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.
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.
>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.
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.
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 current ‘normal’ MBPs don’t have touchbars.
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.
...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.
Good for them that meta has shown this is a dead end. I'm sure they're ready to cut bait on this.
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.