product) they have much clearer vision of what will sell and what not, usual company missteps (AR glasses) notwithstanding.

7thaccount 3y ago

I also can't imagine a home robotics use case that I would get excited over. Can anyone think of anything? I would guess any new product would be more complex, less efficient, and a security risk. It'll be cool and trendy for a few months and then die off. Just like the Alexa and Google speakers that can tell you the weather or adjust your lights...is it REALLY that useful outside of entertaining your nieces and nephews? My guess is that they'll make some revenue from collecting user data and selling it to data brokers or something. Edit: someone below said laundry folding robot. I'd see that as useful.

ravelfan 3y ago
We need a word/concept for technology that has just slightly more utility than a Minsky/Shannon's useless machine but that small amount of utility obfuscates the actual uselessness of the technology.
rustcleaner 3y ago
>I also can't imagine a home robotics use case that I would get excited over. Well, there's always the all-in-one washer/dryer combo which also does auto-foldi... >Edit: someone below said laundry folding robot. I'd see that as useful. I mean there is the automated chef kitchen machine the size of a large fridge which cooks dozens of meals which all intersect with the unit-prepared ingredients. Essentially a compact home version of what you'll all soon be seeing at fast food joints all over. I myself am flipping out about Flippy™!
exe34 3y ago
I imagine an ageing population with social isolation might be the golden ticket for this kind of work.
nostromo 3y ago
I'm shocked by your comment. Everyone that doesn't enjoy cleaning, cooking, doing laundry, mowing the lawn, or taking out the trash would LOVE a home robot that really works. Of course, these are very hard problems to take on -- much harder than a "smart" light switch -- but the market is absolutely there.

nostromo 3y ago

I like that Apple is taking on big hard futuristic problems, like AR/VR, AI, and home robotics. But from a business perspective it seems unlikely to be successful. Apple could "easily" sell a luxury car and TVs and print many billions of dollars right away. They wouldn't need unproven tech -- they could just use their design skills along with vertical integration to have very nice products that people would want to buy. Apple should eschew some of Silicon Valley's obsessions, like self-driving cars, which most people do not care about at all, and instead focus on their strengths.

azinman2 3y ago
Sounds like you’ve never been in a Waymo. It’s so much better than an Uber it’s not even funny, and that’s worth many billions right there.
- layer8 3y ago
  Apple just recently cancelled their car project after ten years of R&D and spending over $10 billion.
  - PopePompus 3y ago
    But Waymo is essentially building an automated taxi service, not self driving cars to be sold to consumers. Replacing taxis would probably never produce the margins that Apple expects. Self driving cars would only make sense for Apple if they could produce what Elon Musk has claimed Tesla would produce (and probably never will) - level 4+ driving.

npunt 3y ago

One thing about Apple is things can make sense for them to explore that don't make sense for others to. They have a big enough ecosystem, enough cash to do R&D on an idea for decades, and a culture of killing things that aren't good enough that make them an ideal place to determine whether ideas are a conceptual dead end versus just haven't been executed well enough (or tied to the right ecosystem to make them work). Foldables make sense for Apple to explore because even if it's ~5% likely to be able to be productized, the return is measured in the tens of billions. Smart speakers were comparatively cheap and are probably profitable, so even if they're not a huge market they made sense. AR/VR remains to be seen. Meta's still learning how to build hardware and operating systems and still learning how to sell actual products, so they're probably not the right ones to test concept risk when they already have so much execution risk. They also don't have the leverage or insertion point that Apple does if e.g. AR/VR turns into an alternative to computers & iPhones instead of an alternative to consoles. It may also be that Vision Pro is just a prelude to AR that ship in ~2035 but lays so much groundwork that nobody stands a chance at competing by the time the tech is ready, letting Apple secure the next trillion dollar product. Cars were expensive and cancelled, that's the one that required Apple to stretch the most in terms of both brand and execution. In your Google example, remember they invented transformers and yet did nothing with them. Any failure in Google's robotics efforts are likely due to Google having an absolutely horrible record of shipping and standing behind products. I wouldn't trust a Google robot because I wouldn't trust a Google product.

PopePompus 3y ago
Yup, Google has the attention span of a gnat. I've used Pixel Phones for years, and I wouldn't be even slightly surprised to see that entire product line dropped tomorrow. I'm very glad to see Apple's Vision Pro, because I believe that if it succeeds it will be wonderful, and if it fails it means the AR/VR product category will never (well, not for a very long time at least) be anything but an unimportant niche product, as it is now.
- mamamis 3y ago
  I wonder if it is because of how its promotion package works. A middle manager thinks up of a product and executes in it. It launches, the manager get a promotion, and then it gets kill for not getting enough users. By then the manager got their pay raise and no longer needs the project.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

Not playing everywhere is an existential risk. Because IT is so integrative, if anyone gets a huge leg up in any sector, Apple risks getting shut out in a lot of other sectors. Spatial Computing/iVision is, for example, a claim in vr. It gives them some exposure to the market, some ability to extend & integrate their existing application/computing ecosystem into this medium. Ditto for all the other pieces; they're all integrative. Smart speakers work with airplay. iWatch works with iPhone works with iOS. The close integration lets them rebuff innovation in any other field: no one small can come along and build the next VR headset or the best watch to compete with Apple in any of these sectors, because no one can integrate like Apple. No one else has all the products. You have to have complete over the horizon horizontal control to keep your intense market power, and Apple is invested above all in there never being a chink in that armor, in making sure they can completely dictate the shape of all products by producing & owning all the products themselves. This is Apple. Hence, Apple has to dabble everywhere. It maintains the most, it prevents real competition from forming, and it earns them a couple % revenue here and there to boot. Expressing an entirely different brand of cynicism, I'd also ask: where else could Apple look to expand into? None of these sectors has been a runaway success. But it's not like Apple's missing the boat on some massive new tech that a huge new Total Addressable Market. It's been absent from Crypto and AI but generally it's just expanding wherever there's any opportunity, and why not when you have the cash & when any sector could become huge?

nxobject 3y ago
That's true, _and_ I think there's a tendency to think that Steve Jobs only launched things he knew were immediate hits – when products that look influential in retrospect, like iPods and the MacBook Air, took a few years to really take off.

nxobject 3y ago

For what it's worth, I don't know whether we'll ever know all of the Jobs-era skunkworks projects that were shut down before they ever saw the limelight. The lid on the rumors was much tighter back then.

ssivark 3y ago

A substantial fraction of households that can afford Apple devices likely owns several of them. So if Apple wants to multiply their revenue, they need to create products with wide appeal with margins (in raw numbers -- not just percentages) comparable to their current offerings i.e. margins of $1000+ per household. That might help understand the kind of products they are pursuing. Apple is uniquely situated (cash surplus, deep tech + manufacturing expertise, consumer product + marketing expertise) to take on such multi-year product-oriented R&D. Even if one out of N (serious) attempts pays off, the scale of success will justify the amortized ROI.

ksec 3y ago

Because they Need to do R&D and spend some money on this category. They also have way too much cash with Execs having very little idea of where Apple should be heading. Tim Cook has zero product understanding. That means he has to rely on engineers. Most of the original product people that were with Apple ( the design team ) has all left Apple. So what makes a successful company more successful? The sales and marketing people.