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Maybe Ternus is the kind of leader who could bring 0->1 innovation back to Apple in some form. Maybe an Alphabet "other bets" type setup? Or simply just takin

Maybe Ternus is the kind of leader who could bring 0->1 innovation back to Apple in some form. Maybe an Alphabet "other bets" type setup? Or simply just taking more chances on completely new product lines that may or may not pay off in 5-10 years (like VisionPro). I mean when was the last big new bet previous to VisionPro? Wearables, with the Apple Watch in 2015 is probably it, a decade prior. (AirPods are huge but feel more evolutionary from their wired EarPods + Beats roll-up) They could & should make new segment bets with genuinely new product lines more than once a decade. They have the capacity.

ricardobayes 6mo ago
Yes, let's hope. And also let's hope that innovation will be more "iPhone" and less "Apple Vision Pro".
- ZiiS 6mo ago
  It isn't innovation if you don't get 99 Vision Pro's per iPhone.
  - trimbo 6mo ago
    You can choose not to ship the 99.
    - steveBK123 6mo ago
      Shipping is part of the process. Stated preferences vs revealed preferences. Polling / focus groups vs sales. You never really know what works until it works.
    - pdpi 6mo ago
      You choose not to ship maybe 90 of those 99, because it's obvious before shipping that they won't work. The rest you have to ship before it becomes obvious they're not that last blessed one.
  - steveBK123 6mo ago
    Exactly - Apple needs to be making MORE bets, not LESS. Apple VisionPro may turn out to be an iPod HiFi, iTunes Ping, eMate, Pippin, Newton, Macintosh Portable, Lisa.. etc. Or it may turn out in 5-10 years to be a contributor like AppleTV, Watches, etc. I don't even care which it turns out to be, I want to see them taking bets like this every year or two, not once per decade. The fact that the list of "Failed Apple Products" returns a lot more stuff from 80s/90s/00s and very little from 10s/20s tells you how little they make bets anymore. Most of the post-2010 "failures" are accessories/parts/iterations rather than completely new product categories.
    - esafak 6mo ago
      I don't. That's how you get Google's graveyard. I want them to make a bet and nurture it, like they already do.
    - ricardobayes 6mo ago
      The current mature tech company scene doesn't nurture this. If you're worried about performance reviews, layoffs and a 5k mortgage bill each month, that doesn't exactly put you in an innovative mood. To get that 90s, early 2000's innovation, Apple needs to somehow think like a small company (this is near impossible) or actually be multiple smaller companies. If the new CEO is smart, he could start in-house startups with Apple funding and infrastructure.
      - steveBK123 6mo ago
        Having worked at companies with 200 to 100,000 employees.. I agree some of it must be organizational big-co thinking/kpis/perf/politics. Creating some sort of internal incubator that encourages experimentation enough to innovate but with enough accountability to not be a purely academic R&D lab is difficult I'm sure. This is why I mentioned elsewhere in thread - Maybe an Alphabet "other bets" type setup? Not sure if people with closer experience has an opinion on if that model actually works our not. I suppose we have gotten some real world output from it right?
heroicmailman 6mo ago
I'm honestly shocked they haven't done more with HomeKit and in-home devices. Give me a low-power, always-on, iPad-mini style display on my nightstand, on my fridge, on my kitchen countertop, as a desk companion... there are so many things they could do with that form factor. They could even just offer me a dock or a mount as an accessory in most cases and it'd probably juice iPad sales, but they don't even do that. I'm surprised they haven't made more inroads into being a more serious Nest competitor because Apple could do it with relative ease.
- redsocksfan45 6mo ago
  [dead]
- steveBK123 6mo ago
  I'd personally be a buyer for some home stuff, but the average normie consumer just doesn't care very much about home automation. IoT turned out to be sort of a nothing. I say this as an early adopter and continued user.. it just never broke into mainstream and it's been 15+ years. You make a good point re: Nest. I am kind of a doomer on home automation market in that I have been an early adopter and it's been around 15 years, but most people just don't care about the space. The home automation stuff people are interested in and Apple could attack is the doorbell/camera/alarm systems because what is out there is still genuinely a minefield of awful products. An Apple it-just-works premium offering would sell. And they have the physical store footprint to demo them.
  - alistairSH 6mo ago
    I don't know, the majority of people I know (mostly upper-middle class white collar) have at least a HomePod/Alexa/Google smart speaker. And many have a smart thermostat and/or smart doorbell/camera. Part of the problem with IoT/home automation is a lack of consistency across devices - they all want their own apps. HomeKit is so close to making that easy - you shouldn't have to spin up HomeAssistant with a bunch of plug-ins to make this stuff easy for the end-user, but that's where we are (and that's decades after the first gen stuff rolled out). I'd think it was an easy sell to have lights, doorbell, security cameras, and smart speakers all connected easily. Anyway, feels like Apple could throw some weight into this market, with Apple-branded devices, and "win" the market. At least for households that are already heavily invested in iDevices. Right now, I have to poke around and find a smattering of off-brand stuff and only about half of it is natively HomeKit, so I have to run HomeAssistant with a HomeKit bridge, etc.
raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
I would hope that Apple doesn’t follow Google’s lead. Google has the attention span of a crack addled flea and struggles to make great products
- mring33621 6mo ago
  Gemini is a great product
  - raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
    I have used Gemini, I have a personal subscription to ChatGPT and a corporate $5000/month allowance to Claude. How is it better than either? How is it doing as a revenue making product?
  - kristofferR 6mo ago
    Eh, depends on what aspect of it. It's a very bad harness and is comically bad at tool calling, but as a Siri alternative and Youtube summarizer it's pretty good. As a chatbot it's unusable due to its broken web interface.
  - butlike 6mo ago
    I don't like the name. Makes it sound two faced. Yes, I get it's a marrying of DeepMind and Google Brain teams or whatever. Still think it sounds duplicitous.
pjc50 6mo ago
For a while people were talking about the "Apple car". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project ; seemingly they gave up on it because they realized that FSD wasn't quite going to work. I'm not sure why they wouldn't just pivot back to making a regular EV, it would still be guaranteed to sell millions of units at a premium price point by being a Tesla without (a) That Guy (b) build quality issues like panel gaps and (c) software promises that weren't delivered. Perhaps the sticking point was where to make it. Another entirely missing Apple product line: rackmount servers, with all the proper stuff like ILO management.
- steveBK123 6mo ago
  The car always made the least sense to me in that its the polar opposite of what Apple had evolved to. High-capex in-house manufacturing onshore in a highly regulated space vs capital-light outsourced contract manufacturing offshore of discretionary purchase consumer goods. There are no successful car makers that outsource production, and even foreign car makers generally make cars onshore in US for tariff/political/regulatory reasons.
  - greedo 6mo ago
    The way Apple funded hardware purchases for their "OEM" manufacturers makes it hard to really say they were "capital-light."
  - twoodfin 6mo ago
    If Apple had gotten to the point of making a real product with “Titan”, all the signs were they would be engaging with a manufacturing partner in the US. Hyundai, most likely. As for why they did it: Apple makes computers. If what you’re interacting with benefits from being a general purpose computer (under the covers or otherwise) Apple thinks they can deliver a superior experience and the margins that come with it. I think they realized that the only computer in the car they cared about was the smartphone.
    - 121789 6mo ago
momojo 6mo ago
I'm all aboard the "Apple is simply waiting for the models to get dense enough to run on their hardware" hype train. They're poised to consume the market for the "I want AI, but I don't want to sell my soul" demographic that is ever growing. Sure, the AI gluttony continues, and the vibes tell me people are only more and more willing to shovel their lives into the maw, but my thesis is people only value fire insurance after they've bought the house. Put my down as bullish. Apple hardware is currently the worst it'll ever be, and gemma4 and qwen3.6 are the least intelligence-dense they'll ever be. Buy up taalas or spin up your own hardware. I'm confident Ive only scratched the surface of Ternus' 5-year plan.

ricardobayes 6mo ago

Yes, let's hope. And also let's hope that innovation will be more "iPhone" and less "Apple Vision Pro".

ZiiS 6mo ago
It isn't innovation if you don't get 99 Vision Pro's per iPhone.
- trimbo 6mo ago
  You can choose not to ship the 99.
  - steveBK123 6mo ago
    Shipping is part of the process. Stated preferences vs revealed preferences. Polling / focus groups vs sales. You never really know what works until it works.
  - pdpi 6mo ago
    You choose not to ship maybe 90 of those 99, because it's obvious before shipping that they won't work. The rest you have to ship before it becomes obvious they're not that last blessed one.
- steveBK123 6mo ago
  Exactly - Apple needs to be making MORE bets, not LESS. Apple VisionPro may turn out to be an iPod HiFi, iTunes Ping, eMate, Pippin, Newton, Macintosh Portable, Lisa.. etc. Or it may turn out in 5-10 years to be a contributor like AppleTV, Watches, etc. I don't even care which it turns out to be, I want to see them taking bets like this every year or two, not once per decade. The fact that the list of "Failed Apple Products" returns a lot more stuff from 80s/90s/00s and very little from 10s/20s tells you how little they make bets anymore. Most of the post-2010 "failures" are accessories/parts/iterations rather than completely new product categories.
  - esafak 6mo ago
    I don't. That's how you get Google's graveyard. I want them to make a bet and nurture it, like they already do.
  - ricardobayes 6mo ago
    The current mature tech company scene doesn't nurture this. If you're worried about performance reviews, layoffs and a 5k mortgage bill each month, that doesn't exactly put you in an innovative mood. To get that 90s, early 2000's innovation, Apple needs to somehow think like a small company (this is near impossible) or actually be multiple smaller companies. If the new CEO is smart, he could start in-house startups with Apple funding and infrastructure.
    - steveBK123 6mo ago
      Having worked at companies with 200 to 100,000 employees.. I agree some of it must be organizational big-co thinking/kpis/perf/politics. Creating some sort of internal incubator that encourages experimentation enough to innovate but with enough accountability to not be a purely academic R&D lab is difficult I'm sure. This is why I mentioned elsewhere in thread - Maybe an Alphabet "other bets" type setup? Not sure if people with closer experience has an opinion on if that model actually works our not. I suppose we have gotten some real world output from it right?

heroicmailman 6mo ago

I'm honestly shocked they haven't done more with HomeKit and in-home devices. Give me a low-power, always-on, iPad-mini style display on my nightstand, on my fridge, on my kitchen countertop, as a desk companion... there are so many things they could do with that form factor. They could even just offer me a dock or a mount as an accessory in most cases and it'd probably juice iPad sales, but they don't even do that. I'm surprised they haven't made more inroads into being a more serious Nest competitor because Apple could do it with relative ease.

redsocksfan45 6mo ago
[dead]
steveBK123 6mo ago
I'd personally be a buyer for some home stuff, but the average normie consumer just doesn't care very much about home automation. IoT turned out to be sort of a nothing. I say this as an early adopter and continued user.. it just never broke into mainstream and it's been 15+ years. You make a good point re: Nest. I am kind of a doomer on home automation market in that I have been an early adopter and it's been around 15 years, but most people just don't care about the space. The home automation stuff people are interested in and Apple could attack is the doorbell/camera/alarm systems because what is out there is still genuinely a minefield of awful products. An Apple it-just-works premium offering would sell. And they have the physical store footprint to demo them.
- alistairSH 6mo ago
  I don't know, the majority of people I know (mostly upper-middle class white collar) have at least a HomePod/Alexa/Google smart speaker. And many have a smart thermostat and/or smart doorbell/camera. Part of the problem with IoT/home automation is a lack of consistency across devices - they all want their own apps. HomeKit is so close to making that easy - you shouldn't have to spin up HomeAssistant with a bunch of plug-ins to make this stuff easy for the end-user, but that's where we are (and that's decades after the first gen stuff rolled out). I'd think it was an easy sell to have lights, doorbell, security cameras, and smart speakers all connected easily. Anyway, feels like Apple could throw some weight into this market, with Apple-branded devices, and "win" the market. At least for households that are already heavily invested in iDevices. Right now, I have to poke around and find a smattering of off-brand stuff and only about half of it is natively HomeKit, so I have to run HomeAssistant with a HomeKit bridge, etc.

raw_anon_1111 6mo ago

I would hope that Apple doesn’t follow Google’s lead. Google has the attention span of a crack addled flea and struggles to make great products

mring33621 6mo ago
Gemini is a great product
- raw_anon_1111 6mo ago
  I have used Gemini, I have a personal subscription to ChatGPT and a corporate $5000/month allowance to Claude. How is it better than either? How is it doing as a revenue making product?
- kristofferR 6mo ago
  Eh, depends on what aspect of it. It's a very bad harness and is comically bad at tool calling, but as a Siri alternative and Youtube summarizer it's pretty good. As a chatbot it's unusable due to its broken web interface.
- butlike 6mo ago
  I don't like the name. Makes it sound two faced. Yes, I get it's a marrying of DeepMind and Google Brain teams or whatever. Still think it sounds duplicitous.

pjc50 6mo ago

For a while people were talking about the "Apple car". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_car_project ; seemingly they gave up on it because they realized that FSD wasn't quite going to work. I'm not sure why they wouldn't just pivot back to making a regular EV, it would still be guaranteed to sell millions of units at a premium price point by being a Tesla without (a) That Guy (b) build quality issues like panel gaps and (c) software promises that weren't delivered. Perhaps the sticking point was where to make it. Another entirely missing Apple product line: rackmount servers, with all the proper stuff like ILO management.

steveBK123 6mo ago
The car always made the least sense to me in that its the polar opposite of what Apple had evolved to. High-capex in-house manufacturing onshore in a highly regulated space vs capital-light outsourced contract manufacturing offshore of discretionary purchase consumer goods. There are no successful car makers that outsource production, and even foreign car makers generally make cars onshore in US for tariff/political/regulatory reasons.
- greedo 6mo ago
  The way Apple funded hardware purchases for their "OEM" manufacturers makes it hard to really say they were "capital-light."
- twoodfin 6mo ago
  If Apple had gotten to the point of making a real product with “Titan”, all the signs were they would be engaging with a manufacturing partner in the US. Hyundai, most likely. As for why they did it: Apple makes computers. If what you’re interacting with benefits from being a general purpose computer (under the covers or otherwise) Apple thinks they can deliver a superior experience and the margins that come with it. I think they realized that the only computer in the car they cared about was the smartphone.
  - 121789 6mo ago

momojo 6mo ago

I'm all aboard the "Apple is simply waiting for the models to get dense enough to run on their hardware" hype train. They're poised to consume the market for the "I want AI, but I don't want to sell my soul" demographic that is ever growing. Sure, the AI gluttony continues, and the vibes tell me people are only more and more willing to shovel their lives into the maw, but my thesis is people only value fire insurance after they've bought the house. Put my down as bullish. Apple hardware is currently the worst it'll ever be, and gemma4 and qwen3.6 are the least intelligence-dense they'll ever be. Buy up taalas or spin up your own hardware. I'm confident Ive only scratched the surface of Ternus' 5-year plan.