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Comment by voisin | Hacker News Reader

Initial product will be weak, just like the original iPhone (no App Store, slow, poor battery life, etc) and Apple Watch (no development, no health tracking, small screen, poor battery life).

The thing about Apple is not to judge based on v.1 but to watch the iteration. They are the most persistent company in the world. Compare to Google which seems to have ADHD. Apple will iterate and iterate and in 5 years we’ll all be shocked that it is an “overnight success” and undisputed market leader with an unassailable ecosystem.

If their stock tanks after the release I’ll see it as a good buying opportunity!

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Where was this persistent iteration and overnight success with Homepod, Airpower, butterfly keyboards, touchbar, force touch, MobileMe, Ping?

Apple has had its share of failures like any other company, and kills products like any other company. There is plenty of precedence for their AR headset to just fizzle out.

HomePod

Getting more successful with the Mini. The OG Homepod was a very V1 product like the person you replied to was saying

https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/06/06/homepod-mini-was-...

AirPower: never released

Butterfly keyboards/Touch Bar/force touch: all features. The person you’re replying to is talking about product lines. You might as well list cd/devs drives and FireWire as well because things come and go.

MobileMe: The majority of MobileMe features still exist under iCloud so I’m not sure what you’re getting at there.

Ping: this was always just a feature for iTunes and not much more. It wasn’t a product in and of itself.

I agree with you on all of that except MobileMe. Apple killed that, then had a delay, then had iCloud. They were actually ahead of the curve for a bit and then went way far back before catching up again.

You seem to be misremembering that.

>All services were gradually transitioned to and eventually replaced by the free iCloud, and MobileMe ceased on June 30, 2012, with transfers to iCloud being available until July 31, 2012, or data being available for download until that date, when the site finally closed completely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobileMe

No, you just need to dig deeper.

The MobileMe Drive system was shut down in 2012, as your link says. However the new feature in iCloud wasn't introduced until Yosemite, which came out in 2014. There was a two year gap where the service did not exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X_Yosemite

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud#iCloud_Drive

Butterfly keyboards, touch bar and force-touch were features rather than products - most of these were actually iterated out of the product, although the touchbar is still in the latest MacBook Pro's. As a side point, 3D touch was brilliant IMO!

These were all part of the persistent iteration of the iPhone and Macbook, hardly failed products.

Also Homepod has just had a second version (released 2023), and a third version is in the works, and it's homepod mini has been very successful, so still under iteration. Considering the state of LLM's and everyone's assumption that this will turbocharge smart-speaker capability, they are probably quite glad that they at least have an established and mildly successful product in the space (they own c10% of the market for smart speakers).

The touch bar only makes an appearance in the 13” MBP, and the 13” MBP is very much the current generation’s Mac That No-one Should Buy (as was the non-retina 13” MBP that hanged around for _years_ after the MBA essentially obsoleted it); unless you have very specific needs you probably want an Air.

The current ‘normal’ MBPs don’t have touchbars.

Interestingly enough to me, all the things you mentioned are "accessories". Not full-fledged products (arguably Ping was right around when social media like MySpace/Facebook really were going full-steam so I think Apple was just trying it out).

The first-class products have all been launched like the parent comment said, along with iterations that build upon them.

So to me it seems Apple is still putting some level of priority on its main products and just less so on accessories.

I don't disagree with your examples. Yep, they've made plenty of mistakes. A key difference here is that Apple has been spent many years developing and promoting substantial AR frameworks. It has been a huge investment. It at least appears that this huge investment has all been leading up to some sort of vision based wearable. If it does turn out to be a failure, the magnitude of the failure will be much larger than the above examples.

> Apple has been spent many years developing and promoting substantial AR frameworks

...dovetailed with their cut support for SteamVR and the OpenXR standard. In-house APIs are a nice investment, but arguably pointless when everyone's content is built on pre-existing and open frameworks. This whole project feels like a side-pot to me, and Apple themselves are clearly afraid to commit.

It's likely that it will just fizzle out. It's a big ship and getting it to produce something new I'm sure is no easy task.

Good for them that meta has shown this is a dead end. I'm sure they're ready to cut bait on this.

Maybe the Newton is a better example, although they did revisit the concept many years later.

MobileMe is now iCloud.

HomePods still exists in both the mini form and the original form factor with newer chips.

The modern version of Ping is what is built into Apple Music.

> Initial product will be weak

To build upon your argument…

The art is in being strong out of the gate in the correct one or two dimensions.

To try and be perfect on all dimensions and depend on concomitant perfect synchrony is a big reason why products like Stadia fail.

>Initial product will be weak, just like the original iPhone

This just isn’t true. People loved that thing and experience wise it did 90% of what people needed at the time better than anything in the market.

Although this headset isn’t the product. The product was going to be ar glasses in actual glasses form factor but it’s clear that’s many years past the spec’d release date and now this headset is just some way to actually profit off this tech investment and get people building apps for the future glasses, if they ever solve the issues.

> The thing about Apple is not to judge based on v.1 but to watch the iteration. They are the most persistent company in the world.

Yes, and the fact that they don't abandon a product once it ships. Other consumer electronic companies still see products as one and done, sort of like videogame consoles before Xbox. When the product went gold it became forever frozen in time, warts and all.

Apple not only iterates the design every year but tries to bring forward the software in the previous years. The iPhone you bought gets arguably better every year.

Other companies try to emulate this behavior by pushing new versions of operating systems but their hardware bares to lineage so it's often a Herculean effort that undertake half-assed.

Yeah but $3K.

That would be not dissimilar to the launch strategy of the macbook air, which was ridiculously expensive at launch, presumably didn't sell in huge quanitities during the first few generations, but gave them something to build on which they eventually turned into a mainstream product.

During a recession with mass layoffs of wealthy tech types who’d otherwise have the cash and curiosity to buy.

It’s still many months away from hitting the shelves. By x-mas the layoffs might be over.

Unless a new round of layoffs starts because of gpt-4 powered apps.

The first Macintosh had a retail price of $2,495. In today's dollars, $7,366.

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