Apple’s next big thing: A business model change
mondaynote.com
mondaynote.com
Its clear Apple are heading down the disruptive disintermediation route.
Look at the Air Tag. Effectively killing off competitors by making use of the global network of Apple devices.
Look at their recent BNPL (buy now, pay later) announcement for example. Managing the whole caboodle, including the finance itself, entirely internally.
Or look at the fact they still haven't rolled out Apple card internationally. My uninformed guess is that it is more to do with "something's brewing" rather than the US cards not working.
Their recent satphone announcement. Clearly that's just the start. I think most people are guessing the endgame will be carrier disintermediation. And frankly, given how shit most cell carriers are, I can't wait for Apple to come along and give the incumbents a run for their money.
As a former paid user of Dark Sky that lost that information when Apple bought them I feel no sympathy for iOS users that Dark Sky has gone to crap
I am sad such an amazing tool for the world was destroyed by a corporation trying to deprive another corporation so they could maybe make a little more money.
> Support for the Dark Sky iOS app will end on December 31st, 2022, and support for the Dark Sky API will end on March 31st, 2023.
So basically them buying then closing the service to make their own seem better
* Climate change is causing problems with forecasting models
* Forecasting models changed, which has introduce unexpected edge cases
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200717101026.h...
While this is confirmation bias, this reflects almost identically with the timeframe in which the forecasts became significantly worse in my area.
I'm not sure this happens on the time scale of 'app got acquired', though. It's absolutely going to increase year by year, and if you'd got used to how it was three years ago and didn't notice some of the outlier events, you might be shocked at the new normal.
Climate change absolutely will cause problems with any conceivable forecasting model because you can't encapsulate chaos, only map its expected potential outcomes: and the nasty truth is that energy is fed into the system, those potential outcomes blow up exponentially. Not even slightly linear. So that's what we're seeing.
So I'd not be surprised if they somehow switched their data source to be not as granular as it once was.
Honestly, that's about right here in Florida. :)
Agreed on the local-storage-for-health-data bit, but I'm sure they could argue that the ambient sensor isn't privacy-relevant.
Does Apple Watch have a light sensor for an auto dimming display? If so, that can be used as a proxy for indoor/outdoor. It isn't great, shade and such. Throw barometer in there, and you can do a decent job.
Microsoft Band had a UV sensor, so we were able to get pretty accurate detection of indoor/outdoor when combined with all the other sensors, at least during the day. I'm sad UV sensors didn't take off on smart watches in general, it is a super useful sensor to have, but they are rather large and even the lens material to go over them is different than what is otherwise required for a wearable.
Then, you still have to account for the fact that your thermometer is located right next to a variable ~100W heater, vs. normal weather stations that are normally located away from heat sources. Also, the thermometer and heater are occasionally placed inside a tight-fitting insulated container.
Maybe they are they next to a window or under a sky light.
> or if they could use location data to figure out that 'this Apple Watch is in the middle of a large field, so he must be outside'.
Could be in a tent or other temporary structure.
Don't talk like that, its a self defeating mindset. You are likely as competent as most Apple engineers (the 10x benefit from less inhibitions and tons of energy.
The people working at apple are like most of us here, curious and driven. Apple has a lot of money to throw at people who bring in experience whereas you and I are individuals who do not work in the field of "figuring out where things are using computers." So we obviously are not experts in the field and not familiar with existing and emerging solutions for the problem.
Its a shame that it is locked up inside of apple.
Second, it doesn't give you any additional readings over oceans, which is where the data is lacking in the current network of data.
It does give you more robust surface temperature readings in cloudy areas but that doesn't really help you predict the weather significantly better.
Source: degree in atmospheric sciences
Let’s pretend that data from user portable devices isn’t garbage (it is): then what do you even do with it? In cities you’ll have thousands of readings per voxel none of which are more valuable. Then you have to clean your data, excluding data from inside or vehicles or hot pavement or heated patios and so on. Apple won’t go to the expense of running their own GCM, and I doubt even mesoscale models. All I could see is some sort of correlative AI, doing microscale adjustments to government sponsored models. So all of this work, and maybe you get one degree better at forecasts and a bit of nowcasting. And because it isn’t physics-based, you might occasionally get something very wrong happening.
The oceans are a data hole (technical term, really) as you mentioned, but the real missing data is above the surface. It’s too bad about Project Loon, because that would have been much more helpful to forecasting than a million monkeys wearing watches.
Is there a really no use in having higher resolution for modeling the boundary layer?
It seems like having a mountain covered in tiny barometric and temp sensors could at least validate a lot of what we think we know about the boundary layer.
I personally would love to be able to see what the temperature at the bottom and top of a given topographic feature is, as well as how atmospheric pressure is deviating from pure altitude differences.
I build instruments for gliders so I know that the sensors in our phones are capable of incredibly fine resolution. Is there really no use for billions of high resolution data points in climate science?
Unless you're sick, most people's body temperature is within a fairly tight range.
So they could compensate for that ...
Or, ahem.... "cold winter evenings". ;-)
Air pressure on the other hand...
Why would the most profitable company in the world want to get into one of the worst businesses in the world?
It's absurdly capital intensive.
Sure, Apple has an abundance of capital, but their shareholders are unlikely to approve this over ever more share buybacks...
But is mobile telecoms really one of the worst businesses in the world ?
I would argue that its one of the worst executed businesses in the world, but not the worst business.
Travel and hospitality would likely be fairer examples of "worst businesses", perhaps especially the airline business.
Carriers have 50-60% gross margins. They are critical enough to get special tax treatments to deal with the capital expenses. If the goal is to make money, what would be the “best” business? Drug cartel?
Indeed. Many people don't realise how amazingly robust margins have remained.
A lot of it is because its such a closed shop which is why they can get away with many things.
My hunch is they print pallets of cash, then use some large fraction for bonfires.
What are good businesses?
Apple... Saudi Aramco... Google... AWS...
Sure, Apple's theoretical cell subscribers could grow a lot - but no one is going to care...
It would be such a small part of the profits compared to hardware sales and other services - with a MASSIVE capital cost - probably much higher than phone R&D.
It would be less capital intensive and possibly more profitable for Apple to manufacture their own phones than start their own carrier business... And that's a horrible idea, too...
The idea of starting your own carrier business that isn't an MVNe is almost absurd.
Why doesn't Tesla build their own roads while we're at it?
For what it's worth I think BNPL is simply an attempt by Apple to get some yield on their insane cash pile. Last year they had over $0.2T on hand. [1] They're making it faster than they seem to be able to return it to shareholders.
BNPL is a pretty bad business - margins are low, buyers are generally not qualified in the same way as other lending, ticket sizes are low, and collections aren't worth it (you really gonna repossess my $20 gently-used socks?). However, if Apple has a better way to qualify the customers (a big if)...
They can take ~3-4% of the transaction, net like 0.5% for a 6 week loan, which is like a 4.5% APR. Their margins may be better than peers since they can use their own cash instead of raising debt. Maybe 6-7% APR. It's also short-term debt that turns over fast so it's highly liquid.
My wholly uninformed opinion is that this is more of a cash management product that happens to be built on their data for Apple than a data product per se. After all you can't just roll up at BofA with a $0.2T check and get that kind of APR.
[1] https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-every...
Apple has said they'll be charging zero interest and zero fees for this service, including zero late fees, so where the yield will be coming from is unclear. That said, I confess that I don't have a deep understanding of the BNPL market.
With respect to cards: cards have a number of advantages for both merchants and customers. Cash is not free to handle and carries risk (theft, etc) and it's really slow. Credit card buyers tend to have larger average ticket sizes (20% larger was the last one I saw) and card buyers have more confidence buying from smaller shops knowing that they can always charge back the merchant if something goes terribly wrong. In a real way chargebacks are a big part of how we got e-commerce.
Merchant agreements generally precluded credit surcharges but they always allowed cash discounts. This is commonly seen at US gas stations to this day. They also prohibited credit card minimum purchase amounts. To my knowledge both of these are no longer true.
Shops aren't putting up with cards so much as embracing them because that's how their customers want to pay, and they don't want to miss out on a sale.
The more this gets legislated the harder it will be for someone to enter the market later on, Apple (among other tech giants) aren't going to sit back while you write the laws, it'll be the other way around.
Note that net neutrality has never been passed as a Federal regulation.
If I could cut them out all together and buy an iPhone and cell service with Apple. Done.
Are you American by any chance ?
This has been solves in other places through regulations
These sorts of comments are common but always strike me as having been made by someone with little to no real world experience on the specific issue being discussed.
I lived in France and now I'm in Germany, still using my French sim card, for no additional cost. I can change carriers whenever I want with no delay and transfer my number to the new carrier, all of that for much cheaper than what was available in the US when I was living there.
No contract, no hidden fees, no loops to jump through to cancel a subscription, it just works. I really don't see what one more monopoly would solve.
Feel free to publish your list of grievances, I suspect they're extremely out of the ordinary
Ask anybody who has lived in the UK long enough about Vodafone.
The story normally goes something like this:
- 90s = Dogs bollocks, nobody came close
- 00s = Started to smell a bit, but still the most robust technical service
- early 10s = Really starting to rest on their laurels now
- late 10s – today = Shit, godawful shit.Isn't that just tax evasion and/or "investment" in a time with negative interest ?
> Or look at the fact they still haven't rolled out Apple card internationally. My uninformed guess is that it is more to do with "something's brewing" rather than the US cards not working.
Banking and credit card operations are some of the most regulated businesses in the world, and financial authorities have different requirements from country to country, which would make it prohibitively expensive to roll out on a global scale.
This has been Appple's business model and advertising for decades: your digital lifestyle hardware and software solution.
Because Apple want to control the quality of the user experience.
Right now Apple Hardware and Apple Software are tightly interlinked. Apple can do things in software because they design 100% of the hardware, and vice-versa.
There's a lot of stuff Apple do in terms of quality of experience that's only possible because of that tight integration. Stuff that would be impossible to do with generic hardware and generic software.
But equally Apple know that if you buy an iPhone, you are dependent on a carrier for service. Like the rest of the world, it has probably not escaped Apple's attention that the quality of service you get from the carriers is becoming rapidly worse by the day. As a result, an Apple user's poor experience with an iPhone might have nothing to do with Apple but everything to do with the carrier.
Having carrier level integration with iPhone could also open up further user experience improvements (e.g. maybe they could do clever stuff at carrier level to help preserve battery).
you nailed it.. they are concerned about the "quality of the user experience" and not the billions of dollars at stake?
Is this why Apple artificially limits which machines can be updated to MacOS as well, to ensure the quality of the user experience and not to drive sales?
In my experience, mobile connectivity just keeps getting better and better. I have lived on both US coasts and traveled to multiple developing countries, and even in places like Zimbabwe I had pretty great connectivity considering where I was.
To clarify ....
When I spoke of "quality of service" above, I didn't mean technical service (although for some carriers it can be a factor), I meant customer service.
I think you'll struggle to find anyone who will say their carrier's customer service has improved in recent years. Carrier customer service, irrespective of what country you live in, is generally globally accepted to only be in the "awful to non-existent" range.
Even with several friends/family on our 10-line plan (to share costs) - it's been a breeze to maintain.
Don't even get me started on the Apple TV. I've never been able to reliably use the remote (physical or app).
New term: "Vertical Monopoly"
My primary credit card is an apple card, primary dev machine is a mbp, primary work machine iPad, phone iPhone, watch Apple, and I have air tags attached to my dogs and wallet.
In this ecosystem, I can reference _ANY_ of my screens for necessary and current relevant information whether it be curated or automated without breaking a glance to whatever primary device the content came from.
I can air drop to my screens and other people in my family whenever I want to share anything from any of my devices.
It's a walled garden sure, but the toys in here are fantastic.
I also have Apple One service because of the iCloud storage alone between devices and Apple Music/News is actually a nice service.
So I guess I understand the "Oh no big company taking over more of my stuff that I think I should diversify because it seems like the right thing to do", but I guess I'm just too used to things just functioning well that I get over how "limited" I am.
I dropped all my sympathy towards Apple and gave my MBP13 to my girlfriend the day they willingly implemented an outdated version of SMB in OSX that broke compatibility with almost all of my other machines.
I had a leftover Cinema 24inch display too. I sold it because to regulate its brightness I had to install a custom driver under Windows, and to tinker a lot under Linux, because the damn thing had no physical buttons. It is a primary function of a display device.
No more Apple devices for me, thanks. These are just overpriced toys.
- there is no way to migrate messages from Signal messenger from Android to iOS
- there is no way to synchronize Opera bookmarks from Android to iOS
- SwiftKey keyboard can't sync my Android settings to iOS
I might have to buy another Pixel I guess...
Talking only about iOS and Signal here. What you describe is entirely Signal’s decision not to allow backups and restores (on iOS Signal made an explicit decision not to allow any sort of backup and restore). Signal only allows transfer of chats from one iOS device to another when both devices are in close proximity. If Signal wanted to, it could’ve asked the user to enter a strong password, use that to encrypt backups and store them anywhere (iCloud or Dropbox or on a Mac/PC).
Many apps provide backup and restore. Heck, WhatsApp, which uses the Signal protocol, recently implemented cross platform backup and restore for chats. So it’s not technology that’s stopping anyone. Signal is just adamant on not doing it because security.
Signal, Opera and SwiftKey are 'guest' species inside the garden.
(no, really, the apple experience is BY FAR better when you just use apple's stuff).
Can you blame them? Enabling third parties to act as 1st class citizens means big sacrifices in UX.
Apple believes that great UX is more important than interoperability. Seems like there's a large enough market that agrees for them to meet their business goals - because at the end of the day that's what all of this is about.
It has alerted me to the wallet being left behind, and a few times I've used the AirTag to find the wallet in the house.
The big downside to AirTags right now is missing family support. We hid AirTags on the kids' bikes, but only my wife can see them.
There's zero intersection between people who should be tracked and people who are able to ride bikes.
• They had phones^H^H^H^H^H tracking devices already, so…
I was recently existing an airplane, and realized I didn't have my wallet in my pocket. Folks were packing up behind me, and I was getting pressure from my family to start existing down the aisle. I wasn't sure if the wallet was somewhere in my carryon or on the floor of the plane. I was scrambling checking pockets of various carry on bags, etc. The I remembered I could ping it. Within seconds, I could hear the chirp and very quickly found it.
Highly recommend!
It was a little awkward at first to get used to my wallet not sitting as flat anymore but I got over it. Luckily, I’m not a person who stores months worth of receipts and 20 cards in my wallet like my father, so there’s plenty of space.
It’s definitely come in handy a few times!
What's really worrying is that having Apple gatekeep advertisers gives them the power to dictate what platforms can get ads vs what platforms can't. Letting Apple decide what platforms/services get their potential ad revenue cut in half is not a good thing.
Anyone who seriously thinks Apple are going to turn into another Google or Facebook needs to give their head a wobble.
Look at, for example, their recent pro-privacy improvements to the App Store where developers are now forced to state in black and white what data their Apps collect.
Look at, for example, how pissed off Facebook were with recent privacy improvements in iOS. If Zuck is pissed off about a privacy improvement, then it must be a good thing !
If Apple didn't give a shit about user privacy and wanted to sell all your data, they would have done so a long time ago.
Fact is that Apple has many moats. One of their biggest moats is their stance on the privacy of their user's data. They know that if they backtrack on that, many people (including myself) would vote with their feet.
They already do "sell", in a very similar way as Google and Facebook does - look at their app store ads for example. Only real difference between Google/FB and Apple is that they process data on device, not on their servers. Sure, it's a huge technical difference, but not that much in terms of business and end users.
Google and Facebook don't sell your data directly, as it's bad business - you want to sell access to customers as a subscription to get big bucks. They have all the initiative to protect data they gather on their servers. Same as Apple has to do that on devices.
There're details to it, but just moving where you process user data isn't that much of a difference to end users - you're still a corporation selling other people ability to show me ads for cribs, when you discover that I'm expecting a baby.
And honestly, I'll take it. I have always been OK looking at ads if it funds the tools I use and the media I consume. I have always been OK with some amount of demographic and history-based ad targeting. I have no moral objection to some company gatekeeping advertiser access to my eyeballs and selling that access at a premium, especially if I'm already going to see ads everywhere anyway unless I go off-grid. I have no moral objection to using my demographics and general interests to show me ads for hiking boots instead of kung fu lessons.
I am not OK with companies storing, collecting, selling, etc. my data without my knowledge, consent, or legitimate ability to opt out. If the data doesn't leave my phone and all of the "targeting" happens on my own device, I can think of much worse compromise outcomes.
You may want to check on this belief more thoroughly, at least with Meta/Facebook as a start.
Meanwhile back on Planet Earth .....
Going by your argument you should not own any electronic device.
Because you should not be trusting Intel/AMD to make your CPU because they might have put spyware in it ....
Because you should not trust your keyboard manufacturer because they might have embedded a keylogger in it....
Because you should not trust your choice of OS because you haven't personally reviewed 100% of the source code and all subsequent patches for spyware ...
In the end, its about balancing risk vs reward. And frankly, especially in terms of privacy, Apple are far more trustworthy than the vast majority of other options out there.
I personally feel some sort of regulatory framework around data collection and sales is not too much to ask.
Normally I'd agree with you, but I think Steve Jobs has a long history of not giving a shit about what shareholders say because he was more concerned with delivering the perfect product to customers, so I'd like to think that Tim Cook has also carried this torch too.
Yes they are a for-profit company, I still get that... But everyone has been shouting "Just wait, Apple will become just like Google once they realize how juicy that data is to their bottom line!!" for literally decades, yet... Nothing.
You'd like to think that. I would too. But even if it's true, Tim Cook will not be there forever either. Publicly traded companies are owned by shareholders who can and will do what they want. The last half century of business is littered with the corpses of once vaunted corporate bodies stripped by investors.
Many moons ago I worked for a large online gambling provider. They worked tirelessly to make their company trustworthy, make their games entertaining, and build relationships with their high rollers. Internally, they had strategies to squeeze as much money from every user as possible without causing distress. It was quite eye opening and I can't help but draw parallels between them and Apple.
To me, anyone stretching over to apologize for Apple needs to give their head a wobble. They are just going for the profit, selling you the lie of privacy. They want to scan your photos, remember. They already gave the FBI the tools they need to unlock phones, and they are of course part of PRISM.
It's hardly any different than what Google or Facebook do except it's even more encompassing.
If they start selling your data, they'll quickly eliminate the very market share that gives them such power. And why would they want to give up that data anyway? Better to use it themselves. A lot of people will accept the data collection as long as it doesn't go to third-party companies, we have ample evidence for that already.
No they absolutely will not. 99% of Apple users do not care about privacy. And when Apple does this, those users will find excuses to why it's okay.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-o...
If iPhone started reneging on privacy guarantees, I for one would switch to a dumb feature phone the same day.
The fact that Facebook got decimated by the controls added indicate the level of concern people have when offered a choice.
The fact that you would even consider this means you are a part of that 1%.
I think that's absolutely beautiful and very human.
"We don't sell or share your data so we can be the only ones who have access to it for advertising purposes"
I don’t believe this is what’s happening now. Do you have any evidence that it will happen in the future, or is this just anticipatory anxiety?
This flies in the face of everything Apple has ever done.
I'm more cynical than most, but I also pay attention, and I find it more plausible that a company run by a very private gay man actually holds privacy as a company principle. That fits the facts much better than the conspiracy view.
Apple has already struck out once in the ad industry because they refused to violate user privacy to compete with Google and Facebook. This time around they've acted to bring Google and Facebook down onto a level playing field.
Since Google acquired DoubleClick, it's like we've forgotten that it's possible to sell targeted ads based on target locations, rather than based on personalized demographic profiles of target users. Being able to target locations impersonally is what initially drew ad dollars to the internet, as the targeting could be more specific than general TV spots or roadside billboards.
There's no evidence that Apple intends to use any personal information at all in their ad targeting, and plenty of evidence that they don't. If it is "gatekeeping," it's a gate that they seem unwilling to cross themselves.
Shouldn't you really say "letting Apple users decide..."?
Of course not, in the same way that a Bently manufacture doesn't care that I own the car everybody envy, but that doesn't mean he won't make a car the everybody envies, because he does care about selling me an expensive car.
So Google was evil from the start, back when they were just selling ads based on your search terms and not yet spying on your entire life online and offline?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPogdNafgic
Apple has the led the conversation on privacy far before anyone else was. I remember them get vilified from sharing their stance 10 years ago.
So they can make more money by selling access to a userbase they withhold from all other advertisers. The notion that Apple cares about anything other than the money-printing ability of their phone users is clearly and obviously wrong.
They should probably have more such values, but they definitely "care" about some things other than printing money.
I'm all on board the Cynicism Express, but you've gotten on the wrong track here. Apple can be a monster for many, many reasons while still operating based on principles of user privacy.
Why does Apple want to sell more ads?
Because money.
It’s incredibly profitable for Apple to sell ads when people search the iPhone App Store for fitness apps or read articles in the Apple News app.
Yes, it's profitable for Apple to sell ads. They tried once before and failed because they refused to violate personal privacy for ad targeting. It is possible to sell fitness ads when people search for fitness apps, or health ads on articles about health subjects, without violating personal privacy. People are concerned about whether Apple will compromise long-held values because Facebook and Google have worked to pretend there's no difference between selling context-aware ads and selling privacy-invading user-tracking ads. There is a difference, though.
Is this what drove Facebook, a slowing but otherwise perfectly healthy cash cow into the disaster that is Metaverse?
If Apple is going to do the same, my popcorn is ready.
What I'm referring to is instead of coming up with something that could be a game changer organically, forcing it because "We need a big idea now". That has a much higher chance to fail.
But I think apple is taking it slow and waiting for the right opportunity rather than shoehorn it in at the last second of Q4 to bolster EOY earnings.
Same with the car. I’m more skeptical of that project ever seeing the light of day, but there is no doubt that apple has the resources to bring that product to market if they wanted to, but they’re also smart enough to read the room.
My point was to say that there is a market that is actively being developed and growing every year. No doubt that VR is still niche, but so were Palm Pilots and MP3 players!
As a business model I understand what Apple is doing and can register the strategy as calculated. As an Apple consumer, I am not that interested.
Sometime after inheriting a pair of AirPod Pros and an Apple Watch I started to feel strange. Then I booted OpenBSD on my own hardware for the first time the other day, straight into the shell and I feel changed by how brutal (as in architecture, aesthetics) the experience was. I find it distracting even to use my MacBook now. The colors, the textures, etc. I just feel different now.
Apple is offering a lot of convenience, apparently. The watch is convenient. The AirPods that dig into my ear canals and make me mistake audiobooks and podcasts for my own thoughts are…disturbing…but convenient as a Bluetooth headset?
As a consumer and user of these devices I just feel somewhere between recognizing these new conveniences but being disturbed by them and distracted even after some time.
Neat, is that an iOS 16 feature?
But seriously, there are things you can do to reclaim your attention span. Here are a few:
https://medium.com/make-time/six-years-with-a-distraction-fr...
https://hulry.com/ios-15-focus-mode/
https://www.wired.com/story/grayscale-ios-android-smartphone...
I think what I’m getting out for myself is more so a UX issue? I’m not sure. It’s not a matter of attention span with me specifically. But the look and feel of certain Apple devices as a whole makes me feel like someone who I’d hate to become. I could still see myself using an iPad or a Mac mini or something like that, because I’ve taking a liking for some of the things those devices have to offer for specific tasks.
But I would love for my phone to just be a concrete brick that can spit out thermal printed slips of paper with messages on it as text messaging and emails. And if only voice calls were a distributed mesh of Solo cups and strings.
Definitely reason enough to avoid them. I sometimes feel nostalgic for the look/sound/vibe of early personal computing. Yesterday I watched this and briefly contemplated how it would be if computing today looked more like AppleWorks and chonky keyboards instead of black mirrors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xtBspMixHk
> But I would love for my phone to just be a concrete brick that can spit out thermal printed slips of paper with messages on it as text messaging and emails. And if only voice calls were a distributed mesh of Solo cups and strings.
Not quite what you're describing, but this brings Brazil to mind for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xNnRBksvOU
I'm not sure even the most devoted Apple fan could fail to see past that bullshit maneuver. It's one thing to stomp out little players, but when you can crush other giants under your thumb, the monopoly is clear.
The operating system is all that matters, and whoever controls the leading operating systems wins. All the products some of us work on are absolutely useless compared to what the OS can deliver - we're all just services waiting to be swallowed up, ripped off, or pushed out.
> Reach new customers or reengage the customers who know you. You can also refine your audience by gender, age, and location.
The whole App Store is one big "ew" experience. It's what you'd expect from other companies.
... and the rest of iOS already shows similar elements. Setting up an iPhone recently I think I saw 3 full screen ads for Apple services. From what I remember it would be a lot more if I used more first-party apps.
What a disappointing way to ruin an otherwise pretty nice experience!
And these laws have passed, and are going to go into effect soon, and there is little Apple can do to stop it.
apple is the source[1] no estimating required. all publicly traded companies, required by law. some math is required, many videos on youtube detailing the process. it can be automated, JSON is available. they are called balance sheets, M.shkreli actually has a video series going through these [1]https://sec.report/CIK/0000320193
look for 10-Q, 10-K; quarterly, annual
Rosalind Picard's (and others) work on affective computing shows the potential. Here's her interview w/ Lex Fridman.
https://lexfridman.com/rosalind-picard/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affective_computing#Physiologi...
I have no idea if "quantified self" is Apple's NBT, a $1T market. I do know that affective computing will be a game changer. And currently Apple's watch is running away with that emerging market.
Losing my phone at this point is worse than losing my wallet and Apple is pushing for even tighter integrations with their customer's life which will ultimately centralize all that information.
Try to do the same with non-Apple ecosystem or with physical cards and keys. I wish there were (dependable) options, but other large organisations have proven to be utterly incompetent in this area. They have no vision and/or ability to pull off something like this. Or their own actions have made their reputation unpalatable even if they somehow offered it in the future.
Also I hate having to remember to carry five different things every time I leave the house, and feel the sensation of those bulky items moving around in my pocket while walking (Europe, we walk a lot) or running. And I hate having to be limited to trousers/joggers/shorts that have deep enough pockets to fit all those items in, and them falling out while out for a run etc etc etc.
Yes, we definitely are. But I am not so sure that is a bad thing? And it's nothing new... how many businesses had their entire operations tied to Blackberry, Microsoft, Lotus, etc. for so long? The market might be a little slow, but it's not stupid.
I personally like Apple products and services. I like the integration. I like that I don't have to go out and find third party apps for certain things and hope for the best.
> Losing my phone at this point is worse than losing my wallet and Apple is pushing for even tighter integrations with their customer's life which will ultimately centralize all that information.
The great thing about this is a replacement phone can be loaded almost instantaneously with all your info again. How long would it take to have every credit card company and the DMV send you replacements?
Well, it is the basis of anti-trust law and pro-competition law, that the legal system supports competition and opposes anti-competitive effects.
Well they are. Because the only alternative is Android. We're into a duopoly situation on mobile and it's almost as bad as a proper monopoly.
i am NOT a subscriber to netflix et al. never have been and actively avoid signing up to "trial services" because it could potentially hook me up good.
maybe these people are gullible enough to be convinced enough to be parted with their money, that's fine.
you see, there is "EVIDENCE" in support of cigarettes causing cancer but instead of banning the sales, governments milk it for taxes, the companies say "if someone is willing to pay, why not us" and the blame is on the user.....
the same thing with alcohol and weed and stuff like that. Most of the world has grown around alcohol and even when EVERYONE knows its not healthy for the body, people still consume it, "its traditional".
if people want to not own stuff, want netflix style monthly payments to have their whole life managed by apple, good for these people because then they dont have to pay individually for a bank, for a cable tv, for a cell phone company, for internet, for transport, for education, for security, for netflix, disney, hbo, prime and all that.
if cigarette makers and breweries can continue and expand their business, so can apple and it would be just the same thing imo
The most common one, that is in the news, is the App Store situation, where literal laws are being passed to ban Apple's behavior.
But it also applies to other parts of their business, such as ads. There could be a push to pass laws to make Apple's behavior illegal in those spaces as well.
While certainly true, I don't see how any of that is relevant in the context of this thread.
One simple case is storage. Would would Apple provide you greater storage capacity when they can milk you more using a "cloud" subscription.
Honestly, if Apple wants to make a car, I'm all for it. What I don't like is that they seem to be ditching their hardware innovation in favor of SAAS like all the other tech companies. It's lazy and all with the hopes of surrounding you with marketing.
The SAAS model thing is annoying because it seems like it’s ruining a good thing
People in 2007, they all own one now.
It's just extending that integration more widely into the cloud and other services. In some ways its surprising they haven't done more of it already.
Perhaps me meant a "hedge" against incrementalism.
Am I the only one that does not want to see an Apple car? We already have Tesla, I would rather see more inexpensive (electric, I assume) cars.
So wrong. PDAs were replaced by smartphones. Smartphones will be replaced by AR glasses. It is the next big thing hardware-wise. Many new services will be built upon glasses and watches, and many will be health related. You'll still buy a phone - it'll have the battery and the supercomputer powering the other two. I doubt that it will even have a display.
Smartphones didn’t replace PDAs, most people didn’t have a PDA to replace. Smart phones replaced whole categories of devices and bundled them into one: cameras, camera phones, PDAs, MP3 players, watches, timers, alarm clocks etc.
People keep looking for “the next big thing” and it just isn’t coming. The smartphone was a singular event in the history of computing and it wont be replicated within our lifetimes. At most it will be unbundled again, unevenly (eg, smart watches, and glasses)
Or... what if the next big thing is the phone becomes the computer, i.e. there will be no laptops? Imagine a device that you can connect to some peripherals including a monitor (possibly with its own GPU), then you undock it, put it in your pocket and move on to the next place - your home or your work with peripherals ready to use.
Today it seems impossible or hard to build but I think the bottleneck here is not even the hardware as much as it's software. But that's a long conversation. Just an idea (kind of an obvious one) I wanted to share.
Looking at the direction of Apple/Microsoft/Google, they’d much rather sell you more devices and keep your data synced in cloud services than let you own in all in one unit locally, so that’ll probably be the main direction we go in.
The main exception will be in the indie/enthusiast/hacker space with devices like the pine phone/purism units.
You can do that with Dex on the higher end Samsung phones.
My brief review of it is close, but lacking some finess with the browsers compared to other desktop operating systems.
Realistically I think the future is already here with a proliferation of specialized mobile devices. This is why Apple took away the headphone jack: so they could sell AirPods. OP was right in the sense that glasses will be coming into this model, I just differ as to how central they’ll be to the future computing environment.
I’m hoping that there will be a bit of a backlash to the Saasification of consumer tech, with its implications on privacy/control. Though I have to say I’m not very optimistic.
I know that. But I've seen this tech evolve now for 40 years, and I am confident that that's where it's headed.
I’m skeptical that glasses will become ubiquitous from a consumer purchasing standpoint.
As much as people are glued to their devices, looking away is still a thing
Nobody will want ads or distractions in their field of view (maaybe in very exceptional circumstances but even then)
It will probably also be illegal to drive using an AR device.
What will the AR glasses do, bring the notifications that I have turned off anyway in my face?
I'd wear a screenless Apple band with just the health sensors but I wont wear a notification distraction on my wrist again.
Good. You have seen the light. Now turn off those notifications on your phone too. Much improved quality of life.
The holdouts who refuse to wear the glasses slowly meet with ... unfortunate accidents. One by one. Until there's no one left who sees the world as it is.
I agree that we'll see some huge new product by 2025 - not sure if it's a visor or spectacles though.
I always get downvoted when making this comment, I just hope that the "blind believers" of today will remember their mistake a few years down the line when the "privacy" house of cards comes tumbling down.
It is difficult to imagine what Apple could do to top Google, Facebook, or even Microsoft on a list of evil empires, ever.