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I'm not so sure about this. They innovate slower, but they still innovate. Sure, without Jobs there isn't one person who's a stand-in for the customer, but ther
by Spartan-S63 2y ago
I'm not so sure about this. They innovate slower, but they still innovate. Sure, without Jobs there isn't one person who's a stand-in for the customer, but there are still plenty of folks at Apple representing the customer and trying to build real solutions to real problems.
As a hardware company, there's a constant need to produce the next iteration of device. Same with software. So you get pretty lackluster year-on-year improvements, but over a 2-3 year cycle, it's pretty impressive. They seem to be refocusing on software quality, which should show some innovation on that front. Apple Vision Pro was their attempt at "the next big thing" and it just didn't quite get there. They probably believed VR had soaked in the market long enough that there was a majority waiting for the best version of it. They sort of missed here, but sort of didn't. There's potential for spatial computing, but the hardware isn't quite there yet.
On the topic of AI/LLMs, they've always had machine learning in their stack, but they haven't highlighted it as something revolutionary and they certainly haven't referred to it as "AI" (because, well, it really isn't artificial intelligence). Right now, most AI products are just wrappers around chatbots. Chatbots are an okay experience, but not ideal. That particular interface, in my opinion, gives an impression of infallibility to these products when it couldn't be farther from the truth. They're nifty, but the current generation of AI products is primitive, rough, and in some cases dangerous.
Apple's caution on AI is actually refreshing. I'm optimistic that the focus won't be on providing AI as first-class product but rather as an augment that makes their existing technology better. Case in point is the improvement in iOS 17's predictive keyboard. They shipped a small language model that improved predictive text leaps and bounds (though, still primitive).