Apple explores robotics in search of life beyond the iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Apple explores robotics in search of life beyond the iPhone

bloomberg.com

58 pointsmfiguiere107 comments

The odd thing is that there's plenty of growth left in their existing markets, should they want it. They could compete much harder against Microsoft in the business computing sector, they could compete much harder against Google in the education sector, they could compete harder in the Pro sector, etc.

Pro computing in general is pretty stagnant and there seems to be little R&D on the core. Apple Intelligence is good, but very much reacting to changes driven by others. They could easily invest money in researching "life after NeXTStep". That's probably easier and more in their wheelhouse than trying to break into totally new markets.

You just know a PA is going to slip this comment into some C-suites memo tomorrow morning.

It's sad to see the decline in values that had me in love with joining this industry. This is now a financialized company, keeping things consistent, and shipping a credit card, is much more important than bold HCI moves, or letting any % of profit dip in service of searching for a wider revenue basin.

I worked in Android at Google, and I think the year-long shipping schedules are inimical to SW exploration.

Communication is poor enough at BigCo that you'll have a feature approved in August, in flight by October, duplicated and shipped by a completely different team in January, and have to throw something together to be ship-worthy in April.

And if you don't, you didn't get any work done this year. It's not really "you need to launch to promo" as "if you don't launch, welcome to the performance shitlist. hope you don't become part of the 5% we'll sacrifice to Wall Street this year!"

Then, the schedule offset between the top and bottom means by the time you're done shipping the barely working version, its time to do whatever thing the VPs were kicking around the last few months by themselves and fell in love with.

Perhaps, and that's an accurate description of Google nowadays, but I think I disagree in the case of Apple. We should be fair to Cook and the rest of the Apple team here: Vision Pro is nothing but bold HCI moves, and the very opposite of what you get from a yearly shipping schedule. It's probably been in development for over a decade. There are people who joined Apple, spent years working on Vision Pro, were promoted and then left before it was even announced! In terms of execution quality and ethos it reflects the Apple of the Jobs era in every way. The problem is simply that breaking into new markets is hard, especially if the market is a price/quality point that nobody else is attempting. Maybe there's just no demand in the end. That's R&D for you.

My argument is really the opposite: Apple doesn't need moves as bold as Vision Pro, or cars or robots. There's plenty of room for innovation within existing product segments, price points and form factors. If I ran the Core OS group at Apple I'd have a dozen research ideas to experiment with by next week, and I'm just one guy who thinks about operating systems more than is healthy. If you look across the span of their existing businesses there must be hundreds of ways they could capture market share in innovative ways.

I'm not sure what major user-visible innovation in desktop operating systems really would look like these days. It presumably wouldn't be something that fundamentally changed the user experience. I have some suspicion that convergence of mobile and desktop/laptop will happen with time but a lot of users would probably hate it, Microsoft already sort of whiffed on it, and convergence probably isn't really in Apple's business interests anyway so long as they can sell someone both a laptop and a tablet.

Why not experiment with fundamentally changed user experiences? The WIMP paradigm goes back to the 1980s and much of it is rotting away, getting less and less well matched to the modern world yet without being rethought.

Random examples of eminently fixable HCI issues that bother me every day:

1. The clipboard is invisible, historyless and lost on reboot unless you install third party utilities. Yet clipboard operations are a key part of any professional user's day.

2. The Downloads folder is basically an indirect cache for remote URLs because apps can't open them directly, but I have to manually manage it by cleaning things out every so often. Also, if I open the same link twice it'll just download the same file twice which is all wrong.

Possible fix: the OS should have a kind of "belt" of recently used "things", whether those are objects copied from apps, files accessed over HTTP or apps. They should persist across reboots. The OS should act as if these don't use any disk space even though they do, and delete old items automatically as the disk fills up.

3. Window management can be upgraded significantly. Multi-screen is sort of hacked on, the way Cmd-Tab works for instance when >1 screen gets involved is quite unintuitive. People need layouts that they can switch instantly without animation delays, and the only way macOS offers to do that is by using Cmd-Tab. Safari gets this right: switching and closing tabs is instant, why can't the WM work do that?

4. Browsers are barely integrated and so the UI is very confusing. My wife sometimes accidentally saves PDFs of Google Sheets because that's what happens if you click File > Save in Safari. Why are there two menu bars and what's the difference, eh, life is short and computer history is long. Don't worry honey, I'll do it. Also see: starting Zoom meetings from iCalendar (opens a web page which opens an app).

Possible fix: Any action triggered by the keyboard should not animate (or only does it once or twice to teach the user what's happening and then stop). Make Safari/browser the default desktop experience, allowing apps to launch into tabs with a better/more keyboard-able splitting implementation. Get rid of the default keyboard shortcuts for things like save/print in Safari (do you really need keyboard shortcuts for such rare operations), and let web apps take that over. If the web app doesn't, try to auto-wire them to web app UI using Apple Intelligence or DOM matching heuristics.

And so on. This is like a fraction of what could be fixed.

Those are small things. Competing harder with Windows would not just involve innovation, it'd also involve stuff that doesn't come naturally to Apple e.g. maybe a UI mode that's more like Windows to make switchers more comfortable, or Macs that are sold with Office out of the box, or integrated support for running some apps using Wine or built in support for Parallels-style Coherence virtualization.

A couple of things you describe would raise anti-trust issues or at least historically did in Microsoft's case.

Not sure why I need another integrated browser and certainly don't need Microsoft Office integrated with MacOS. A better clipboard manager and management of downloads might be nice but is pretty far down the list of things I care about. There have been various projects to have better UIs, e.g. Sun's 3D one, but nothing has ever gone anywhere.

Some of it I'm sure is just that I'm fairly set in my ways and largely live in a browser other than a few multimedia programs but I just don't have any deficiencies at the OS level that jump out at me.

I think that was a pretty common view by smartphone users before the iPhone came along though. If you'd asked Blackberry or PocketPC users about their devices, they were pretty happy.

Yes and no. I had a Treo and it obviously made doing email on the go much easier. (Which is why I bought it. At the time I was on crutches for about six months and lugging around my laptop wasn't in the cards.) On the other hand, the app ecosystem was obviously seriously limited and even accessing Exchange was sort of a kludge.

And, at the time, I was still using a separate (Apple) MP3 player.

Apple got where it is though by focusing mostly on the consumer and only a little on the pro user.

Yeah. The Xserve went nowhere and they mostly succeeded in business because (at least some classes of) users became much more able to dictate the devices they used for work.

Apple survived and grew originally by catering to pro designer types. They still have significant business from professional users on the Mac side, whether those are artists or developers. This is despite not really trying hard for a long time. They could easily grow their market share there.

Robotics is way too hard and they should look elsewhere IMHO.

Software has this beautiful property of being magical: if you can imagine it, it can be written, given sufficient effort.

The physical reality puts constraints that you often can't work around with decades-long, distributed research... which isn't really profitable or timely for a business to do.

There are countless cases of companies trying to "solve" problems in the physical world with ingenuity carried over the virtual one. Self-driving cars come to mind as one topical and recent example, even if I do believe in their success in the long enough term.

Sometimes examples are more catastrophic failures, like Theranos... which is why I'm generally short on promises of "healthcare tech" in general.

And as much as I enjoy my Apple devices and appreciate the second-to-none ingenuity of their hardware, I think a lot of their value proposition comes from software. They would do well to refocus these greenshoot innovation efforts to software categories that are dominated by subpar experiences and reinventing them from a fresh perspective. Easier wins and no shortage of profits to be made near term...

Our home appliances (and industrial robots) are very optimized specific devices. Don't get me wrong. A washing machine or refrigerator is magical relative to the prior art. But there's nothing even on the horizon that remotely replaces my housekeeper coming every few weeks (and even she requires me organizing some things ahead of time).

Apple’s value proposition is marrying hardware with software rather than, say, writing software for commodity hardware.

Their REAL proposition is capturing and corraling users through software and hardware, and so far it's been working too good it's starting to find resistance.

Any practical robot they manage to make will be surely tightly tied to their other hardware, software, and new suscription tiers.

>Robotics is way too hard and they should look elsewhere IMHO.

>Software has this beautiful property of being magical: if you can imagine it, it can be written, given sufficient effort.

>The physical reality puts constraints that you often can't work around with decades-long, distributed research... which isn't really profitable or timely for a business to do.

I imagine plenty of people thought and said that about phones when Apple was rumored to be getting into that space. Certainly the Motorola ROKR partnership probably put most people off the idea of Apple and the phone space. Obviously prior success doesn't indicate future success, but at the same time Apple's biggest successes have often been in the space of building hardware that breaks though those physical constraints of reality in a way that is finally sufficient to push it towards mass market appeal.

No, because a phone is a pretty limited "physical reality". It exists in a little box. It doesn't really interact with the outside world. It's just a transporter of software in the physical reality, but it doesn't interact with it other than through light and sound.

I still find myself wondering if this is actually "robotics" as most people would think of it, or if it's just an iPad on the Belkin auto-tracking stand [1], which already does full rotation and 90-degree tilt.

[1]: https://www.belkin.com/p/auto-tracking-stand-pro-with-dockki...

It's not robotics, because it doesn't "plan". A robot is an embodied cognitive agent. Embodies = has a body and is acting in physical space. Cognitive agent = it uses a sense-plan-act loop. This thing may sense and act, but its controls are too primitive to call it "planning". In particular it doesn't plan multiple actions into the future. It's doing something folks in the AI literature would call "reactive control".

There are many technical problems to overcome, including having hardware that can successfully roam through cluttered spaces and navigate buildings with multiple floors...

...For now, the technology is going to be incredibly expensive for both Apple to build and for consumers to buy. The company is also going to need more talent, including many more engineers, to bring something truly meaningful to market.

Why can't Apple acquire Boston Dynamics? BD may have solved lot of these problems already, and to boot would have lot of patents, which Apple would be glad to have. BD in 2020 was acquired by Hyundai for $1.1B.

What I would do for a robotic pack mule I could take camping or to the grocery store

The dog has a runtime of 4hr unburdened. Great for walks to the grocery store but not as great for long hikes.

I don't personally understand some of these tech companies with such enormous hoards of cash. Apple could go on a massive acquisition spree in the space and buy Boston Dynamics, iRobot, all kinds of stuff and become a gigantic brand in home robotic automation with their well-functioning interoperable ecosystem. Are they afraid of antitrust?

These companies lose money, so it would hurt their ongoing margins.

None of that stuff seems useful to me in anything like its current form and I'm sort of an early adopter of a lot of things.

My brother has a (newly built) house that's more or less optimal for a Roomba-type thing. It's very single level. They also have dogs. I looked at and a much better solution was a Dyson stick vac I could spend a few minutes running now and then.

I'm just not sure where the big home automation wins are. Not sure the last time I've even heard Nest thermostats mentioned in print.

Grandparent said, "BD in 2020 was acquired by Hyundai for $1.1B."

Well, there is your answer: BD's market prospects are too meager for it to be worth Apple's management team's ongoing attention. (Apple's current market prospects are valuable enough that Apple has a current market cap of $3.45 trillion.)

(Also, Hyundai might not want to sell it.)

I imagine at least some part of it is that acquisitions are difficult, time consuming and rarely work 100%. There are almost always seams after the fact and problems with culture integration. Cash on hand also gives you the option to respond to market swings and changes. It allows you to invest in new opportunities, and to build a space organically from your own internal visions. Would the iPhone been what it was if Apple had just bought Nokia, or Ericson or any other phone vendor at the time? Maybe, but I strongly suspect not. And at least for Apple especially, the point isn't just to have the product, it's to have a well and tightly integrated product, and existing product lines might need to be so heavily re-worked any value in buying it as is would be lost in having to scrap so much of what's where.

The Chinese guys are way beyond Boston Dynamics.

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/unitrees-robot...

What exactly are they ahead in? only thing that stood out was price

What's the going price for an BD Atlas robot?

They’ve got brand new demos that I remember seeing 10+ years ago from Boston dynamics. I mean, that’s no small feat, but they don’t have an edge yet.

Check this one https://www.unitree.com/g1/ this is SOTA.

This is a lot better link, with humanoid robot: https://www.unitree.com/g1/

From what I understand they started mass producing this and you can buy it from 16k USD.

And here is h1 https://www.unitree.com/h1/

With what happened when Google bought them, I doubt if Apple can handle thenlm. Hyundai feels like a much better fit. Japanese companies have had a longer history with robotics and less insistence on short term profitability.

Hyundai is Korean

Smart speaker, car, VR, and now robots... it's crazy how much money can be burned when a few of your other products are successful and mature, while those mostly just receive incremental updates.

HomePod would be a fantastic device if it didn’t have Siri and was just a decent speaker with AirPlay… as is it sits unplugged somewhere in my garage because I got sick of it butting in to every conversation where anyone said anything like “see ree”.

Siri can be disabled on the HomePod.

all of my homepods have that feature turned off. it is a simple toggle and you never have to worry about it again

I'm not sure that the homepod belongs in this list as by most accounts it's a financial success. Nothing will be as profitable as the iPhone but the homepod enhances the Apple eco-system. Of all the devices I absolutely would not trust Google/Amazon with, it's a smart speaker. With homepods all over the house, it just makes it that much harder to switch to a non-iphone.

Of all the devices I absolutely would not trust Google/Amazon with, it's a smart speaker.

Not just you. My company's work from home policy requires any Amazon or Google speaker on the same floor as a home office to not be just software disabled, but actually unplugged from the wall. HomePods, on the other hand, are allowed to just have the Siri diagnostics feature turned off.

My company ($1B+) is not exactly known for its technical agility, so I don't think these rules came from in-house testing. Because we're in healthcare, my guess is they are recommendations from a federal agency.

“The master has failed more times than a novice has tried” rings true here.

I’m glad there’s companies out there trying things as opposed to doubling down on rent seeking (which apple also has a tendency to do)

Apple needs to create more iPod nano type fun products. Instead they are trying to create category defining products like vision pro because I think apple too has fallen for the MBAs running the show instead of the pirates. They need more risk, more fun, smaller bets to figure out the next wave.

I'm sure Apple is fiddling around with things in their labs. But I still remember something that someone at IBM told me once about some initiative. Don't focus on the specific number but basically if it isn't a billion dollar opportunity, it's too big a distraction up and down the line to bother with.

You may hate on MBAs but focus is actually something that Apple has been very very good at over the years even before the current management.

The MBAs wont let them. They already cancelled the iphone mini because it was selling but not selling enough.

As someone who likes the smaller phone form factor, it was a real bummer that they’re discontinuing this size. But on the other hand, as someone who needs to accommodate mobile UI, the mini was a bit of a thorn in my side. Conflicted

Such is life of the mobile developer though, or really any other developer. You have to accomodate multiple view port sizes or just write your code in a way that scales correctly. For example it used to be common for mobile apps to use the off the shelf ui tooling from the os vendor and use stuff like html for their pages within the app of whatever else. That stuff has always scaled perfectly. Its the new sexy stuff that has trouble but its not necessary to write code like that.

The mini has the same logical resolution as the 11 Pro, and the current SE3 has a significantly smaller screen. Not sure I see your point.

It may be a mistake to think of this as robotics.

Consider it more in terms of form-factor leading to UI interaction styles:

- mac for the desk

- ipad for the couch

- iphone for the pocket and hand

- Vision headset when you are inside the computer

So what's the computer you talk to from afar, or point to, to have it do things? Where's the screen that will follow you?

To me the sea change would be moving to voice as the primary mode of interaction. Keyboards are just awkward and hard. And voice now is used only with screen-centric UI's, as a keyboard replacement. The new thing could be life beyond the thumb.

For tasking a robot, the UI is more like a dialog, of setting objectives and constraints and getting feedback on progress. The key is the level of familiarity and trust: what might start as awkward and verbose with lots of confirmations, becomes laconic with experience of repeated success.

That's the stickiness. Transaction cost economics describes how repeated auctions accrue advantages to incumbents. Everyone's task dialogs will build differently, and once you've taught your assistant to be functional, you won't want to re-teach another; and also they'll likely better learn how you want the next task done.

That's the value of idiosyncratic on-device intelligence, intelligence that's not just fodder for consumer targeting or model building. People will pay extra not only for quality, but also for privacy, especially in the intimacy of tasks.

It does feel like Apple innovation is either stagnating or small, incremental gains. Certainly not huge leaps like iPhone or Apple Watch. Vision Pro hadn’t really taken off yet.

When Apple had a smaller user base of devoted Mac fans it could allow itself to experiment, but it cannot do it at the current scale. They have two potential options: focus of research of various groups of their existing products, e.g. find out who uses iPads for what and see if there is a potential for a hardware product for that group of users. For example, pilots load flight plans and other information on iPads, maybe there is a potential for a product for the aviation industry? Second option is an experimental product spin-off that they would finance, a bit like Bell Labs, but for Apple.

BTW. Apple Vision is not taking off anytime soon. At that price point it's going nowhere.

The Vision would be uninteresting to me at anything beyond pocket change prices. I have an SF concept of the type of augmented reality that could be interesting but we're nowhere near there.

Really, I'm an Apple fan but MacBooks and iPhones are the only devices I'm genuinely attached to. I haven't replaced a broken old iPad (at least not yet) and my Apple Watch is something I basically use for hiking.

I was in the Apple Store in Regent's Street in London yesterday. They had Vision on display. The headbands were already visibly dirty and nobody was looking at them anyway. At £3,500 it's no wonder why. My personal take on Vision is that it was created to shut up Wall Street asking why Apple does not have a VR vision/product? So they produced a product that will join Pippin and Newton and will kill it before Wall Street starts asking why they have a VR product when nobody else is investing in VR?

I was in their Covent Garden store late spring/early summer--admittedly not at a peak time--to ask to take a look at one of the new iPads. And, yeah, no one was playing with the Visions.

Even if they're skeptical, probably makes sense for them to be playing with (even very visibly). But I'm not sure I see a general use case at this point.

The impression I get is that there's a substantial appetite for experimentation with (and attention for in general for) macOS among Mac fans that hasn't been satisfied since iOS began to suck all the air out of the room many years ago. It's understandable that Apple might not want to rock the boat too much for more general audience Mac users, though. Perhaps some kind of "enthusiast mode" for macOS that could act as a playground for these things is in order.

They don't need to experiment with Mac. They still own the perfectly good Apple II brand they didn't use for decades and could experiment with all they want.

the watch was a leap? the only people I know who have them are Apple stans, and unlike the iPhone they certainly didn't kick off a new category of must have everyday item

heck, after growing tired of having one more thing with a rechargeable battery, I went back to an analog watch

Every person I see working retail has an Apple Watch. Think it’s some weird mix of they can’t have their phone and also rampant materialism through exposure at work.

I loved my $30 EBay Apple Watch as a cheap running watch with GPS before the battery got so weak it wouldn’t even do my 1.5 hour runs anymore. Apple wasn’t helpful about a battery replacement and encouraged me to buy a new one (starting at $249) and said they couldn’t replace the battery since it was so old, when I met a Genius at the Apple Store. That soured me quite a bit on the whole thing.

They shot themselves in the foot with eSim for Apple Watch (Samsung did he same with Galaxy Ultra watch). You have to buy a contract for both your iPhone and your watch, because you cannot put your Apple Watch on a pay as you go plan. This is a big obstacle in Europe where PAYG plans are popular. It's not going to change, because operators like it and LTE smartwatches do not cut into smartphone sales.

I know a bunch of people with some apple watch at this point but I never met anyone who pays for cellular for it

I did for a bit but I'm just not really in circumstances where I need smartwatch connectivity and my phone isn't on me somewhere.

I have an Apple Watch Ultra and, honestly, hiking is pretty much the only thing I use it for.

Most of the hikes I take don’t even have cell service

The market leader who captured more than half of all smartwatch revenue shot themselves in the foot?

I don’t think Apple cares whether you activate the watch on cellular or not. The product doesn’t really need it.

I'm talking about the LTE watches. They will not let them become untethered from the iPhone, which contradicts the marketing that convincing you the LTE watches are not reliant on the iPhone. Technically they are not, but you cannot use LTE on them without having a contract tied to the iPhone.

And that is shooting themselves in the foot how?

Apple would much rather sell you both an iPhone and a watch. Untethering them from each other destroys that upsell.

I don’t think Apple ever claimed in “the marketing” that you didn’t need an iPhone to use your watch. Just that you can leave it at home if you’re going out for a run or something like that.

Whether you and I think that’s consumer-friendly is a completely different story. I certainly don’t think it is. But it’s been an extremely good business model for Apple.

Cutting off VMOs like GiffGaff with its 4M customers is leaving money on the table https://www.cityam.com/giffgaff-hungry-for-more-as-it-looks-... Also, they could allow Apple Watch to be activated/paired with/managed from LTE iPads.

I think, for one thing, Apple makes essentially zero dollars from these cellular activations on Apple Watches.

But also, think about the kind of customer who believes their cellular bill costs too much and goes with an MVNO instead to save money. For that kind of customer there is no price that will make a smart watch cellular activation worth the money.

I think all the hardware companies know that smartwatch cellular plans are somewhat of a niche product that isn’t really a “killer app” for the smartwatch experience. Almost nobody is willing to leave their phone at home and I think the futuristic idea that the smartwatch could replace the phone is dying or dead. The whole industry seems to know it. Hell, Google gives smartwatch data away for free on their MVNO and that’s because they want to make money selling Pixel Watch hardware. They know that they won’t get anyone to pay $5 or $10 a month for smartwatch connectivity because, why bother, my phone is right there.

Apple really doesn’t really give a hoot about 4 million lower spend GiffGaff customers who use MVNOs instead of big carriers. Someone who is too frugal to spend on a big name carrier plan probably doesn’t want to spend $400+ on a cellular Apple Watch in the first place, they’re going tog get the Apple Watch SE or maybe something WearOS in the $200 range.

It’s important to remember that in capitalism, not all customers have the same value. Apple traditionally hasn’t fought hard for the bottom 50% customers who simply have less disposable money to give to them.

After 3 years my Apple Watch needed a battery replacement. I went a week without it. There were times I missed an important call or text because I don’t have any habit of checking my phone and I refuse to use audible alerts.

Overall, the Apple watch is less distracting because you can quickly glance and ignore most notifications, or filter notifications based on who it is, time, etc.

But if I had to think harder … another reason I love the Apple Watch is getting stripe sales notifications. Someone halfway around the world buys a thing of yours and you get a tap on the wrist as a reward. I’m not sure I’ll ever turn that off.

Kinda weird to say that only Apple stans have them when they are the global marketshare and revenue leader. Sticking to objective facts will make your point more effective.

Let's travel back to 2016 ...

> It does feel like Apple innovation is either stagnating or small, incremental gains. Certainly not huge leaps like iPhone or iPad. Apple Watch hasn’t really taken off yet.

This might be true on the user-facing side of things, but moving chip design in-house and transitioning their entire hardware lineup to the ARM ISA is a big innovation. M-line Macs can't be beat in efficiency or performance any time soon.

M-line Macs have been beaten in pure-performance terms since the day they were released, and that goes for everything from the M1 to the M3 Max: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks

It's the single-core scores that are really impressive, but as time goes on, the performance gap is closing and not widening. It's been said many times before, but it was Apple's TSMC alliance that mattered more than their core design or ISA choice at the time.

> M-line Macs have been beaten in pure-performance terms since the day they were released

I don't think anyone would ever argue this based on performance alone, which is why I think your geekbench link is irrelevant, and I think a fair reading of parent's comment talking about "efficiency and performance" would mean these two aspects taken together, not independently.

That is, nobody is surprised a beefy server chip has more computing power than an M3, and nobody is considering an Nvidia H100 a competitor to an M3 in any sense.

The problem is, we can correct for wattage and it's still a blowout.

Compare the M2 Ultra's 5nm GPU performance-per-watt to a product like Nvidia's RTX A5000 laptop GPU on Samsung 8nm. The M2 Ultra is rated to pull over 290w at load, compared to the A5000's maximum TDP of 165w. Apple's desktop-grade iGPUs are less power-efficient than Nvidia's last-generation laptop GPUs, even when they have a definitive node advantage and higher TDPs.

You don't have to just look at the server chips. Compare like-for-like and you'll quickly find that Apple's GPU designs are pretty lacking across the board. The M3 Max barely swaps spit with Nvidia's 2000-series in performance-per-watt. When you pull out the 4000-series hardware and compare the efficiency of those cards, it's just plainly unfair. The $300 RTX 4060 outperforms Apple's $3000 desktop GPUs in performance and efficiency.

Why are you comparing SoCs to dedicated GPUs?

Why not? Apple's SOCs are in the 200-300w range that desktop systems occupy, it's only fair to compare it with it's contemporaries. Nvidia is said to be developing desktop SOCs too so we'll soon have systems for comparison, but I don't see how laptop dGPUs are an unfair comparison against desktop SOCs in any case. It's basically the same hardware with similar thermal constraints.

Plus; say we did include all of the dGPUs that Apple officially supports. Not even the W6800X gets more performance-per-watt than an Nvidia laptop chip. It only highlights the fact that Apple goes out of their way to prevent Nvidia from providing GPU support on Mac.

Vision Pro in form factor and experience is just another VR headset the population has no interest in. They haven't since it first debut in the 90s.

I know their pathway is to shrink it down to glasses size so we are basically wearing our iPhones on our face. Yet as Ray Ban smart glass enthusiast (use almost daily since Oct '23) im fine with vocally asking my glasses what time it is & getting an audible response. Some visuals in my face only upon summoning them maybe via a ring on my finger or a watch or some natural non-intrusive gesture would be helpful.

Now I don't think smart glasses will replace smart phones as you cannot take selfies with them.

> the population has no interest in

I definitely have an interest, but there's always something wrong with the existing headsets, so I never adopt. The Oculus is close, but the mandatory Meta integration is a no-go for me.

Maybe the masses (smartphone user population) will once it's as light as sunglasses.

Been wearing my Ray Ban smartglasses while playing pickleball lately and they are too heavy for playing sports. Im always pushing them up on my face so they dont fall off.

I don't like these takes of "innovation is stagnating", as a lot of this is just a function of what is possible at any given moment.

For example, I think the iPhone was a revolutionary, innovative device at the time, but the need was obvious: it was pretty clear even back then that things like separate mp3 players, phones, and mobile browsers would converge - Apple was just the one that did it best early on.

Even with Apple Watch, while a smart watch form factor was pretty obvious, in the early days the "reason for existence" wasn't as clear until Apple Watch (and pretty much all smart watches) started laser focusing on being fitness trackers and providing health monitoring functionality.

So now we're at a point where you have either things like Vision Pro, which is an amazing piece of tech but which solves problems nobody really has, or you have ideas ("I want a robotic housekeeper!") that are eons from being technically feasible. So for anyone saying "Apple isn't innovating", I'd challenge you to think of areas where it could even begin to innovate in the first place (and where people would actually pay money for whatever they built). The answer to that question isn't as obvious as it was in 2007.

Final thought, I think Apple has been doing a ton of innovation. Their chips are now state of the art leaders, and take a look at just Airpod revenue alone compared to total revenue of other major companies: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/15z558o/oc...

There are some obvious areas that are not easy but could develop into a very good value proposition such as certifying a variant of Apple Watch for medical use, more sustainable tech (their products are basically throwaway when finished), integrate better across ecosystems such as Android, and improved battery technology / investment.

I agree that all the examples you've given would be welcomed by users, but I highly, highly doubt that the crowd that accuses Apple of stagnating when it comes to innovation would be impressed with more "sustainable" tech, for example. Many of the examples you've given (better integration with Android, better batteries) have nothing to do with tech but are clearly deliberate business decisions by Apple.

It's such a gamble for Apple to move out of the safe space they are in. They have such total ecosystem control, such ability to set the terms of use however they want with digital technology. But as soon as they start building more mechanical physical systems that exist int eh real world, there's far less ability to maintain that pristine veneer.

Whether Apple can find a path to being a less perfectionist company is a big question in my mind, that bounds all their ambitions.

Yeah it's the startup vs established company dilemma. An AI company can publish a tool that makes mistakes. If Google publishes a version of that tool, maybe making it respond a little bit faster so that it can be shown next to search results, but at the expense of accuracy, people suddenly ridicule them.

Same goes for other products. New product categories require a lot of risk taking and established companies have a lot to lose, they don't want to take risks, they want to minimize it and for that they have entire departments with hundreds and thousands of employees that crunch every idea to death.

Very few companies survive Robotics projects, as the public has decades of unrealistic expectations from entertainment media.

If the plan is an unconstrained general purpose use-case design, than the reality of the processing power needed to do simple tasks will quickly hit the product.

If the board is serious, than just purchase the universal-robots.com company. Then add whatever branding and software you thought was useful on top of the existing platform.

Making a profitable Robotics company is hard, as they are not generally a consumer product.

I'd try Apple branded appliances, and you know people would buy a talking toaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec

Best of luck =)

It doesn't sound like a robot at all, because it doesn't "plan". A robot is an embodied cognitive agent. Embodied = has a body and is acting in physical space. Cognitive agent = it uses a sense-plan-act loop. This thing may sense and act, but its controls are too primitive to call it "planning". In particular it doesn't plan multiple actions into the future. It's doing something folks in the AI literature would call "reactive control".

Apple is probably only interested in doing things that elevate their brand by making it feel more premium. But if they wanted to, they could focus really hard on increasing Swift adoption by making the tools a lot better and porting Xcode over to other Operating Systems. They would gain more mindshare amongst developers, but that’s probably not interesting to them outside of the Mac/ios ecosystem

Apple should buy ARM while it has cash. And then software stack such as Qt. And then start industrial automation division (or subsidiary) could be one possible way that supplies whole stack (the chip, the software stack on top) that the industrial machinery works well with iOS/iPhones/iPads.

This shall fuel the iPhone and iPad sales as well.

It is far cheaper bet then a robotics division.

They already have everything Qt has? And the killer feature of Qt being multiplatform will cause an allergic reaction so I'm not sure I see the value (for apple) there.

> that the industrial machinery works well with iOS/iPhones/iPads.

> This shall fuel the iPhone and iPad sales as well.

Even if all the industrial machines that go for $100k+ started bundling two iPad Pros to use as their control interfaces, I don't see how that could make a noticeable difference to iPad sales volumes. It definitely wouldn't justify spending tens of billions on acquisitions as part of a strategy that would be heavily opposed by antitrust regulators.

Apple is renowned for their seamless interoperation between their devices, yes, but there is also another angle - Apple always searches for the largest common denominator (amongst what ordinary people do) and refines that experience. Everyone needs to be able to share a photo, record a video, lookup a song, etc. The addressable market for iphone users that operate industrial equipment is minuscule. They wouldn't bother.

Ah, yes, even more big-tech concentration is exactly what we need.

> Apple should buy ARM while it has cash.

No.

> And then start industrial automation division (or subsidiary)

As someone who works in this sector - HARD NO. Machinery can and should last decades, even outlasting their users or their manufactures. Apple is not interested in providing this kind of support just like MS. They make money selling you new shiny things that do nothing for a fixed function machine.

I have to deal with machines with RTOS run-times, software and drivers anchored to Windows 2k/XP, 7 and 10. There is ZERO need to update outside of the fact that I'm a prisoner of their upgrade treadmill. I then have to resort to eBay for hardware and the good grace of 3rd party service techs to obtain obsolete software they happen to have a copy of. The controls OEM does not give a single fuck your machine and therefor your business is down and tells you to buy all new hardware and software as if that is a solution to lost business.

Here's the secret ingredients for successful robotics products:

1. Does it do something useful? Useful enough to pay for? 2. If it's solving something hard, are you going to invest enough to solve the problem?

The article is like a perfect clock. In 3-5 years you'll read the headline "Apple cancels robotics projects," and be totally unsurprised.

The idea of a screen that follows you around is somewhere between creepy and useless. Remember the Amazon home drone, the Ring Always Home Cam?[1]

Robots have to do something useful. For homes, that's mostly clean, cook, or launder. Those are hard, unstructured tasks. Robot vacuums are at last semi-useful, though expensive.

Automated laundry machinery exists, but the amount of machinery you need is way too much for the home. Robotic soiled-side sorting.[2] Robotic wash and dry, including load and unload [3]. Robotic clean-side sorting and folding.[4] Hospitals and hotels buy such systems. There were Foldimate and Laundroid for the home, but they cost too much.

Robotics woks are a thing in China. They add ingredients at specified points in the cycle. There's a home version that takes a plastic container with multiple compartments and a bar code with the instructions. But they're just another kitchen appliance.

[1] https://ring.com/always-home-cam-flying-camera

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-03OAHvn54

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9s4HiaRDaA

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpTuwKu5fY0

Apple is desperate to stay relevant, just like Sony was a few decades ago when they were launching robot dogs (AIBO) and other useless gadgets.

I don't agree with both of your two points. The AIBO was more like an experiment, Sony didn't go bankrupt because of it as much as Microsoft, Google, Meta are not going bankrupt from failed projects. Fail is in their playbook and not as risky as you think. For example, for a startup it could mean their closing.

Regarding Apple, they are completely relevant in the market. They have business challenges and good competitors (e.g. Samsung). Most probably when we read about Apple exploring robotics is because there are many projects we don't know about because of their known secrecy.

You are right, Sony didn't go bankrupt because of AIBO or any other failed new product, but Sony never launched another successful product after PlayStation. Sony will probably never go bankrupt, no matter how many failed projects they launch, but Sony is just a legacy company at this point.

Apple, Meta, Tesla, Google, they're all desperate to find the next big thing that will help them grow like stockholders speculate they will. Nobody wants to be the next Sony. Sony is the equivalent of stagnation and lack of (successful) innovation.

With all due respect what you said about Apple, etc could be applied to anyone on the top of the market cliff: if you are a huge hedge fund it is difficult, if no impossible to find a new opportunity in that scale, at least to "time the opportunity". AI, for example escaped all of them even when Google was the real innovator behind transformers. They will catch up for sure.

Regarding Sony, I really haven't studied them well. I know I have used many many Sony products since I was born and that the only product that I now use is the PS5. I also think culture plays its part there, thinking also about Nintendo. I don't know how desperate Sony really is to innovate now. They also produce movies and series though.

Huh, they used to want to eliminate moving parts from their devices.

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Isn't this what the Apple Vision Pro was supposed to be?

iPad OS/MacOS Notebook like a Microsoft Surface but with an actually usable User Interface would be the obvious next step to me.

We have yet to see a user interface that works equally well for laptop/desktop and tablet use, and that isn’t a downgrade for either. It’s not entirely impossible, but it might as well be.

Just another future dead project like Apple Car. VR is also already nearing its death knell as well ($5K+ paper weight, at best).

Apple is way behind the curve and has been playing catch up since change in leadership from Jobs to Cook. Historically, iPhone innovation has slowed to a crawl. There has been some life with Apple Silicon, but unfortunately like everything with Apple it’s locked off behind the wall. Trying to use it without macOS is an absolute pain in the ass (yes, I have tried asahi but there’s a massive feature parity, and endlessly waiting for upstream support sucks).

> ($5K+ paper weight, at best).

You know the price of the Vision Pro is public, readily-available information, right? What do you hope to accomplish by lying about its price?

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