Tim Cook: Technology Doesn't Exist to Do AR Smart Glasses 'In a Quality Way'
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
There's existing tech out there that does a reasonable job. It's gaining popularity. We don't have anything to deliver, so let's shit on the market until we can cobble something together.
Yep, standard apple ploy.
Name a single product you'd feel comfortable drop-shipping to a non-techy relative that is geographically distant, confident that they can get it working and won't be disappointed when they do.
There's been an article posted not once, but twice to HN in the last two days about someone returning their Apple Watch because it won't currently stream music, despite the fact that Apple specifically says, "coming soon". And the article's author pays for the developer program, and should know better than most. But as I understand your argument, you're saying there exist products today that actually live up to the hype so well that Joe Normal won't be disappointed. What you call "reasonable job", I call "tech preview" with regards to the current state and it's level of usefulness for average folks.
>There's existing tech out there that does a reasonable job.
No, there isn't. What exists now is clunky and isn't the kind of experience users are after. One of Apple's strength is understanding that "reasonable job" doesn't cut it. Too many tech people obsess over the tech and misunderstand what consumers want. It's why the people who laughed when the iPod came out, or the iPhone, or the iPad and went on about tech specs and features other products already had were so blind.
But it was too expensive by far (and underpowered, and didn't run long enough on a charge, and was too limited, etc)
Sadly, instead of blazing ahead on that starter technology, Google [seems to have] abandoned it
Doing AR on your smartphone - for now - is much smarter: you can pick when you want to use it, you don't need another device, etc
I think shifting focus on how to do AR is smart-er
Right, in that there are no good examples of a holistic "just works" stack of hardware and software + user modalities that Apple could release and have people just pick it up and go.
Wrong, in that Apple could make all of that work if they really wanted to because the fundamental underlying physics is there for everything except rendering black.