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Thoughts and Observations in the Wake of Apple's 'It's Glowtime' Keynote

talldayo 2y ago
> That fat Nano was quirky. It was also, in hindsight, obviously a mistake. I’m quite sure that inside Apple there were designers and product people who thought it was a mistake before it shipped. Steve Jobs shipped it anyway, surely because his gut told him it was the right thing to try. Tim Cook’s Apple doesn’t make mistakes like that. Look, I'm willing to accept a certain level of fanboyish Apple defense, especially from Gruber. It does seem like a bit of a stretch to say the fat iPod Nano was a failure for selling 10 million+ units but the Vision Pro somehow wasn't a mistake by comparison.
- itronitron 2y ago
  hopefully at some point they'll return to non-fat iphones as well
- emsy 2y ago
  I love the fat nano. I was said when its battery died. I love my iPhone Mini (besides iOS being a bit too dumbed down still). Apple should make more hardware for niches.
- MBCook 2y ago
  He didn’t say it was a flop. I know people who liked it. But Apple obviously didn’t think it was the right track because they abandoned it and went back towards the previous form factor. I’d say the Vision Pro is different. I’m not sure they got the form factor wrong. Maybe some adjustments needed, but I don’t think the core design is wrong. Also a ton of the Vision Pros issues have nothing to do with the physical design. The cost is massive to get components (mostly the screens) that can achieve what they want. Their normal profit margins makes it worse. OS and App Store policies blunt the utility. Refusing to let developers have them until release meant no/few killer apps. US only for 6 months made all that worse. In my mind it’s a totally different thing.
- tpmoney 2y ago
  He doesn't say the iPod Nano was a flop, he says it was a mistake. And there is a difference. For example, the iPhone 4 was a mistake (remember antenna gate?) and yet, it sold plenty units. But the 4s antennas were a new design and by the 5 they'd started moving the antennas back inside the phone. The butterfly keyboard and the touch bar were mistakes. Their models still sold millions of units.
cyberax 2y ago
Things that haven't changed: mafia-like 30% cut of app developers' income. No access to privileged APIs for NFC or JITs.
- TechRemarker 2y ago
  Google and Steam charge 30% for their top rate as well right? So assuming you are referring to tech companies and not Apple in particular?
  - cyberax 2y ago
    Google allows side-loading, and Steam is completely optional. You can avoid it, even on Valve's own handheld.
    - theshrike79 2y ago
      Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo take a cut too and you can't sideload.
      - cyberax 2y ago
        For consoles, not general purpose computers. Microsoft's cut is also much more sane.
        EMIRELADERO 2y ago
        The "general-purpose" differentiation is completely artificial and shouldn't be used except in very narrow circumstances (for example, when discussing the economic impact of the entire mobile market) The only thing that should matter is the device's raw computing power. The user should have the same level of control over code execution that the manufacturer has post-sale. That should apply to every single appliance and product on the market that uses a chip.
        cyberax 2y ago
iorrus 2y ago
Obvious counter argument is the Vision Pro
- gwbas1c 2y ago
  That's like the Lisa. It needs Steve to make it palatable to everyone.
- ggrelet 2y ago
  No mention of it in the article, even though they wrote: > But it’s also why Cook’s Apple delivers fewer surprises. The delight is still there, but there’s less amazement. The Vision Pro is literally mind blowing.
  - MBCook 2y ago
    But it’s not changing the world. It seems to be doing very poorly, at least partially due to Apple’s policies. The price obviously doesn’t help.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    > The Vision Pro is literally mind blowing. Mind-blowingly stupid? I used an Oculus Rift DK2 in 2014; the fact that Apple could brute-force a similar product with no market fit and slightly more "magic" in it hasn't impressed me the slightest. Add in the fact that it's slower than an iPad and costs as much as a used car and the thing is dead-on-arrival. Meta ate Apple's lunch with $500 headsets and Valve dominated the high-end with better controllers and software for years. The only way Apple can create market fit is by inventing a new price segment (read: Stupid Expensive) and leveraging their branding to do the heavy lifting. Apple dodged Khronos standards for years, avoided OpenXR during it's development, and got cut off from SteamVR after Valve gave up engineering support. They have so many loose ends to tie up that it's kinda hilarious anyone thinks Apple is a competitor in this industry, at this point. Vision Pro isn't an iPhone moment, it's a Lisa moment. We'll count ourselves lucky for each one we're not burying in a landfill.
    - pazimzadeh 2y ago
thenewwazoo 2y ago
> My dissatisfaction flying home from last week’s event is, ultimately, selfish. I miss having my mind blown. I miss being utterly surprised. Welcome to middle age, John. I'm here too, so I can't tell you what comes next, but I hope it's more fun.
EMIRELADERO 2y ago
> I’ve been pondering this for the remainder of the week. One factor is that the iPhone defined the apex of personal computing. In the early years of PCs, everyone knew we wanted portability. Most of us — including me — thought we reached that with laptops. But laptops don’t go with us everywhere, and, it turns out, we want computers that go with us everywhere. That’s the iPhone, and the original iPhone in 2007 established the all-touch-screen form factor and general concept right out of the gate. That first iPhone blew our minds the moment Steve Jobs showed it to us. Gruber seems to think of iPhones as portable, use-everywhere computers when such characterization puts Apple in good light. However, his opinion about what the iPhone is seems to change when dealing with sideloading and, in general, App Store shenanigans: > The iPhone and iPad are not PCs; they’re consoles for games and apps. (From https://daringfireball.net/2024/01/coming_to_grips_with_apples_seemingly_unshakable_sense_of_app_store_entitlement https://daringfireball.net/2024/01/coming_to_grips_with_appl...)
- idle_zealot 2y ago
  Yeah, he's consistently frustrating on this issue. It seems he actively wants Apple to control general-purpose computing and will make whatever characterization necessary for that to sound reasonable. I really wish we had portable general-purpose pocket computers, but there isn't really an option on the market for that, and it's not a hardware issue.
- andrewmutz 2y ago
  His perspective is as pro-Apple as it gets. This article about his keynote disappointment was mostly spent fawning over apples headphones and watch and how Tim Cook is a sage. Unable to criticize Apple for anything, he even concludes his remarks blaming himself.
  - m463 2y ago
    I agree. Honestly I think apple has become both too impersonal and too controlling. SJ at the helm would have made things more personal, and might have headed off all the rot that has led to poor developer relations, anti-trust, and relentless profiteering without clear benefits.
mafuyu 2y ago
Computing and the Internet have matured and become so much more central to daily life. For better or worse, that's going to put limits on the quirks something like a smartphone can have. If your photo library, banking, social media, or even job depends on your phone, it really does need to be rock solid and reliable. I think what people forget is pre-iPhone, we all saw _something_ coming. Maybe we didn't expect it to look exactly like the iPhone, but there was a sense of excitement around what was coming next for computing. Sony Style magazine was still in print. eCommerce was picking up. Palm phones, Blackberry, Windows Mobile. Super quirky laptops and UMPCs. I remember lusting after some wildly impractical UMPCs, because it meant that everything I did on my desktop could now fit in my pocket. Even after smartphones took off, I remember sometimes thinking "man, imagine in the future when this stuff is good and it actually just works." A lot of stuff was basically just demos back then. Well, here we are. A huge portion of my life happens on my iPhone, and that really does mean it has to Just Work.
DaoVeles 2y ago
I get it, being mind blown in this industry is getting further apart with time. It is just that the industry is becoming mature, we have picked most of the low hanging fruit and now it is a case of refining the refinded. Triple distilled design in action. More broadly this is a middle aged industry and unfortunately it is leading to some mid life crisis moments like metaverse, crypto hype and AI everything but generally it is still in decent shape, at least when you ignore some details. The last time I was blown away by any tech would have been the first time using generative AI stuff, yes we figured out its limits, but just that feeling of being able to just type something and just have these thing created on demand was wild. The time before that, I couldnt really say, it has been that long. Maybe seeing realtime raytracing on commodity hardware and even that wasnt ground breaking. In a way it us like the 10th season of a sitcom, we know all the characters and it is familiar but nothing much is new or fresh any more. The jokes are still fine and the catch phrases are there but it all just feels same-ish. That is ok so long as that is your expectation.
gtvwill 2y ago
Buys a vanilla bean but get surprised when it's plain and simple. Not sure what he expected. Apple is a cash cow harvesting brand loyalty. 2 years of r&d and they got what? A usbc port and a button? Folks are joking if they think this is the peak of tech.
calmbonsai 2y ago
I have no idea why anyone gives credence to Gruber after his history of “incredible to the point of incredulity” pro-Apple bias over the years.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- paradox460 2y ago
  > I have no idea why anyone gives credence to Gruber after his history of “incredible to the point of incredulity” pro-Apple bias over the years. Once upon a time he made a variant of textile and restructuredtext, with a lot of help from Aaron Swartz. Turns out it's a really good invention. But everything else is just mindlessly pro Apple bloviating to the point of self parody. He's probably one of a few hundred who bought the iPod hifi
  - calmbonsai 2y ago
    Agreed on Markdown. It illustrated there was an unfilled niche in mark-up between Unix plain-text, HTML, and RTF. I use it nearly every day. I adore that CommonMark exists too: https://commonmark.org/ https://commonmark.org/ .
    - paradox460 2y ago
      And out of CommonMark John MacFarlane created djot[1], which (imo) is awesome and a solution to virtually all Markdown woes, while still being close enough to pure Markdown/CommonMark that it doesn't feel that different when using. [1]: djot.net/
      - calmbonsai 2y ago
        Thanks! I'll review the repo tonight. I'm designing a new workflow pipeline atm, and it's worth seeing if the djot juice is worth the squeeze.
pazimzadeh 2y ago
> If anything, under Cook, Apple more consistently achieves near-perfection. Tolerances are tighter. Ship dates seldom slip. I'm surprised that Gruber doesn't mention the fact that Apple is now in the habit of announcing products or features 6+ months before they ship, both software and hardware (not talking about things like the iPhone which have to be submitted to the FCC). And sometimes, they never ship at all (see AirPower). This would never happen under Jobs. Also, while Steve Jobs straight up lied in order to protect future announcements (i.e. 'we're not making a video iPod', Tim Cook will say things like 'we are very interested in the AR/VR space' for close to a decade before announcing any products).
- xuki 2y ago
  Steve Jobs announced a white iPhone 4 and couldn’t ship it for 6 months.
- DaoVeles 2y ago
  I agree with you sentiment. That said there are two vague exceptions I can think of on this. The original iPhone but that was because its existence would have been leaked/semi announced once they tried to get it approved for public use. So their hand was forced on that. Also we never did get a 3Ghz G5 or mobile variant of it. This is something that Jobs mentioned when unveiling their Intel switch. As an aside, I did find it funny that PA Semi did end up designing their PWRffcient PowerPC chips with the goal of getting into Apple products. They eventually were purchased by Apple and now do all their hardware stuff. So I see the PWRffience chip has being one of the best job applications produced.
  - pazimzadeh 2y ago
    Yeah I am excluding the original iPhone announcement for that reason. Same with the apple watch
mystified5016 2y ago
Gods, how much longer until we all accept that phones have reached a local (if not global) maximum? There's really not much left to 'innovate'. More cameras, more memory, bigger and bigger and bigger screens, less ports. The next innovation here is gonna have to be a total paradigm shift, and I'm not particularly convinced that Apple and/or Google are capable of that anymore. The only levers in their grasp left to pull are software. So now we are innundated with capital-F Features. And these Features are so important that users must be constantly bombarded with tips and popups and hints and notifications telling them about the latest Features. Google even calls their extremely normal and standard update cycle 'Feature Drop'. People just want to buy a phone that fits their preferred physical dimensions, lasts at least most of the day, and generally does what you tell it and stays the hell out of the way. Nobody, not one person on this planet wants their phone to swoop in an animated rainbow-bordered modal telling them that their calculator app now includes AI, for some reason, and that they now are compelled to accept some new terms and license for a calculator.
- vlovich123 2y ago
  I’m going to posit that the paradigm shift will cost significantly more money than it took to bring desktop OSes to mobile + make cap sense work and create a real smartphone market (ie in-lens display + maybe even a ChatGPT like AI to interact with or really good hand and eye tracking). So it’s hard to imagine that it won’t come from some very entrenched player because not only is this stuff super expensive to r&D, it’s super expensive to get the compute powerful enough and using low enough power and batteries big enough to do this stuff since Moore’s law ended a decade ago. It very well could be that smartphones are the last major HW computing revolution for a long time and you’ll only see incrementalism from entrenched players going forward barring significant unforeseen scientific and engineering breakthroughs.
- pazimzadeh 2y ago
  Maybe when there's an e-ink display on the back of the iPhone, or the main display can switch into an ultra low power mode Built-in 2D projector or hologram projector (eventually with input detection) Force Touch returns to the display but with actual tactile feedback Force Touch but in the hologram or projection Non-contact charging within range of a base station You can also imagine tons of security features for a device that you always have in your pocket
twoodfin 2y ago
Gruber edges up to this in a footnote, but I think the prerecorded keynotes are particularly corrosive to the spirit of risk and excitement that he misses in Tim Cook’s Apple. Jobs cared deeply about the keynotes and was ruthlessly strategic about which feature was in and which was out, who—other than Steve—would present, and which guests would be invited onto the stage. That didn’t mean they were perfect—as Gruber points out, we saw plenty of busted demos and boring partner CEO’s. But now all the pressure to put on a high-wire act is gone, and Apple can rely on increasingly sterile and repetitive “ultra-production” to make every new supported Fitness activity seem like a headliner, which means everything’s just indistinct, cheerfully delivered mush.
- paradox460 2y ago
  The most exciting part of a jobs keynote was guessing what was coming next, and if it was a hardware demo, if it would work or not, and if not, how would jobs react
- concinds 2y ago
  Prerecorded doesn't work. You're watching a 2 hour long ad, and you feel like you are. It was stilted, the presenters sounded borderline AI-generated, and the small bits of humor still had me feeling like the joke was on me, and that I was a sucker for tuning in. And it's clear that Tim and co. don't understand Jobs's pacing and narrative structure whatsoever. It felt amateurish, even worse than previous pre-recorded keynotes. Jobs used superlatives, but he didn't use them like that. He also didn't scream, Tim. It's funny. In early 2022, the Apple blogosphere loudly wondered when Apple would go back to "real" keynotes, since Covid was dying down. But Apple was already batting away antitrust concerns, devs were pissed, and WWDC was coming up. I'm convinced that Apple was worried about unenthusiastic crowds, laughter, or even a couple of boos, and decided to delay the return some more. I guess they never got that confidence back.
w10-1 2y ago
It's not just that Tim Cook wants to help humanity, or more accurately avoids the false positive products. Nor should Apple aim to deliver "I'm so special!" feeling of a new product category. The key is: Tim Cook understands the criticality of goodwill in the context of pervasive computing. If you used computers from the 1990's-2010's, you grew to hate - hate - the fact that you had to use Microsoft. Office was king, and blue screens and viruses only evolved into more subtle pain. Now, we just settle into our lives, as enhanced by devices we carry. That scale happens when you hit not 99% but 99.999% quality. (Yes, Android+Samsung is a copycat, one that wouldn't exist or have any direction without Apple.) Gruber's not sure what the next thing will be. I am. It will be the natural UI's - voice and maybe vision - augmented with AI assistants. Voice computing, like speech recognition more generally, is jarring because 3-5% of the time you're dropping back into correction mode. But on-device speech-interactive AI will learn and correct all that. It will be understood as such in 2025, voice-only apps will go big in 2026, and voice-only devices will be available in 2027, along with lightweight voice+vision. Then we'll only need to carry airpods, and we'll be happy to pay $3k for that.
- DaoVeles 2y ago
  I want to believe! But I think your vision goes a little too heavy on audio only side. By that I mean, the biggest problem with voice control is the lack of detailed feed back. This is why people will usually use it to check the weather, but the rest of the time it becomes a 'trust but verify' mode. That why many are happy to place appointments, dial calls and set the GPS but only so long as they can visually check it is correct. That is the largest hurdle to over come and it is something that will in part come from sizable R&D but also be driven by a few inspired folks that can intuitively resolves some key issues. Apple is trying, like how they had the Voice only version of Apple Music, but it still isn't there. The problem is with anything, others rush in to get to market first but not doing it right and ruin it for those trying to make it great.
- macintosh-hd 2y ago
  This just doesn't make any sense. Even in an ideal world where voice assistants never failed, some of the most basic daily interactions become extremely complex and time consuming with audio only. When 3 different people text you it takes infinitely more time to clarify that with voice than you would be able to just read. Plus, people like social media, and young people really like tik tok. How are you going to record or meaningfully play back videos on a device where you can't see? Voice only is significantly more of a gimmick than the Vision Pro. Nobody likes navigating call center menus. A voice only smart device would be doing that all day long.
pentagrama 2y ago
The elephant in the room of this article is the Apple Vision Pro.
- talldayo 2y ago
  What's worse, Apple Vision Pro doesn't even feel like a Lisa or Newton type of failure. This isn't just an expensive slice of future technology. It's a shaky foothold in a market Apple cannot confidently compete in. It might be the first time Apple released something that's just simply a dud, and nobody had the confidence or capability to stop it from shipping. All the "innovations" in the current hardware feel destined to get removed as a cost-saving measure. Eye tracking is sketchy is frankly just worse than traditional locomotive pointing in other headset software. The passthrough screen is worse than the living devil and needs to be removed STAT. The software is fixable, but currently in a state that barely supports WebXR and doesn't support SteamVR or OpenXR. A good iteration on this headset would look almost nothing like Vision Pro, which suggests to me Apple really just doesn't know how to capitalize on their market.

> That fat Nano was quirky. It was also, in hindsight, obviously a mistake. I’m quite sure that inside Apple there were designers and product people who thought it was a mistake before it shipped. Steve Jobs shipped it anyway, surely because his gut told him it was the right thing to try. Tim Cook’s Apple doesn’t make mistakes like that. Look, I'm willing to accept a certain level of fanboyish Apple defense, especially from Gruber. It does seem like a bit of a stretch to say the fat iPod Nano was a failure for selling 10 million+ units but the Vision Pro somehow wasn't a mistake by comparison.

itronitron 2y ago
hopefully at some point they'll return to non-fat iphones as well
emsy 2y ago
I love the fat nano. I was said when its battery died. I love my iPhone Mini (besides iOS being a bit too dumbed down still). Apple should make more hardware for niches.
MBCook 2y ago
He didn’t say it was a flop. I know people who liked it. But Apple obviously didn’t think it was the right track because they abandoned it and went back towards the previous form factor. I’d say the Vision Pro is different. I’m not sure they got the form factor wrong. Maybe some adjustments needed, but I don’t think the core design is wrong. Also a ton of the Vision Pros issues have nothing to do with the physical design. The cost is massive to get components (mostly the screens) that can achieve what they want. Their normal profit margins makes it worse. OS and App Store policies blunt the utility. Refusing to let developers have them until release meant no/few killer apps. US only for 6 months made all that worse. In my mind it’s a totally different thing.
tpmoney 2y ago
He doesn't say the iPod Nano was a flop, he says it was a mistake. And there is a difference. For example, the iPhone 4 was a mistake (remember antenna gate?) and yet, it sold plenty units. But the 4s antennas were a new design and by the 5 they'd started moving the antennas back inside the phone. The butterfly keyboard and the touch bar were mistakes. Their models still sold millions of units.

cyberax 2y ago

Things that haven't changed: mafia-like 30% cut of app developers' income. No access to privileged APIs for NFC or JITs.

TechRemarker 2y ago
Google and Steam charge 30% for their top rate as well right? So assuming you are referring to tech companies and not Apple in particular?
- cyberax 2y ago
  Google allows side-loading, and Steam is completely optional. You can avoid it, even on Valve's own handheld.
  - theshrike79 2y ago
    Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo take a cut too and you can't sideload.
    - cyberax 2y ago
      For consoles, not general purpose computers. Microsoft's cut is also much more sane.
      - EMIRELADERO 2y ago
        The "general-purpose" differentiation is completely artificial and shouldn't be used except in very narrow circumstances (for example, when discussing the economic impact of the entire mobile market) The only thing that should matter is the device's raw computing power. The user should have the same level of control over code execution that the manufacturer has post-sale. That should apply to every single appliance and product on the market that uses a chip.
        cyberax 2y ago

iorrus 2y ago

Obvious counter argument is the Vision Pro

gwbas1c 2y ago
That's like the Lisa. It needs Steve to make it palatable to everyone.
ggrelet 2y ago
No mention of it in the article, even though they wrote: > But it’s also why Cook’s Apple delivers fewer surprises. The delight is still there, but there’s less amazement. The Vision Pro is literally mind blowing.
- MBCook 2y ago
  But it’s not changing the world. It seems to be doing very poorly, at least partially due to Apple’s policies. The price obviously doesn’t help.
- talldayo 2y ago
  > The Vision Pro is literally mind blowing. Mind-blowingly stupid? I used an Oculus Rift DK2 in 2014; the fact that Apple could brute-force a similar product with no market fit and slightly more "magic" in it hasn't impressed me the slightest. Add in the fact that it's slower than an iPad and costs as much as a used car and the thing is dead-on-arrival. Meta ate Apple's lunch with $500 headsets and Valve dominated the high-end with better controllers and software for years. The only way Apple can create market fit is by inventing a new price segment (read: Stupid Expensive) and leveraging their branding to do the heavy lifting. Apple dodged Khronos standards for years, avoided OpenXR during it's development, and got cut off from SteamVR after Valve gave up engineering support. They have so many loose ends to tie up that it's kinda hilarious anyone thinks Apple is a competitor in this industry, at this point. Vision Pro isn't an iPhone moment, it's a Lisa moment. We'll count ourselves lucky for each one we're not burying in a landfill.
  - pazimzadeh 2y ago

thenewwazoo 2y ago

> My dissatisfaction flying home from last week’s event is, ultimately, selfish. I miss having my mind blown. I miss being utterly surprised. Welcome to middle age, John. I'm here too, so I can't tell you what comes next, but I hope it's more fun.

EMIRELADERO 2y ago

> I’ve been pondering this for the remainder of the week. One factor is that the iPhone defined the apex of personal computing. In the early years of PCs, everyone knew we wanted portability. Most of us — including me — thought we reached that with laptops. But laptops don’t go with us everywhere, and, it turns out, we want computers that go with us everywhere. That’s the iPhone, and the original iPhone in 2007 established the all-touch-screen form factor and general concept right out of the gate. That first iPhone blew our minds the moment Steve Jobs showed it to us. Gruber seems to think of iPhones as portable, use-everywhere computers when such characterization puts Apple in good light. However, his opinion about what the iPhone is seems to change when dealing with sideloading and, in general, App Store shenanigans: > The iPhone and iPad are not PCs; they’re consoles for games and apps. (From https://daringfireball.net/2024/01/coming_to_grips_with_apples_seemingly_unshakable_sense_of_app_store_entitlement https://daringfireball.net/2024/01/coming_to_grips_with_appl...)

idle_zealot 2y ago
Yeah, he's consistently frustrating on this issue. It seems he actively wants Apple to control general-purpose computing and will make whatever characterization necessary for that to sound reasonable. I really wish we had portable general-purpose pocket computers, but there isn't really an option on the market for that, and it's not a hardware issue.
andrewmutz 2y ago
His perspective is as pro-Apple as it gets. This article about his keynote disappointment was mostly spent fawning over apples headphones and watch and how Tim Cook is a sage. Unable to criticize Apple for anything, he even concludes his remarks blaming himself.
- m463 2y ago
  I agree. Honestly I think apple has become both too impersonal and too controlling. SJ at the helm would have made things more personal, and might have headed off all the rot that has led to poor developer relations, anti-trust, and relentless profiteering without clear benefits.

mafuyu 2y ago

Computing and the Internet have matured and become so much more central to daily life. For better or worse, that's going to put limits on the quirks something like a smartphone can have. If your photo library, banking, social media, or even job depends on your phone, it really does need to be rock solid and reliable. I think what people forget is pre-iPhone, we all saw _something_ coming. Maybe we didn't expect it to look exactly like the iPhone, but there was a sense of excitement around what was coming next for computing. Sony Style magazine was still in print. eCommerce was picking up. Palm phones, Blackberry, Windows Mobile. Super quirky laptops and UMPCs. I remember lusting after some wildly impractical UMPCs, because it meant that everything I did on my desktop could now fit in my pocket. Even after smartphones took off, I remember sometimes thinking "man, imagine in the future when this stuff is good and it actually just works." A lot of stuff was basically just demos back then. Well, here we are. A huge portion of my life happens on my iPhone, and that really does mean it has to Just Work.

DaoVeles 2y ago

I get it, being mind blown in this industry is getting further apart with time. It is just that the industry is becoming mature, we have picked most of the low hanging fruit and now it is a case of refining the refinded. Triple distilled design in action. More broadly this is a middle aged industry and unfortunately it is leading to some mid life crisis moments like metaverse, crypto hype and AI everything but generally it is still in decent shape, at least when you ignore some details. The last time I was blown away by any tech would have been the first time using generative AI stuff, yes we figured out its limits, but just that feeling of being able to just type something and just have these thing created on demand was wild. The time before that, I couldnt really say, it has been that long. Maybe seeing realtime raytracing on commodity hardware and even that wasnt ground breaking. In a way it us like the 10th season of a sitcom, we know all the characters and it is familiar but nothing much is new or fresh any more. The jokes are still fine and the catch phrases are there but it all just feels same-ish. That is ok so long as that is your expectation.

gtvwill 2y ago

Buys a vanilla bean but get surprised when it's plain and simple. Not sure what he expected. Apple is a cash cow harvesting brand loyalty. 2 years of r&d and they got what? A usbc port and a button? Folks are joking if they think this is the peak of tech.

calmbonsai 2y ago

I have no idea why anyone gives credence to Gruber after his history of “incredible to the point of incredulity” pro-Apple bias over the years.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
paradox460 2y ago
> I have no idea why anyone gives credence to Gruber after his history of “incredible to the point of incredulity” pro-Apple bias over the years. Once upon a time he made a variant of textile and restructuredtext, with a lot of help from Aaron Swartz. Turns out it's a really good invention. But everything else is just mindlessly pro Apple bloviating to the point of self parody. He's probably one of a few hundred who bought the iPod hifi
- calmbonsai 2y ago
  Agreed on Markdown. It illustrated there was an unfilled niche in mark-up between Unix plain-text, HTML, and RTF. I use it nearly every day. I adore that CommonMark exists too: https://commonmark.org/ https://commonmark.org/ .
  - paradox460 2y ago
    And out of CommonMark John MacFarlane created djot[1], which (imo) is awesome and a solution to virtually all Markdown woes, while still being close enough to pure Markdown/CommonMark that it doesn't feel that different when using. [1]: djot.net/
    - calmbonsai 2y ago
      Thanks! I'll review the repo tonight. I'm designing a new workflow pipeline atm, and it's worth seeing if the djot juice is worth the squeeze.

pazimzadeh 2y ago

> If anything, under Cook, Apple more consistently achieves near-perfection. Tolerances are tighter. Ship dates seldom slip. I'm surprised that Gruber doesn't mention the fact that Apple is now in the habit of announcing products or features 6+ months before they ship, both software and hardware (not talking about things like the iPhone which have to be submitted to the FCC). And sometimes, they never ship at all (see AirPower). This would never happen under Jobs. Also, while Steve Jobs straight up lied in order to protect future announcements (i.e. 'we're not making a video iPod', Tim Cook will say things like 'we are very interested in the AR/VR space' for close to a decade before announcing any products).

xuki 2y ago
Steve Jobs announced a white iPhone 4 and couldn’t ship it for 6 months.
DaoVeles 2y ago
I agree with you sentiment. That said there are two vague exceptions I can think of on this. The original iPhone but that was because its existence would have been leaked/semi announced once they tried to get it approved for public use. So their hand was forced on that. Also we never did get a 3Ghz G5 or mobile variant of it. This is something that Jobs mentioned when unveiling their Intel switch. As an aside, I did find it funny that PA Semi did end up designing their PWRffcient PowerPC chips with the goal of getting into Apple products. They eventually were purchased by Apple and now do all their hardware stuff. So I see the PWRffience chip has being one of the best job applications produced.
- pazimzadeh 2y ago
  Yeah I am excluding the original iPhone announcement for that reason. Same with the apple watch

mystified5016 2y ago

Gods, how much longer until we all accept that phones have reached a local (if not global) maximum? There's really not much left to 'innovate'. More cameras, more memory, bigger and bigger and bigger screens, less ports. The next innovation here is gonna have to be a total paradigm shift, and I'm not particularly convinced that Apple and/or Google are capable of that anymore. The only levers in their grasp left to pull are software. So now we are innundated with capital-F Features. And these Features are so important that users must be constantly bombarded with tips and popups and hints and notifications telling them about the latest Features. Google even calls their extremely normal and standard update cycle 'Feature Drop'. People just want to buy a phone that fits their preferred physical dimensions, lasts at least most of the day, and generally does what you tell it and stays the hell out of the way. Nobody, not one person on this planet wants their phone to swoop in an animated rainbow-bordered modal telling them that their calculator app now includes AI, for some reason, and that they now are compelled to accept some new terms and license for a calculator.

vlovich123 2y ago
I’m going to posit that the paradigm shift will cost significantly more money than it took to bring desktop OSes to mobile + make cap sense work and create a real smartphone market (ie in-lens display + maybe even a ChatGPT like AI to interact with or really good hand and eye tracking). So it’s hard to imagine that it won’t come from some very entrenched player because not only is this stuff super expensive to r&D, it’s super expensive to get the compute powerful enough and using low enough power and batteries big enough to do this stuff since Moore’s law ended a decade ago. It very well could be that smartphones are the last major HW computing revolution for a long time and you’ll only see incrementalism from entrenched players going forward barring significant unforeseen scientific and engineering breakthroughs.
pazimzadeh 2y ago
Maybe when there's an e-ink display on the back of the iPhone, or the main display can switch into an ultra low power mode Built-in 2D projector or hologram projector (eventually with input detection) Force Touch returns to the display but with actual tactile feedback Force Touch but in the hologram or projection Non-contact charging within range of a base station You can also imagine tons of security features for a device that you always have in your pocket

twoodfin 2y ago

Gruber edges up to this in a footnote, but I think the prerecorded keynotes are particularly corrosive to the spirit of risk and excitement that he misses in Tim Cook’s Apple. Jobs cared deeply about the keynotes and was ruthlessly strategic about which feature was in and which was out, who—other than Steve—would present, and which guests would be invited onto the stage. That didn’t mean they were perfect—as Gruber points out, we saw plenty of busted demos and boring partner CEO’s. But now all the pressure to put on a high-wire act is gone, and Apple can rely on increasingly sterile and repetitive “ultra-production” to make every new supported Fitness activity seem like a headliner, which means everything’s just indistinct, cheerfully delivered mush.

paradox460 2y ago
The most exciting part of a jobs keynote was guessing what was coming next, and if it was a hardware demo, if it would work or not, and if not, how would jobs react
concinds 2y ago
Prerecorded doesn't work. You're watching a 2 hour long ad, and you feel like you are. It was stilted, the presenters sounded borderline AI-generated, and the small bits of humor still had me feeling like the joke was on me, and that I was a sucker for tuning in. And it's clear that Tim and co. don't understand Jobs's pacing and narrative structure whatsoever. It felt amateurish, even worse than previous pre-recorded keynotes. Jobs used superlatives, but he didn't use them like that. He also didn't scream, Tim. It's funny. In early 2022, the Apple blogosphere loudly wondered when Apple would go back to "real" keynotes, since Covid was dying down. But Apple was already batting away antitrust concerns, devs were pissed, and WWDC was coming up. I'm convinced that Apple was worried about unenthusiastic crowds, laughter, or even a couple of boos, and decided to delay the return some more. I guess they never got that confidence back.

w10-1 2y ago

It's not just that Tim Cook wants to help humanity, or more accurately avoids the false positive products. Nor should Apple aim to deliver "I'm so special!" feeling of a new product category. The key is: Tim Cook understands the criticality of goodwill in the context of pervasive computing. If you used computers from the 1990's-2010's, you grew to hate - hate - the fact that you had to use Microsoft. Office was king, and blue screens and viruses only evolved into more subtle pain. Now, we just settle into our lives, as enhanced by devices we carry. That scale happens when you hit not 99% but 99.999% quality. (Yes, Android+Samsung is a copycat, one that wouldn't exist or have any direction without Apple.) Gruber's not sure what the next thing will be. I am. It will be the natural UI's - voice and maybe vision - augmented with AI assistants. Voice computing, like speech recognition more generally, is jarring because 3-5% of the time you're dropping back into correction mode. But on-device speech-interactive AI will learn and correct all that. It will be understood as such in 2025, voice-only apps will go big in 2026, and voice-only devices will be available in 2027, along with lightweight voice+vision. Then we'll only need to carry airpods, and we'll be happy to pay $3k for that.

DaoVeles 2y ago
I want to believe! But I think your vision goes a little too heavy on audio only side. By that I mean, the biggest problem with voice control is the lack of detailed feed back. This is why people will usually use it to check the weather, but the rest of the time it becomes a 'trust but verify' mode. That why many are happy to place appointments, dial calls and set the GPS but only so long as they can visually check it is correct. That is the largest hurdle to over come and it is something that will in part come from sizable R&D but also be driven by a few inspired folks that can intuitively resolves some key issues. Apple is trying, like how they had the Voice only version of Apple Music, but it still isn't there. The problem is with anything, others rush in to get to market first but not doing it right and ruin it for those trying to make it great.
macintosh-hd 2y ago
This just doesn't make any sense. Even in an ideal world where voice assistants never failed, some of the most basic daily interactions become extremely complex and time consuming with audio only. When 3 different people text you it takes infinitely more time to clarify that with voice than you would be able to just read. Plus, people like social media, and young people really like tik tok. How are you going to record or meaningfully play back videos on a device where you can't see? Voice only is significantly more of a gimmick than the Vision Pro. Nobody likes navigating call center menus. A voice only smart device would be doing that all day long.

pentagrama 2y ago

The elephant in the room of this article is the Apple Vision Pro.

talldayo 2y ago
What's worse, Apple Vision Pro doesn't even feel like a Lisa or Newton type of failure. This isn't just an expensive slice of future technology. It's a shaky foothold in a market Apple cannot confidently compete in. It might be the first time Apple released something that's just simply a dud, and nobody had the confidence or capability to stop it from shipping. All the "innovations" in the current hardware feel destined to get removed as a cost-saving measure. Eye tracking is sketchy is frankly just worse than traditional locomotive pointing in other headset software. The passthrough screen is worse than the living devil and needs to be removed STAT. The software is fixable, but currently in a state that barely supports WebXR and doesn't support SteamVR or OpenXR. A good iteration on this headset would look almost nothing like Vision Pro, which suggests to me Apple really just doesn't know how to capitalize on their market.