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> with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with hig
by lisper 1y ago
> with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets
It's not just building a product end-to-end. Tim Cook is a supply-chain guy. He knows how to build a product. What he doesn't know how is how to design a new one. This is the reason that all of the "new" stuff that has come out of Apple since Cook took over is actually just riffs on old degrees of freedom: thinner phones. New colors. Different UI skins. The only thing I can think of that Apple has done in the Cook era that was actually new was the Apple Vision Pro. That was really cool, but it was a commercial disaster, the modern equivalent of the Lisa or the NeXT.
Jobs took Lisa and NeXT failures and turned them into the Mac and OS/X. There is no hint that Apple intends to do anything with the Vision Pro, and they've already been scooped by Meta.
- Gee101 1y agoWhat about the Apple watch?
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoThe Apple Watch seems to have suddenly found its pace. I am seeing them everywhere, around here. I suspect that quite a few are SEs and maybe last year's model, but I do see a lot of Ultras.
- ghaff 1y agoBattery does seem to be a limiting factor and I don't wear mine unless I'm doing activities where it's especially useful. But, for a lot of people, something else to charge doesn't seem a big impediment.
- ghaff 1y agoWhen we heard young people don't wear watches any longer at the time. And certainly many people didn't think yet another bluetooth earphones were anything to get excited about. AR does seem to be a potential big deal. But the tech and implementation probably has a ways to go before it's interesting outside of a bubble audience.
- petre 1y agoIf people don't wear watches, they probably wouldn't wear scuba gear either. Unless AR comes in rose tinted glasses.
- petre 1y agoWhat about it? I'm not going to recharge my watch every night. Yawn.
- spookie 1y agoYeah, we have basically infinite battery on "dumb" watches, as long as you use them. You know, so you can rely on them. The Apple Watch to me just seems like a worse earbud. If I want to be that interrupted in tge middle of something might as well hear the thing and not have to look at it.
- macintux 1y agoI never had any interest in wearing a watch to bed. Still don’t, although theoretically I could charge it for a few minutes in the evening to make that possible. The Watch has helped me lose 30 pounds, has significantly helped motivate me to exercise more, and has let me keep my phone on silent mode for at least 5 years now. For me, it’s a great device.
- petre 1y agoI have a Garmin with roughly the same functionality and I only need to charge it every other week. If you use the GPS the battery gets drained in about a 6 hour activity, but I've recharged it at a refuge while eating.
- macintux 1y agoI understand, and I don't care. I charge my watch overnight, and if I don't have a charger, I can power it off overnight and still have juice for the next day. It's simply not a big deal for me.
- NetMageSCW 1y agoI think that roughly is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Part of the point is that Apple doesn’t do “roughly”.
- 1y ago
- intrasight 1y agoWhat about Airpods? Also, I expect Vision to eventually be a massive success.
- petre 1y agoThe basic Airpods are crap, noise cancellation is useless, they fall off the ear. You're better off with Sony or JBL at half the price. The Pro ones are good.
- chatmasta 1y agoI don’t have AirPods basic but I’ve got 2nd gen AirPods Pro and they’re one of the best products I’ve bought in a long time. I’d put them up there with my 2011 kindle I still use every day.
- petre 1y agoYup, that version is the good one. My wife had the Pro 2s and was super happy with them until they died after two years. I got her a pair of AirPods 4 with ANC and we had to return them because they were subpar compared to the AirPods Pro 2. The price difference between 4 ANC and the Pro 3s is like $60 and you get an actual useful product if you're willing to spend that amount.
- chatmasta 1y agoI’m considering Pro 3 for the hearing aid + live translation features, but not in a big rush… I wish they would bring these to Pro 2, because it really seems like an artificial restriction…
- intrasight 1y agoI have the original Pros (who's ANC failure made them less enjoyable) and recently got Pro 2s. The Pro 3s (and more so in subsequent iterations) are going to have some incredible tech. I am most excited about silent speech.
- garyrob 1y ago> There is no hint that Apple intends to do anything with the Vision Pro, and they've already been scooped by Meta. I expect that's exactly what they have in mind. If they're successful, Meta's project will be to Apple's what early MP3 players were to the original iPod. The jury is out on whether Cook can pull it off.
- petre 1y agoThat's why they bought up Luxotica shares. Because scuba gear is for scuba diving. Even if it's white, it's still scuba gear. Remember the PDAs with resitive screens and styluses? They were a lot more convenient than scuba gear.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoIt's more likely than not that they will, in my opinion. As an owner of both an AVP and Quest 2, the former is a lot nicer to use than the latter with the exception of VR games, and my hunch is that Valve is going to eat Meta's lunch for gaming with Deckard (which will be at least as good as the Quest 3, but much more open, paired with a vastly more populated and popular marketplace, probably won't treat PCVR as an afterthought, and won't be saddled with the Quest's somewhat painful sideloading experience). The main hurdle Apple faces is bringing costs down and improving the AVP's form factor, both of which are well within their capabilities.
- spookie 1y agoHaving experienced the Quest Pro I can say that Apple has absolutely no clue what the focus should be on. Hint: being able to grab a well balanced headset that is so easy to put on as a cap. This makes you not think if you are going to watch or play in VR, you just do it.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoI think Apple knows exactly what they're doing, but was forced to choose between making the product more about demonstrating their tech and end goals or being mass market mediocre and chose the former. Nobody would've cared about what amounted to a Quest wrapped in a Cupertino design with similar performance, specs, etc. It's very much in line with the original iPod and iPhone, both of which took a few iterations before becoming category-defining hits. It'll probably be the second or third-gen Vision device that'll fix the AVP's nits while also keeping or improving upon its strong points.
- eastbound 1y agoThere’s a beautiful conference (which I’ve lost) saying that science and technology can regress. We always talk about “the progress” but things do regress all the time; Tests I’ve cleared for employment can’t be passed by newcomers, the NASA wouldn’t be able to put a rocket on the moon today, and there is no downloadable Jira competitor anymore. In fact the speed of innovation is, pretty much, equal to the speed of maintenance. Nothing gets maintained, it’s either new or collapsing, but no-one enjoys the middle part. Which is sad. It’s a form of inflation. Boeing is perfectly right to design a new plane right now. Engineers who interned on the 787 have bought a house on the countryside a few years ago.
- pixl97 1y agoThis here should trigger a red flag when you hear anyone say "The government should be run like a business". Businesses kill themselves all the time from the loss of institutional knowledge. We see stuff like "government spends X a year paying people Y to build almost no product Z". Instead, we're paying people Y to be ready to build Z when something goes terribly wrong like war.
- charcircuit 1y agoWhen they say run like a business that doesn't mean that it should be done like a reckless business. Plenty of businesses invest into things like disaster recovery or insurance which they may never need.
- selectodude 1y agoRunning like a business means providing services to profitable customers. This is, surprisingly, the exact opposite of what government is supposed to be doing. The USPS would be plenty profitable if it didn’t have to maintain the infrastructure to deliver a letter from Honolulu to Barrow for 50 cents. Medicare? Not the best business model. Roads? Forget it.
- charcircuit 1y ago
- mnahkies 1y agoMy work laptop (Mac) needed an OS upgrade recently, top of the release notes was "added 8 emojis" - what? Why is this an OS level feature worth calling out
- waiwai933 1y agoI believe I read somewhere that announcing new emoji drives noticeably more OS upgrades compared to more boring security and stability update release notes.
- throw0101c 1y ago> My work laptop (Mac) needed an OS upgrade recently, top of the release notes was "added 8 emojis" - what? Why is this an OS level feature worth calling out Because the Software Update page under System Settings is all that normies will ever read and so what's in the text there is focused on normies. Meanwhile techies may be interest in the CVEs listed in the security update list: * https://support.apple.com/en-ca/125111 https://support.apple.com/en-ca/125111 * https://support.apple.com/en-ca/100100 https://support.apple.com/en-ca/100100 * https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-notes https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note... And corporate IT types may be interest in enterprise features, like TLS behavioural changes: * https://support.apple.com/en-ca/121011 https://support.apple.com/en-ca/121011
- School-Cotton 1y agoApple is rumored to have a strategic emoji reserve. The more they want people to install an update, the more emojis from the reserve they release as part of it. Because this is basically the only thing that drives OS updates among average people.
- NetMageSCW 1y agoNew emojis are actually created by the Unicode consortium so they they are interoperable across ecosystems.
- School-Cotton 1y ago
- ashu1461 1y agoHasn't Tim Apple done his share by releasing apple watch and airpods, which have been good successors to other ancillary products which apple had earlier (ipad / ipod). And right now as well, no laptop comes close to the overall experience that the Mac provides so he has been able to maintain market leadership. Far better than Zuck for whom the only source of innovation has been acquisitions rather than releasing original products.
- lisper 1y ago> apple watch and airpods Fair point.
- reaperducer 1y agoThere is no hint that Apple intends to do anything with the Vision Pro Grab one when they go on sale, and keep it in the box for a couple of decades. Have you seen what Lisas go for at auction these days?
- PaulHoule 1y agoHave you seen what they went for when they were new?
- jen20 1y ago> The only thing I can think of that Apple has done in the Cook era that was actually new was the Apple Vision Pro. AirPods and the Apple Watch are also major new product lines, by some accounts each alone bigger than many major technology firms, that were released in the Tim Cook era of Apple.
- lisper 1y agoFair point.
- djmips 1y agoI feel like moving in the direction of their own silicon and getting M1 out and to massive success was under Tim Cook's watch. You might not consider this 'designing a new product' but I do.
- lisper 1y agoNo, that's a fair point. It's not really a product, but given what a huge win it was in terms of power/performance I'd say it qualifies.
- bilbo0s 1y agoYeah. I kind of feel like people gloss over the seismic shift in computing power Apple silicon designs have ushered in. It seems like a lot of people on HN think of building these chips as almost an afterthought if they think of building them at all. Which is ludicrous. It's the chips that make the new innovative products possible, not vice versa. You literally can't innovate, until you have the compute working at the power profile that you need. Only then can you build anything groundbreaking.
- wpm 1y agoPASemi was acquired in 2008.
- tw04 1y agoI dunno, Johnny Ive had the MacBook on a trajectory to disaster trying to make it thinner for the sake of being thin. Under Cook’s leadership they actually listened to users and redesigned it to be something people actually wanted. Beyond that, I’m not sure what you think is going to be the visionary product. AR/VR still feels like 3D tv to me - a solution looking for a problem. The best use case I’ve seen was HoloLens and the military, but even that has had limited scope.
- lisper 1y ago> AR/VR still feels like 3D tv to me - a solution looking for a problem. Have you tried the Vision Pro? It was a life-changing experience for me. I actually forgot that I was looking at a screen and thought that I was looking through a transparent visor. It was that good. If they could get the weight down I'd buy it in a heartbeat. The problem it solves (for me, or at least would solve if it didn't weigh so damned much) is having effectively a giant monitor that I can use on a plane.
- iamleppert 1y agoWhat people fail to realize is that 2D works. It's the optimal configuration of information for the human brain. Adding a third dimension, although possible and supported natively by human brain hardware, adds little to no value to almost everything people do with computers. Where does it add value? Entertainment, but not nearly as much as 2D entertainment. It also takes a lot more processing power to decode the 3D experience. It's why people get fatigued after spending any reasonable amount of time in VR. Some of that is due to the synthetic nature of the experience, but even a theoretical perfect device would require more energy consumption for the brain to decode than an equivalent 2D interface. The experience in 3D might be more intuitive because it borrows from already learned spatial relationships and behaviors from the real world, but long term it's going to take more energy to accomplish the same task in a 3D environment than a 2D one. For the vast majority of people, what we have now is optimal. It's like trying to train a model when its already converged.
- tw04 1y ago>If they could get the weight down I'd buy it in a heartbeat. The problem it solves (for me, or at least would solve if it didn't weigh so damned much) is having effectively a giant monitor that I can use on a plane. If they could get the weight down, the size down, the cost down, it might have a market. But with the R&D of a trillion dollar company they've been unable to do any of those things. Mass adoption would require the thing to be the price of a gaming console which is almost a 90% price reduction from where it sits today, while making it smaller and lighter. Good luck to Apple.
- insane_dreamer 1y ago> riffs on old degrees of freedom: thinner phones. New colors. Different UI skins. you forgot Apple Silicon -- a _huge_ leap forward you also forgot the Apple Watch, which has become almost the standard watch these days in the US, worn by nearly everyone I see, from baristas to CEOs AirPods have become almost ubiquitous (and every other brand now copies them)