Ten years ago was pre oculus rift. We weren't saying anything about VR headsets.
Five years ago was pre valve index. We didn't have CPUs in a headset. Nor a battery. Cameras were only used for tracking. The things we were saying would improve is "screen door effect" and "tracking", both of which have.
The optical pathway is pretty much locked in. LEEP was invented in the 80s, and that's still the optical system used today. Compare the size to NASA's VR system from the early 90s. https://images.nasa.gov/details/ARC-1992-AC89-0437-6
It's been 30 years of massive improvements to all of the rest of computers, and VR has only shrunk a couple inches. There's not much else we can do to make it smaller.
There’s an insane amount of tech in the Vision Pro. Eyesight probably occupies a big chunk. Then there are more sensors than they need. Also the CPU and 100% processing is happening literally strapped to your face.
This is like having two 5k displays powered by a mobile device*.
* 2 x 5k = 28 million pixels, compared to Vision Pro’s 23 million pixels.
The AVP is leaps and bounds ahead of where we were collectively technically back then
But I don’t see us appreciably closer to the goal of ubiquitous persistent headworn see through visual computing
It’s a social expectations and data problem it’s not a “technical” problem
It’s probably gonna be decades before we see any regularized mainstream adoption, because the form factor is such a different thing that we’re not even close to make it a simple transition for the least savvy consumer
> Ten years ago was pre oculus rift. We weren't saying anything about VR headsets.
Rift DK1 was released in ~2013, and lots of gamers bought it throughout 2014. We got the first "consumer release" for the original Rift in 2016. I think its more than fair to say 10 years - we were absolutely talking a lot about Rift DK1 in 2014.
> Five years ago was pre valve index
Valve's first consumer VR headset was the HTC vive, released in 2016:
"The first-generation Vive was announced in 2015, as part of a collaboration with video game studio and distributor Valve Corporation, and implementing its VR software and hardware platform SteamVR; the first-generation consumer model was released in April 2016."
It demonstrates Valve have been at this longer than the ~5 years of the Index, and closer to a decade again (the point OP disputes and uses Index as evidence of).
not OP but it does seem like you're nitpicking details instead of engaging with what seems to be the intent of the response: AR/VR has come an incredible distance since DK1, the last 10 years have seen it go from a barely-discussed completely unavailable/fringe dev-kit-only technology to being an clearly viable spectrum of mass-market products.
edited: grammar. still feel like I've failed to produce readable english, but I'm giving up
Didn't Microsoft's hololens first launch around 10 years ago? It was AR rather than VR, but it was absolutely pitched as an early product meant for very specific use cases to act as a proof of concept before consumer versions.
I personally used a HoloLens for a few minutes and it had severe problems with field of view and brightness of the display. AR works for enterprise or the military to train people or present information at least the US military for the HoloLens [1]. Google finally axed the Glass Enterprise project in 2023 which was much longer than the original version.
Google Glass was pretty slick honestly, ahead of its time.
I had a friend that worked on the team for a couple years when it first started. The use case of a headsup display for directions while driving was a great experience.
I had a friend get Google Glass. I tried in on for a few minutes and was pretty disappointed. It was a tiny Android window stuck in the upper right of my FOV. Looking at the hardware, I guess it makes sense, but it’s not what the marketing seemed to be selling, and I expected a more custom UI that would get out of the way, rather than what looked like a tiny phone screen.
It wasn’t mine, so maybe there was more to it that I didn’t get from my brief interaction, but it didn’t leave me wanting more.
Yeah the UX definitely wasn't immersive. I liked the idea of a heads up display and have never really wanted a full display experience, Glass would have fit really well for me.
These days I don't even want that, but that's almost certainly of a combination of getting older and over reacting to how pervasive tech and displays have become.
There's been talk about VR and some kind of headset since the late 90s, even if it was cardboard, or some computer science professor wearing large goggles and backpack around campus. Google Glass came out in 2013.
The list on wikipedia [1] doesn't include it, I guess because it was a "development kit", and I just naively assumed the "Oculus Rift" was the DK1 not the CV1.
First Oculus headset versus Quest 3 right now? Quest 3 wins. There's progress. Perhaps not as fast as we'd want. There is progress though. I suspect that progress will continue.
There were a lot of tablets before the iPad but it wasn’t until the iPad that tablets really took off as a serious market segment. Ditto with AirPods and Bluetooth earbuds.
In the past, once Apple started pouring R&D money into a specific product type, the entire industry around it tends to advance very quickly. I’m optimistic about the Vision Pro, and I actually think the n+2 Meta release will be much better off for it.
My question is why does it seem like only Apple can do this, over and over? Why are they the only ones who seem to be able to knock a product category out of the park and legitimize it? Is it just the vast amount of money? Are they the only ones who can create products? Is everyone else that bad? Competitors work for ages and ages fighting each other, refining v1, v2, v2.1, v2.2, v2.25, and then suddenly Apple comes out with something v8-ish and the whole industry scrambles. Why does this keep happening?
They seem prepared to go in at higher price points.
Most other manufacturers seem to take the approach of getting as many features on the side of the box and then compete on price. They cost engineer the crap out of everything and it ends up being somewhat disappointing.
I often maintain that so much technology is 80% of the way to being amazing, but is stymied by commercial concerns that cause companies to cut corners and cheap out, or they hobble their own product to create barriers to interoperability.
While Apple still have to strike the right balance between between features and cost, and also like to make their own walled gardens, they are able to go for the higher price points, and also integrate really well between a wide swathe of products. They are prepared to let specific products be less competative in general (e.g Homepod), because they know that they integrate well into their overall ecosystem.
Yes, "stymied by commercial concerns" is a great way to put it. I get the feeling that many companies/managers don't have enough courage to make a different set of tradeoffs.
A lot of the replies are pretty vague, like they’re just “good at product” or they just “understand this or that” as if it’s some kind of mysticism. But why, and how? What is the formula? I think this reply chain starts to get at why.
I’m imagining a typical business school 2-axis chart where one axis is “willingness to take and commit to risks vs unwillingness/noncommittal” and the other axis is “acts independently vs. reacts to commercial/competitive pressures”. I guess what I want to understand is why is Apple kind of all alone on that plot, where the rest of the industry are clustered together far away from them? What are the business processes that lead to their position? Can a company follow a playbook and change their culture and have similar results? Are there other examples?
A lot of our industry are so extremely risk averse, have tunnel vision trying to copy each others’ feature checkboxes, rush things to market to try to make money before they are fully baked, and then give up when they aren’t instant successes. Everyone seems to follow this playbook.
As someone who is deep inside the Apple ecosystem after making enough to afford the devices, it’s because they make it pleasant to use. Before my first MBP, I had a Dell Inspiron which has good specs, but it was heavy, the plastic was flimsy and the screen was not good. The trackpad was abysimal. In my last work position, I got a Dell XPS and it was the same, so in the span of 8 years, nothing changes to show that they care for me as a user.
Most people don’t want to think about how to do something or care about optimizing it when they can get it done and not think further about it. But companies seems to want to put a lot of barriers into what I want to get done, like popups, complicated screens, ugly interfaces. For the majority of user workflows, Apple offers a simple, unobstrusive way to do them. Starlink routers are almost the same in that regard (the mobile app could use some work, and perhaps add a desktop interface)
My advice (as a user) is for to simplify the usual workflow to the point you only ask the few (0,1-3) indispensable questions, and then get out of the way. Further options can be buried inside Preferences and Settings. And then you perfect the apperance, ease of use, and general enjoyment of using the application/device.
Apple makes devices for the users. Dell makes them to sell as part of a service contract to a company. Microsoft makes an OS to sell to enterprises to provide a heavily managed experience for their employees so they can maximize productivity and profit. Apple makes an OS for people to use. (and get a 30% cut on almost every purchase the users make with it lol)
My personal machine is an M1 Air, and have to use PCs for work. The time it takes the PCs to wake from sleep until I can do actual work is a constant annoyance. The MacBook Air wakes just as quickly as an iPhone.
The MacBook team had this whole presentation planned for him, a usual dog and pony show about better specs and batteries and whatnot. Instead he just put an iPhone and a MacBook on the table, “woke” them both up, and said “why can’t this (the MacBook) do that (the iPhone)?” End of meeting.
Being pleasant to use also requires some courage to remove features, make compromises and spend extra time on the right things, rather than box-ticking.
In the end you need courage both to make it pleasant to use and to give it a big price.
I think they view design, especially of new products, as an intensely iterative process to identify and solve every problem they can find. And let that process lead them to a new very cohesive product definition.
That takes a very wide set of skills, to follow the series of discovered problems to be solved wherever they lead.
Other companies look at what parts are available, define a product from that, design have different teams build the different parts, each maximizing specs and reducing cost.
For the vast majority of already well defined products, the second path is the right one.
So that path is very familiar to every level of management at every corporation, and doing something completely different from the ground up isn’t easy or natural in that context.
For Apple, the other holistic discovery path is their mission.
Even “big” differences like being super vertical are a second level strategy for Apple, in service of being able to more easily follow problems to product definitions.
But even for Apple, that path is very risky. They have had a few half baked lemons in products that didn’t get as much discovery and attention as they needed.
You're getting close. Over the past 30-40 years, American corporations have focused more and more and more on profitability, and "making the numbers go up." They have sacrificed employee retention in order to pay executives eye-watering packages to focus on eliminating literally everything that doesn't contribute to that goal. They gutted all the R&D they can, years ago. Apple seems to be almost alone in retaining enough business acumen to think further out than the next quarter. It's not magic. They're just continuing to do what places like IBM and HP were famous for, decades ago. It's like the quip in Days of Thunder (and I have no idea why it sticks with me): "I'm not going faster. Everybody else is going slower." Wall Street has killed the future of America, and slowed human progress around the globe, in order to buy a bunch of already-filthy-rich people even more stuff.
Not that I'm bitter and jaded, as an engineer, or anything.
Apple has in house expertise for everything from designing their own processors, writing their own OS and applications, world class designers, manufacturing at scale, and sourcing parts and negotiating favorable pricing.
No other company has all these competencies at the same level.
> Most other manufacturers seem to take the approach of getting as many features on the side of the box and then compete on price. They cost engineer the crap out of everything and it ends up being somewhat disappointing.
This is a good summary of Windows Mixed Reality headsets, or Kinect
The price thing isn't just about competition. Meta and oculus before it has a stated goal to bring it to the masses. That's not going to work at a $3500 price point.
You need to get Devs interested too and that won't work if only the top 1% of the western world can afford it.
Apple can afford to build to standards, It is not like everyone else is dumb , they simply cannot pull it off the brand strength Apple has is without peer in the market.
If another brand launched first at same price points they simply will not get the traction Apple does.
Even with $3,500 price Apple likely needs sales hundreds of thousands of units to break even , no other manufacturers cannot pull it off
I think there are a lot of smaller companies that can build to standards, and then they either exceed their original vision or things explode to the point where they feel they need to move faster.
I love my Apple Watch (on my second one now) and I didn't like wearing watches. Except the Pebble that I bought (I think that I got the first generation Pebble colour, but it's been a while). After that product, things went sideways for Pebble for a lot of reasons. But the initial products were great and the build quality was good (not great, but good). The same applies to the first few generations of the Palm Pilot (and to a lesser degree, the Treo), although I think that the best PalmOS device built was the Clié NX70.
With respect to Apple's break even…I suspect that the research they did is going to produce benefits across all of Apple's product lines for the better part of the next decade (part of it already has, with the Apple Watch Double Tap hand gesture, although that is movement detection not camera-based).
> to the point where they feel they need to move faster
They feel the need because unlike Apple others cannot wait years to release a product or upgrade to a successful one and still sell enough. Everyone else have limited brand recall, if they don't move fast a competitor will and they loose relevance.
The point is nobody else can sustainably build to standards the way Apple can, because Apple can take its time enter a industry late and still win big.
Ya know the funny thing about Pebble, looking back as someone who is on his 3rd apple watch: At the time, I honestly thought Pebble was doing it the right way! And in hindsight, I still think that at launch, they had the perfect idea - for that point in time. Their initial success even matches that.
When the tech advanced, and use cases evolved, and users had become accustomed to the limitations of the apple watch style of smartwatch - which regarding battery life STILL HOLD TRUE... once all that was the case, Pebble had to deal with the "and now what?" and they couldn't.
It's not the money. They did it with the iMac when they were headed for the ground, and with the iPod when they were in a better position but still without infinite funding. Reality is actually quite simple: they spot technology advances, and integrate them into a neat, well-designed package that people actually want to buy.
The first iPod was a fancy shell around an IBM 1.8'' hard drive. There were MP3 players before but they were very bulky, or could store only a handful of files. They saw the hard drive coming, did the math, and went all in.
Same thing with the iPhone: there were smart phones before, but they spotted the capacitive digitizer that was orders of magnitude more accurate than the competition, and boom, multitouch.
Same thing with the AirPods: the killer feature being their fancy Bluetooth chip, which made the experience much better than the competition that was established for a decade at that point.
It is quite interesting that they do it over and over, going as far as saying what they do in interviews, and some people really don't see it for what it is.
> Are they the only ones who can create products?
They are not. They just have a vision of what they want to do, and once they start they put the effort needed (sometimes killing advanced designs before release). Then, they iterate relentlessly generation after generation. They play the long game, and often introduce their first generations at higher price points and keep improving and driving their price points down even if it is not an initial resounding success. Any company can do it, if they take design seriously and optimise for long term strategic goals rather than short-term economics.
> Competitors work for ages and ages fighting each other, refining v1, v2, v2.1, v2.2, v2.25, and then suddenly Apple comes out with something v8-ish and the whole industry scrambles.
If you look closely, when Apple comes in, it's because they have found a differentiating factor that they think will make the difference. They always have a compelling message about why you should choose their product above the competition. And it's never "same product, but cheaper".
Apple is AFAICT the only company in the world (outside of ultra-luxury brands) that actually cares about user experience enough to spend however much it takes to make it good.
Agree. And in a world where most technical people assume differentiation means better specs, Apple repeatedly prioritizes better UX: easier and/or more fun to use.
Agreed. I wasn’t trying to say Apple gets every bit of UX perfect (or even acceptable) in all products.
But they do have a history of disrupting markets by leveraging superior UX. Mainstreaming the GUI, the click wheel, the all-glass multitouch phone, etc, etc.
This. I consider myself a VR/AR enthusiast and I've had many VR headsets since the DK1, included Hololens 2 (and now Vision Pro). The day I started using Hololens 2 I just though "Wow, I could wear this for hours and even do real work on this if the displays and performance were a bit better". The product was simply amazing but it had a few issues (mainly performance) that it limited the device to very specific use cases.
Microsoft decided to mostly abandon the project, move/fire most of the team and give up rather than keep spending resources on a product that had an incredible potential... What would happen if Microsoft released a headset like Hololens 2 capable of running Windows apps for consumers at a similar price to AVP? They have Windows Mixed Reality, an almost infinite software catalogue, and the capabilities to do it... buy they simply don't (think about the Surface).
Steve Jobs is on record that Apple doesn’t care about being first (to market). They care about being the best.
This is why secrecy is a huge part of their culture: it allows them to spend years doing R&D work on multiple prototypes until they land on something they think is better than what is already out there.
If they can’t make it work due to the laws of physics (e.g. Apple AirPower) or indecision (e.g. Apple Car), they can shut it down without much fanfare and move on to the next secret R&D project.
Before Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the entire industry had decided separate software and hardware companies were the superior business model. With Intel processors, Microsoft software, and a huge number of PC compatible manufacturers.
Jobs doubled down on the combination of hardware and software designed and implemented under one roof. That bet paid off past anyone’s expectations.
So Apple now is far ahead of everyone else, when it comes to creating products deeply integrating hardware and software and design.
Because Apple is great at product. They have product built into their DNA. Specs and technology are only there to deliver a product experience. Few companies in the technology space think this way.
Other companies are also really bad at product. Google can't convey a coherent product strategy to save their lives. Great at technology (and building chat apps lol), terrible at product.
my generalized thoughts (and there are exceptions so don’t bother replying with “what about XYZ” because its a generalization):
1. Apple focus on customer story for every product. They may get it wrong sometimes but every product is sold with “this is how it will impact your life for the better”.
2. Apple understand brand and fashion. Unlike other companies, they don’t typically rush out the gate with a million variants to try and capture every part of the market. They don’t let it cheapen their brand and they avoid brand fatigue.
3. They stick with things for longer . Other companies tend to throw products at the wall early and hope they stick. Apple comes in later and then doesn’t relent for a long time compared to competitors.
4. They try and not focus on just specs. Other brands focus on features, and do a really bad job at telling you why you need it.
Apple aggressively focus on low-volume high-margin opportunities, have been doing so for some decades, and have a giant war chest to make bets with. In many ways, they work like the very very large version of a successfully bootstrapped business.
Most of their peers pursue maximum volume in an attempt to dominate a market and drown all competition, inebitably at much lower margins. It's the continuation of the VC launch-or-bust rocketship model most of them were born from.
The difference then means that Apple can try making something really unique and compelling and call it a profitable success based on much much smaller sales volume. And if it does happen to launch like a rocketship (as the iPod, iPhone, and iPad each did) all the better.
But their peers set a much higher mark for sales volume when thinking about what's a success or failure. If a product is only lightly taken up, even if nominally profitable at their margins, it's more like a distraction or clue rather than a success in itself. So they scavenge the project and move on to an alternative market or a parallel product idea.
This all sets Apple up to make slow, well-considered bets on quality and design coherency instead of strictly trying to race to market and outmaneuver everyone for volume.
They didn't need those numbers for the iPhone to be worth their original R&D effort, but winning those numbers is even more advantageous for them because of their core philosophy around volume and margins.
Meanwhile, Microsoft/Google/etc are playing a whole different game. When they succeed, they also saturate a market, but that's the only time they call it a success and so they approach the whole product design process differently.
Apple have only had 1 successful product, and thats a flat device with a screen for media consumption.
iPod, iPhone, and iPad are just different sizes of this device.
The only thing Apple have done which elevated themselves above their peers is have marketing which positioned them higher in the market.
Remember those Black and White ads of Steve Jobs next to Ghandi, Malcolm X, and Charlie Chaplin?
They are paying off now in spades.
That interpretation seems pretty out of sync with their financial history across divisions, their operating margin across divisions, their customer loyalty across divisions, and pretty much everyone's experience of the world, but maybe you're right.
You may not like their products, and you may think their customers are idiots hypnotized by villianous marketers or something, but that's kind of the point of it all: by targetting high margins and precisely volume instead of low margins and maximum volume, they really don't need to care what you think. And that lets them approach products differently.
>You may not like their products, and you may think their customers are idiots hypnotized by villianous marketers or something.
Thats quite a stretch to assume that opinion from my comment?
I actually love Macbook Pros. IMO they are the best Laptop ever built. However in the global market of laptops they are not patrticularly successful. The entiety of the MacOS ecosystem (of which Macbook Pros are a small percentage) barely breaks 20% of the market share.
Are their products more reliable, more fully featured, and objectivley better than their competitiors? No they are not. The reason they are regarded as a more premium option in the market is not because they make less product with more profit margin, its because they have had an incredibly clever marketing department for the last 20 years meticulously curating their brand presence and public perception into being the most premium tech company which produces the best products.
That's the difference in strategy. Apple only cares about profits not about market share. Market share only matters when margins are low and you need volume to bring revenue numbers up. When your margins are high, you can have a much smaller market share but also use that to create a more opinionated brand image and drive brand loyalty.
Thats fine until your revenue growth stagnates. Its then that your shareholders come knocking demanding growth, at which point market share becomes incredibly important. When that happens, opinionated brand image needs to become much more generic brand image to start attracting more of the market.
This is what happened with Xerox, IBM, Microsoft, and it will happen to Apple too.
Xerox, IBM, and Microsoft were unable to stay innovative. All three brands had huge missteps entering emerging market categories. Xerox stumbled during the PC transition, IBM with commodity servers, and Microsoft with mobile. The risk of building a brand is building an inflexible brand that doesn't have the agility to change.
It's true that trying to enter every market and own a huge market share in it can lead to lower risk of having to stay ahead of every innovation (as we can see with Google and its inability to productize AI properly) but since Apple's turnaround its execution has been top notch, and that was 20 years ago. With products like the Vision Pro Apple is explicitly trying to avoid losing the innovation race that Xerox, IBM, and Microsoft did.
> Are their products more reliable, more fully featured, and objectivley better than their competitiors? No they are not.
This is your personal opinion. My personal opinion, is very much the opposite.
> The reason they are regarded as a more premium option in the market is not because they make less product with more profit margin, its because they have had an incredibly clever marketing department for the last 20 years meticulously curating their brand presence and public perception into being the most premium tech company which produces the best products.
I've heard this same boring claim now for about 20 years. It was wrong as a broad statement twenty years ago, and such a statement I would hazard is still wrong now.
I've had a twenty year career in IT. Starting with PC repair and working for a PC OEM, however the vast majority of my career has been spent in fields involving Linux. (Linux Administrator/Systems Engineering/DevOPS through to executive leadership). I know how computers work, I know how the hardware works, I know the relative value of parts that go into things, yes I can, always have, and still will build machines including using on a regular basis all major operating systems in place today and despite all of this, I still remain an Apple customer and its not because im some dumbo non technical individual tricked by apples fancy marketing voodoo.
It's because for those twenty years Apple has consistently conducted themselves in a way with me personally that for the vast majority of cases, has served me best as a user and as their customer. As opposed to some third party who is paying them to exploit me through their operating system or some mass of adware shipped with their operating system, not just this years profit margins, not just for as long as im in the store and to which afterwards im left alone once ive paid them with a "fuck you, got mine."
Just a few of the events of the past twenty years that have kept me as an apple customer:
* 2006ish era macbook. HDD dies at random just outside of warranty. No local apple stores at the time. Local authorised repairer spends two weeks dicking me around on a fix, nothing. I push it to Apple who was not even local at the time. A week later I have a BRAND NEW macbook, not just a drive, outside of warranty, complete with brand new warranty, an additional year tacked on top and an apology for the service I had received. (We now have apple stores so this would not occur again I imagine.)
* 2014ish iPhone. Much like the macbook I start having issues outside of warranty, it is unable to be debugged in store. Dude wanders away, comes back. "Have you got a backup?", "Yes?", "We'll just give you a refurb, newer model, with warranty, are you happy with that?" "lol, yes I am."
* 2012 15" MacBook pro retina battery replacement - Battery dies outside of warranty in around 2017 and im informed no stock currently exists in the country, and that i'll be waiting months if I wanted a replacement. I am immediately informed that if I do not want to wait, I can instead have a significantly more powerful, and higher specced refurb model, complete with brand new warranty in place of waiting the month for a replacement. I took the replacement. Again, this machine was OUTSIDE of the warranty window. That one retina MBP purchase due to this replacement saw my laptop needs covered for a decade.
This is only touching on a tiny amount of the circumstances that have led to me remaining to continue investigating the purchase of products from Apple. Not everyone will have had these interactions, or come away from Apple positively, and perhaps one day, I also will not and my opinions will change. But at this point, from the day I became a customer through now, I have received a better long term support experience as a customer from Apple, then I have from any other organisation on the planet.
Do you even realize that Apple owns most of the above-1000$ laptop market and makes something like 40% of all computer profits because it sells so few computers at such a high price?
I'd love to be not successful making a luxury product that sells at commodity volume.
No, it is the vast amount of risk they are willing to take. Microsoft/alphabet have vast amounts of money too, but no appetite for risk.
Apple is willing to dump tens of billions and years into R&D for physical products, fail, and then try again. Microsoft half asses it, and then pulls back instead of plowing through (see them shutting down Microsoft retail stores and windows phone). But they have that Excel and Windows B2B gravy train they can ride for the foreseeable future.
Microsoft is actually doing great right now, but the thing they're doing great at is Azure and cloud services like 365, plus some very lucky AI investments.
Shutting down their bad products was a good move, even if they should've made good products in the first place.
AirPods/pro/max? They've taken major presence a space owned by Sony, Samsung and Bose.
Apple Watch Ultra?
Though it's thin and flat, The iPhone X was a huge leap in specs, contrary to the entire market analyst sentiment that people wanted cheaper phones. Apple made a big bet that people would want the opposite: more expensive phones, and they were right.
M series of chips is an arm processor, licensed by ARM and fabricated by TSMC.
On top of that it is a processor. Did apple R&D invent the processor? No, they licensed an existing design, tweaked it, and paid a factory to make it for them.
Airpods are just bluetooth headphones. Did Apple R&D invent bluetooth, or even bluetooth headphones?
Apple watch was not even the first smart watch to market. They did not invent the watch, and they did not invent the smart watch.
You must be pretty blinkard to think that Apple invented all these things instead of licensing existing patents and repackaging them, which is what they do best.
Who is talking about patents? I was talking about business risk. Since when does invention ever imply economic gain? It's business 101, invention rarely leads to business payoffs unless there is innovation in the market, i.e. it is manufactured, packaged, sold, distributed to the demands of the day. Who invented the PC? Kenbak corp & John Blankenbaker, arguably - they didn't last. Motorola invented the mobile phone. Invention is important but is no indication of long term business success.
On the M series of chips, "Tweaked it" is a heavy lift. You are vastly underplaying the amount of Apple's design work that went into the M series of chips. It's led to massive performance gains against the competition.
Airpods are "just" bluetooth headphones, but happen to be the ones that have the most market share by far. It's about design and quality.
The Apple Watch also is the most widely adopted smart watch, by far. Because of how it was designed and manufactured.
The facts are that Apple has taken major risks repeatedly with their design and product decisions, and reaps the rewards with higher margins and market share than the competition. This isn't blinkard, this is just reality.
I have no interest in convincing anyone else, maybe they are only risky according to me.
But I do know they seem to result in net incomes that others would seemingly find envious, and yet the others are not able to replicate, so the empirical evidence doesn’t make it seem so easy.
Apple has invested in developing the full stack for their products. Not only do they have the full stack of components for the products but the entire toolchain to develop those products. This gives them a very strong foundation for pretty much any product they want to pursue.
The AppleTV and HomePod both use older A-series SoCs and run iOS with a custom shell on top. They get all of the iOS media and peripheral handling capability "for free". Both projects can focus on TV or speaker features since the base OS is largely a solved problem for them. If they need some special consideration from somewhere in SWE they just file a Radar. They don't just get binary blob dumps of firmware from outside vendors and have to beg for bug fixes and hope their contract is big enough to get some consideration.
The Vision Pro leverages their ARM SoCs, base OS, and all the motion coprocessors that have been in their phones and watches for a decade. Novel improvements from the Vision Pro's development will just feed back to those components and make it into the next phone, watch, or whatever.
Most other companies don't actually own their whole product stack. Even Microsoft is at the mercy of their suppliers with the Surface line. They get what Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD have to offer. Smartphone manufacturers are grabbing Qualcomm and Samsung SoCs which are collections of Cortex cores then slap Android on top hoping that Google's latest version is better than the previous version.
It's hard to really make leapfrog products when you're shipping the same shit as your competitors and trying to compete on price.
Because they have spent decades building a brand which most people see as premium and desirable. Doesnt matter what the product is now, if it has an apple logo on it the majority of people will want one.
Other companies trying to compete with Apple in any space will automatically have this disadvantage that they are seen as the inferior choice because Apple have repeatedly positioned themselves as the most premium player in the market, and so thats just what people expect now.
OS: Windows is a add-riddled and always ignoring your preferences and getting in the way of your work.
Tablet: Android tablet are slow (or soon to be) and not much applications designed for them
Laptop: Windows and never a good mix of great components, perfomance, and weight.
Phone: Only a few do not add uninstallable junk, and these days, they all try to copy the iPhone which is not something I want is I’m trying to move away from the iPhone.
Speaker System: If I want a homepod alternative, I will not be looking to get inside another closed ecosystem. And I’d want lifetime support (airplay has been reversed-engineered). The last time I used Sonos, it wanted me to use its music player or something.
Apple is and always has been a product company. They invent technology to serve the product, and they don't particularly talk up the specifics of the technology, preferring to talk about what it enables. For example, the numerous interaction features introduced by the iPhone, such as swiping, pinching, and tapping. And the high resolution display they demanded for their Vision Pro.
One of the reasons for this is that Apple is a design-centric company. They really prioritize aesthetic and functional design, and they have a customer base that will allow them to flex these muscles in building luxury lifestyle products. Consumers respond to that. Products like that tend to have a segment-defining quality.
Consider Google. A couple years ago, a reporter documented the nearly (iirc) 20 attempts Google has made at a messenger. Meanwhile, Apple made one and ground away at it until it became great.
Google is a company that -- and this is true -- dropped trou and put apps on my phone called "Google Meet" and "Google Meet (Original)." And don't forget Duo. See also having "Google Pay" and "Google Wallet."
With a side of Android is kinda meh and look at pics of various Google execs at industry events. There's a solid chance there's an iphone in their hands.
Are you aware that Google Pay and Google Wallet are completely different products, and that Apple has exactly the same counterparts even named the same?
Apple does have similar level of branding confusion elsewhere. Look at Apple Music vs iTunes Store. How many people understand the difference between the two subscriptions?
Anyone who has been around longer than a minute in the ecosystem. The iTunes Store isn't a subscription service, it's an a la carte store. Done!
More importantly: it's not confusing because no one really cares or needs to care. New folks use the Apple Music subscription, old folks that know the difference use either.
There is, in fact, an iTunes subscription called iTunes Match. That's the one that lets you upload your own tracks to the cloud, scans them to match against the catalog, and then gives you DRM-free high quality downloads of it.
On the other hand, with Apple Music, there's a different subscription that also lets you upload your music to the cloud and scans them for matches, but what you get back out of it is DRMed downloads. Which don't work outside of the Apple ecosystem, and stop working even on it if you cancel your Apple Music subscription.
On top of that, the way matching works is different for the two services. iTunes Match actually analyzes the raw data of the track to do the exact match, while Apple Music seems to prefer metadata. Which means that, with the latter, you'll often get a different variant of the song, in cases where multiple versions exist.
I'm aware of iTunes Match vs Apple Music Sync Library. Incorporating legacy services into new ones is always a product management tap dance of tradeoffs.
My point is that bring your own library of pre-ripped music into a subscription service for syncing is rare these days unless you're over a certain age or are an audiophile (at which point there are better alternatives like Roon). If you're going to do rare things, then there will always be nuances to understanding the tradeoffs Apple took to support you.
It's not rare for anyone who already has a collection of music, e.g. because they are coming from a different service. It doesn't have to be ripped - it may well have been purchased via numerous existing services that sell downloadable files, from Amazon to Apple itself.
>My question is why does it seem like only Apple can do this, over and over?
Because they don't just treat things as hardware, but as a complete ecosystem. Sure, they price things at a point where they can afford to make a quality product, but it's more than that... There are times when things aren't perfect, but overall everything works together and is very high quality. When I've tried in the past to buy non-Apple gear, things tend to be clunky, incomplete, and put a high burden on me as a user, even in cases where the specs might be better than Apple gear.
Because they're able to understand what is actually valuable to their customers, and they'll go the extra mile to make sure that what matters is done properly.
It's comparable to why 'Google Video Search' lost out to youtube way back in the day. The google engineer nerds couldn't understand why no one liked their product: it had all these options for uploading video with the best quality and all these formats, while youtube had worse quality and few options. They missed the point and didn't understand the users, and were caught up in the tech rather than what was actually valuable to the users (basically: dead simple to 'just upload a video' - quality doesn't matter as much as that).
Kinda like how Mark Z. has been talking about how the Oculus has similar resolution. It's not the tech specs that make the product - those are necessary but not sufficient. If the product is supposed to be AR: then it needs to actually be AR. And that means. e.g., that details like virtual shadows on real surfaces MUST be included, and must actually work properly. If it's not, then it's only kinda-AR. That's the kind of long tail that Apple understands, and other companies don't. The tech must fit the users, and the experience must be complete.
First, we cannot ignore Apple Fanboys (and I am not using that in a negative sense). They have a large base of users who will jump at nearly anything they put out.
However they also have a track record of doing things, both big and small, and pushing the industry to go a certain way. Dropping CD drives is a great example of this, this was an inevitability with more and more distribution through the internet. This would be a risk for a manufacture to try with a random computer because consumers may just ignore it. Apple has the power to say, well you want a Mac? here are your couple options and we are doing this anyways.
Sometimes this fails, see all USB-C Laptops.
But I think it also often comes from thinking about the entire experience. Take them removing the head phone jack (the debate on whether or not they actually needed to do that aside), at the same time we got the AirPods.
Or the iPhone wasn't just simply, without a physical keyboard. It emphasized the advantages of this throughout the entire OS.
But regardless of all the above, I think the simple fact that they just happen to generally sell a lot of devices. Enough that it can normalize a decision for consumers and then other manufactures can follow without risk.
It’s because the majority of tech firms with sufficient capital are not willing to invest in the development of a full product, nor frankly, do they have the leadership to do so. I also believe they don’t have the smarts to capitalise on disruption, so they’d much rather maintain the status quo by swatting competitors.
However the c-levels at those companies are happy to chase $$$, and will closely copy whichever hardware and software is deemed the best in the market at the time. Some also do this because they see the product as a threat to their core business.
There will also be various cheerleaders who exalt that apple’s ideas are trivially obvious and were always the pre-destined pathway for the category. Seemingly ignoring the long floundering that occurred before Apple’s entry.
Apple tends to jump on the bandwagon late but then turns thing mainstream. That worked well for ultrabooks (e.g. sony vaio, then MacBook air, nowadays every laptop) or earbuds.
The AR/VR or visionsomething^TM case is a bit different in that apple actually has to implement a new market. Thus far they don't seem to be trying that hard.
They don't really have to implement the market themselves - they just have to create the marketting buzz. Then they'll happily let Meta build the volume market where the profit margins suck (much as Android did for the iPhone business)
The problem with every headset over the last ten years was that they just didn’t have the technical commitment to really overcome the major problems. Making good VR is a VERY tech heavy endeavor. Apple has shown that they can make hardware which really begins to solve those issues (good resolution and quality pass through being one, having a nice OS being another). The AVP is truly starting to make a difference in what is possible with VR. It’s not just more optimism.
Apple has a history to sticking with things like this. Watch and HomePod were both seen as over-priced and sold poorly the first iterations. Apple leadership had the confidence to see through those initial versions. This was part of the internal culture during my time at Apple.
> This was part of the internal culture during my time at Apple.
From a management perspective, how do they handle the people side of that - keeping good people on the team and keeping them motivated to do something extraordinary?
People don't like spending time on unsuccessful projects and don't want their names associated with them, and don't want to work extra hard on something that won't come to fruition.
Maybe Apple management has enough internal reputation that employees are willing to take that risk (but even Apple management has flops - the car seeming to be a recent example). But that doesn't feel like a sufficient explanation to me.
You don't know if Apple sees them as failures. We weren't building to v1. We were building a long lived product. We knew that. We understood our vision and that it might take years to see that through. I don't think anyone would be ashamed to have Apple Watch or HomePod on their resume.
Clearly you are right and they were right, but that's hindsight.
Getting people to see that in forseight when they aren't seeing results, they won't for years, and it's all uncertain that it all won't be a waste of time, and it's frustrating and they have other, more certain offers - that's difficult leadership and management, and I wonder how Apple does it.
But we were getting the results we expected, just not what articles and blog posts expected. I learned very quickly that most things I read regarding projects I had knowledge of were wildly inaccurate.
So basically they have the patience, the cash stockpile, and the management culture to support large multi-year product field testing with non-employees.
I know this is anecdotal but my brother uses the Vison Pro daily ever since we have had it. He got a Oculus DK1 and a Oculus Quest 2 (I bought the Quest 2 off from him) and if he wasn't wearing it so much I have worn it and the best experience from it is media consumption. Its really a iPad with a ridiculous screen.
My main concern with the vision pro is that all use cases I know of (other than gaming) work better with some sort of pass through HUD display like the HoloLens.
They spent a ton of company resources, weight and power making the wrong form factor emulate the right form factor, and are shipping with zero killer apps.
You can’t even let your friends play with it without getting it re-fit to their head at the Apple Store, which basically kills social/word of mouth marketing. It certainly isn’t a fashion item / status symbol to be seen in public like all their other stuff.
Maybe the “real” product is sitting in the wings and will be ready to ship in a few years, but the current form factor seems like a non-starter to me.
My opinion, and its very naive because I've only really tried the Vision Pro for this type of content, but immersive video is the current killer app for the Vision Pro. Sitting in the studio with Alicia Keys warming up for her tour was almost equal parts uncomfortable and amazing.
But their work on the software side transfers seamlessly to a pass through device later. It still serves its purpose as a beta (beta meaning data collection and improvement process, not its modern “we just don’t support this” definition.
"Pro" is a misnomer here, though. "Pro" normally means "with extra features for professionals", where here it means "it's more of a dev kit than it is an actual product".
The main use case Apple presented, productivity, works much better with an opaque screen, not pass-through. There's a reason we don't make transparent screens, nor transparent windows on our screens: text and images are much easier to read if they are opaque.
There were lots of rumors that Apple was working on both AR glasses and VR goggles, but had to focus on the latter because the tech just isn't there to do glasses right.
There's nothing that says that a pair of glasses can't have panels on the sides and top to provide full coverage [0]. The main obstacle is miniaturizing the necessary compute and display technology.
Given my age, I would say the same applies to all headsets I have seen since 1994, when I saw someone using one to play Doom at the Lisbon computer fair.
