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Comment by wahnfrieden | Hacker News Reader

Tim Apple reportedly overrode the design team on launching it prematurely relative to their typical standards in order to enter the market and begin iterating before waiting too long. It’s the first new product category made under his leadership and he’s eyeing retirement, as context.

Btw, don’t forget visionOS 2.0 is just 18 weeks away. (Source: WWDC is every June and every platform gets a version bump, as we saw with watchOS launching in April then getting a 2.0 immediately after at WWDC.)

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> It’s the first new product category made under his leadership and he’s eyeing retirement, as context

I've been wondering how much this is part of the context here. He may feel some pressure that he hasn't really launched a new major product category from scratch in all his time as CEO and if this has been running 10 years as a project now, that it would be a blemish on his legacy to not get it out the door before he leaves. Perhaps without him there it would even be binned which would be even more pressure to deliver it.

Contrary to all that he really seems a bit ambivalent about the device himself, having never allowed himself to be seen publicly using it.

Apple Watch, HomePod, AppleTV+, Apple News+, AirPods.

And I would argue the M-series CPU are pretty major as well.

Apple Watch began before he became CEO, it wasn't under his direction. He just continued the existing initiative.

Wikipedia's citation that the Watch began in 2011 after Steve's death is incorrect. It began in 2010 under Steve's direction after the acquisition of Bob Messerschmidt's Rare Light, which brought hearth rate monitoring tech to Apple. Messerschmidt was assigned a team by Steve. Don't blindly trust Wikipedia, folks...

As for the others I just meant platform products, none of those have their own OS until homeOS later this year. None of them defined new product categories for Apple - for instance the AirPods were an iteration on EarPods, not a new product category. Apple was already shipping a home speaker product before HomePod, which was an iterative product without its own software platform for developers. M-series is iterative tech, not a new product category. The Motorola ROKR wasn't an Apple product. But sure HomePod is perhaps Tim Apple's one original new product category before Vision if the 2006 Apple Hi-Fi counts as a distinct product category.

Discounting genuinely new products because Apple made them nearly 20 years ago seems a bit ridiculous.

No one would call the iPhone an existing product just because Apple shipped the iTunes collaboration phone with Motorola.

This all feels like so much projection.

As far as I can tell Tim Cook has never pretended to be a product guy. He seems perfectly comfortable being what he is: a ruthless operations guru bent on efficiency. In every profile I’ve ever read he’s not really the one making hard product decisions, and seems content to leave that to others better suited for it.

The decision to ship Vision Pro before the design team considered it ready/good enough was his decision. That's more a product decision than an operations one. But yeah otherwise he is reportedly hands-off and disengaged from internal product demos including of the Vision Pro.

The watch is a new product category under his leadership isn't it?

Watch still under Steve, put it in other way, it's last product under his supervision.

Doesn’t look like it.

> Ive began dreaming about an Apple watch just after CEO Steve Jobs’ death in October 2011. He soon brought the idea to Dye and a small group of others in the design studio.

https://www.wired.com/2015/04/the-apple-watch/

That is incorrect, or rather, misleading - maybe Ive didn't join the project until 2011, sure, but it began in 2010. Ive didn't lead all design work yet in 2011, he was still just a VP.

AirPods, too.

AirPods weren't a new product category, they were an iteration of the Apple EarPods which looked the same, had the same remote features, etc.

I highly disagree about that, especially for the Pros with ANC and spatial audio. EarPods were nice wired earphones. AirPods seem like way more of a leap than just EarPods-but-wireless.

If those features defined new product categories, they wouldn't have replaced existing AirPods with "3rd generation" (non-pro) AirPods that have spatial audio and ANC in the upcoming 4th generation. They're iterative features on an existing product category.

> don’t forget visionOS 2.0 is just 18 weeks away

Source?

Its speculation, but probably reasonable speculation. At WWDC, I think almost every OS version gets an announcement of a major version bump. They will announce the next macOS major version, iOS major version, etc. So it is totally reasonable to suspect they will announce the next major version of visionOS.

Edit: But since it is still so new, it could not be until WWDC 2025 that visionOS 2.0 gets announced.

watchOS 1.0 launched in April and got a 2.0 in June that same year

it'll be a beta

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