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Yeah, they seem to be moving from innovators to exploiting their user base. In particular, I interpret their AI failures as the innovator's dilemma. They have l
by dash2 10mo ago
Yeah, they seem to be moving from innovators to exploiting their user base. In particular, I interpret their AI failures as the innovator's dilemma. They have loads of highly paid people designing and creating beautiful UIs. A chatbot could replace a lot of this: just tell your phone what to do instead of clicking and swiping. But that would put most of their employees out of work. So instead they are going to milk and lock in their user base, and hope rivals don't get traction.
- fodkodrasz 10mo ago1. Their UIs were never beautiful or really good tbh. The iOS26 is the worst so far, and they really went too far this time. 2. They are no charity, they don't care for giving work to their designers. 3. They won't milk their userbase or long, friends and family are already abandoning their ecosystem due to v26's atrocious UI, I'll be doing so also. Adding more ads to the mix will just speed things up. I'm not selling my stock just of yet though, as investors like these moves. Layoffs also usually bump the stock price.
- thomassmith65 10mo agoPresumably the person who wrote this comment is too young to have used Apple products prior to 2010?
- nottorp 10mo agoThey do have a point though, because you can't continue to use a phone made by Apple in 2010.
- thomassmith65 10mo agoI would if I could! Apple has been a mess since they lost Steve Jobs.
- bee_rider 10mo agoApple hasn’t been much of an innovator for decades. They take an idea that’s already been worked out (like MP3 players) and then just out-execute the competition. It is possible they won’t pull it off for “AI,” of course. But we won’t know until when somebody finds a profitable consumer-facing application for these models.
- tyre 10mo agoThey innovate in design and user experience. I wouldn’t have expected Apple to introduce the first AI, for example. I definitely would have expected them to wrap it better than anyone and boy was I wrong about that. But their innovative design tends to be in hardware and supply chains.
- al_borland 10mo agoIt’s still early. The model for AI that will seem as if it was inevitable in 10 years is likely something we haven’t seen yet. There are a ton of chatbots and they are all in the App Store. Apple brings nothing to the table by doing another chatbot, and their users can still use all of them. I don’t see why everyone seems to harp on that so much. Where Apple can do something useful is using AI to integrate solutions to real world stuff throughout the OS. These features are rarely flashy, but they become an indispensable part of people’s daily workflow. Current LLMs also seem to have a much higher tolerance for hallucinations than Apple does. I’d rather wait for something good and reliable than have them rush out a copy-cat chatbot that lies to me. People are much more forgiving with OpenAI than they’d be with Apple.
- type0 10mo ago> But their innovative design tends to be They should release iphone pocket mankini edition as their hallmark of innovative design
- dd8601fn 10mo ago> They take an idea that’s already been worked out (like MP3 players) and then just out-execute the competition. I’m inclined to think of that as innovation. To your point, not a single, earth shattering kind (inventing the first mp3 player), but by 100 lesser improvements in a single product. But yeah, all their stuff is that way. They didn’t invent smartphones, or satellite messaging in a phone, or rich mobile messaging, or end to end encryption of data on your cloud services, or biometrics and secure enclaves, etc. They just usually execute better than others.
- sublinear 10mo ago> A chatbot could replace a lot of this: just tell your phone what to do instead of clicking and swiping. I'm confused by this take. We've had this for over a decade? Technology is not holding this idea back. It just sucks big time for every situation except driving. Talking to a computer is dumb, but Knight Rider nailed it.
- cwillu 10mo agoWe've had voice recognition for over a decade, but we have not had “tell your phone what to do”. Heavy structured voice input to a command line is not what we're talking about.
- al_borland 10mo agoApple spent a lot of time already doing a lot of this with Siri instead of focusing on external knowledge. This didn’t replace their UI people. Voice commands aren’t always appropriate and a UI is still needed. The UI for setting up a daily alarm is a little clunky, since it requires individually selecting each day. I needed to setup alarms for pills every 12 hours. Instead of doing this manually, I asked Siri to do it and it was much easier. As an easter egg, you can even use some Harry Potter spells. “Lumos” will turn the flashlight on, “nox” will turn it off. Not everything needs a bunch of AI. Most OS operations and settings are probably better without it, other than maybe for helping to process intent if it’s unclear.
- wolvesechoes 10mo ago> Yeah, they seem to be moving from innovators to exploiting their user base Wow, who could have expected that to happen?!