It's the “hardware”, stupid
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Android still has weird laggy jumps and just is not that smooth. Even on the new pixel devices.
On the other hand, a device that could work offline is interesting. One that could work in a zombie apocalypse is even more interesting. Especially if it was solar powered and contained the knowledge needed to rebuild society.
Kind of an unnecessary dig at the Raspberry Pi, no? Modern Pis and SBCs in general are good at lots of things. I use mine for self-hosting some apps I use, and I've definitely seen them used in little compute clusters for AI inference.
> On the other hand, a device that could work offline is interesting. One that could work in a zombie apocalypse is even more interesting. Especially if it was solar powered and contained the knowledge needed to rebuild society.
This is kind of interesting in an abstract sense; it's fun to imagine burying a solar-powered oracle in a hardshell case in a bunker somewhere so that some hypothetical person can use it to bootstrap civilization after the end, but that's all it really is: hypothetical. Fun to imagine. A project for hackers or maybe a non-profit. It certainly fails the "toothbrush test" mentioned in the article; no one will be consulting their doomsday box once or twice a day (absent a doomsday, anyway).
If I can be really reductionist for a second, I think there's a lot of AI cart-before-horse happening with these hardware products. Smartphones changed the world a decade and a half ago because they took something that people wanted--the internet, but mobile--and finally made it work. Since then they've dramatically changed the landscape of the internet and social media etc, but the idea--that people already had the internet but wanted to interact with it in a different way--should probably be the foundation for how we think about AI hardware products. What can they do for people better than what they already have? We should not need the benefit of hindsight to see why something like the Human AI pin, that doesn't really do anything and does it badly, failed.
PCs just aren't interesting because they're all fundamentally the same thing and are capable of the same set of tasks.
RPis aren't interesting because 99.9999% of projects they're put in are better served by a microcontroller and not an entire linux system. If not just a 555. It's boring to throw an entire linux computer into a project. You've utterly given up on the hardware and have assumed you can do everything with software.
I mostly use them for situations where I'd otherwise need a small Linux computer and a microcontroller together, e.g. for CAN + DoIP simulation with SCPI control of test equipment over Ethernet & relay control of a vibration table.
I'm imagining a stratified market with two distinct customer personas - very rich and paranoid, and very poor paranoid.
Have fun!
Have to disagree here. There were many devices before (and after) the iPhone that offered this package but it stands above the rest because of its design and polish.
And most of the discussion I had with the owner wasn't about how it was "all-in-one package", but rather how much smoother the UI was compared to other touch devices at the time, how accurate it was and how it felt in the hand.
Maybe depends on the country but 00's in Sweden on the internet was OK, lots of social places and other nerdery going on that was easy to get into, granted you had an internet connection. LunarStorm (originally "Stajlplajs" I think) must have been popular around 2002 already, and I remember that from my teenage age group, most of them were signed up to Lunarstorm, even though most of us were still on modems, 240p webcams and white/yellow desktop computers.
You could run things like IRC clients, dedicated text chat apps, and server rendered browsers on live Internet. But downloading full webpages was too much for the hardware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language
> Building on Openwave's HDML, Nokia's "Tagged Text Markup Language" (TTML) and Ericsson's proprietary markup language for mobile content, the WAP Forum created the WML 1.1 standard in 1998. WML 2.0 was specified in 2001, but has not been widely adopted. It was an attempt at bridging WML and XHTML Basic before the WAP 2.0 spec was finalized. In the end, XHTML Mobile Profile became the markup language used in WAP 2.0.
But even Sony Ericsson phones way before the iPhone could all do those things in one phone too, some of them really good for their time. Yet they never kind of changed the technology scene as much as the iPhone.
It did. Jobs famously said on stage [0] "An iPod, a Phone, and an Internet Communicator. An iPod, a Phone... are you getting it? These are not 3 seperate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone" at the launch. It also did come with maps that used Google Maps.
It did web browsing very well.
And it came with Maps (which, at that time, used Google's data).
It was initially amusing back then when the world was commonly filled with wide-open 802.11 networks to pull out that little pocket computer, connect to a nearby network (if it hadn't already connected to "Linksys"), and browse an online map -- from about anywhere with a building nearby.
Wifi-based geolocation was also spooky-good at that time.
Anyway, it didn't do much else that I found useful. It was generally lacking features that I'd been using for years with a Handspring Visor (which itself ran on a pair of alkaline batteries for months).
Early IOS didn't even have a clipboard to cut and paste with.
So I jailbroke it. I added multitasking, an app "store," a clipboard and a bunch of other fun stuff long before Apple allowed those functions.
I think I even had a good bit of the Debian userland installed at one point.
After that, I used it all the time for stuff (until the OG Motorola Droid replaced it in 2009, which was easy as pie to root: just dump a special su on there and run it).
Nothing, and I mean nothing, compared to Safari on the iPhone. It was in a league of its own. It was dog-slow over Edge but it was a _real_ browser instead of what had come before.
It's the usefullness, not the hardware.
The apps were worse, but you had that HUGE screen to look at. And compared to other non-blackberry phones where you were limited to T9 text input, it was a game changer.
The iPhone felt more like a general portable computing device that happened to also function as a phone.
Even the Blackberry up to that point still felt more like an "email/phone device" primarily (though funny enough, I never had a Blackberry myself until after the iPhone came out).
The irony now, and I suspect many people are like this, is my "phone" is barely ever used as an actual phone. It's a computer with a data plan. I am way more likely to use some kind of internet-based voice/video chat than make or take a phone call.
My phone icon is still on my home screen, but only because it is something I want to be able to get at quickly in an emergency. I'm certain it's the least-used icon on the screen, though.
There were also other “phones” that only had the phone function as one of many apps.
Relatively speaking I think that gave it an edge which helped make it successful.
I don't think Apple products in general have the best most usable designs, but they do have the most beautiful, most stylish most sophisticated-looking designs. People want that because a device like phone is part of their identity.
Word.
I worked as a software developer, for hardware companies, most of my career.
Most of the upper management came from hardware, and consistently treated software as an afterthought.
That may change, this time. Different breed of top managers.
In a software company the software is a magical money printer with zero unit costs.
In reality, a good software/hardware meld can make all the difference (hello, Apple). In those cases, the software is "free."
I am not that familiar with Nvidia, but, from what I hear, they do good software, to go with their hardware, and have a robust developer outreach program.
Who was the exact individual that had the vision for glass multi-touch screens and sick gesture like effects (scroll).
Perhaps the team just sat around a table and came up with the vision. Or maybe it was Jobs, but clearly there were some good visionaries in the company.
I think the proof of Ive's excellence will come out of this next OpenAI project. If it's something lame, then I will assume his impact at Apple was overrated. If it's a jaw-dropper, then maybe he really is the cat's meow.
Excellent point. I think most great creative work is due to a uniquely 'right' combination of people, problem, experience and environment being together at an opportune moment.
The momentum on iOS is nicely tuned though.
But adding the physical feel of momentum and inertia was Apple’s invention, AFAIK.
(And I wouldn't be surprised if there are academic papers that predate the consumer products by a decade or more.)
We saw a lot of great ideas in the 90s, but either the hardware performance wasn't ready, or the software effort fell short of the polish needed for mass adoption. We had to wait for the iPhone to be one of those rare products where they used capable hardware AND actually finished the software.
Other smartphones and PDAs back then used more precise resistive touchscreens that required an annoying pressure stylus because it was a way to get more usability out of the very small screens that devices were limited to.
Like almost all new products later thought of as 'visionary' innovations, the first iPhone built on pre-existing ideas but integrated them particularly well and added some excellent new refinements. It's easy to forget that the prior five years had been a crucible of in-market experimentation between companies like Nokia, Palm, HP, Sony, Ericsson and Blackberry with platforms like Pocket PC, Palm OS, Windows CE and Windows Mobile.
The iPhone was announced in Jan 2007 at MacWorld (and shipped in July), I was there and played with it extensively in the Apple booth. I remember thinking it had some especially clever ideas and was a very nice implementation. It advanced the "premium pocket phone" bar up to a new level but I didn't see it as unusually visionary. It was definitely significant but still a (large) step in an ongoing progression of refinement, integration and search for product/market fit. There were already large color touchscreen devices which integrated a phone, messaging, camera, music player, Wifi, Bluetooth and GPS. Here's an article looking at a few pre-iPhone devices: https://www.phonearena.com/news/6-great-smartphones-from-10-....
The iPhone 1's design was uniquely simple and svelte but I was immediately concerned about it having enough battery to support that screen. The choice to go with just "One Big Button" and no physical keyboard or navigation keys was bold, weird and also a bit concerning. The on-screen keyboard-only and gesture nav-only choices did feel a bit like two steps forward, one back in iOS 1. It felt like they made a 'purist' design decision and had to make it work as well as it could. That worked out to be "well enough" but sometimes similarly bold but risky choices can fail when they sacrifice too much. However, the battery life did become a very serious issue for active users when the first iPhone shipped and limited the success of the device. It's also worth remembering the usability of iOS 1 was pretty clunky. I played with most of these early phone devices and owned several but didn't adopt an iPhone as my primary device until the iPhone 3G shipped 18 months after the iPhone launch. The 3G was significantly better, different and more refined than the iPhone 1.
I know a lot of people basically who were basically saying "finally"
Maybe, but I’m not certain we would have converged on a single form factor. Only Apple had the retail, marketing, software, hardware capabilities, discipline, and incentives to throw everything behind the minimalistic design and single form factor and turn it into a hit.
Everyone else was splitting their efforts across multiple form factors and relying on carrier stores to sell their phones, and I don’t think that was going to revolutionize anything.
It's strange to think it was only 4 years after the initial release that he died.
I remember the first application that people were hyped about was Google Maps. The Nokia phone couldn't run that, and any map available there was much harder to use. But the iPhone only really took off after people could install any kind of application there.
I'm not sure what model you are talking about, maybe the S60, third edition. It is hard to get any background on it.
I'd like to say that companies missed out on the fact that a web browser would be really sellable, but it's clearly all about tying everyone to their platform, and more importantly their store.
Have you ever encountered a product you saw as "unusually visionary"?
So I've thought a lot about new tech product innovation including speaking, writing and teaching about it. When people have been kind enough to use 'visionary' in relation to a product I led, I thank them but reject the term and then try to turn it into a teachable moment about the thought processes, systems and relentless execution necessary to create results someone might someday describe as 'visionary'. I'm generally opposed to the trend in media and pop-biz-lit to deify outstanding new product development as somehow ineffably mystical. At best, it helps no one get better at doing this hard thing, and at worst, it's pulling up the ladder after we've climbed it.
The novel insights and intuitions which some people call 'visionary', in my experience, always seem to come after intensive research, deep study of prior work in the field and constant hands-on, practical experimentation. So I credit them as the indirect (but expected) result of the rigorous process of making and shipping cool new stuff. That said, I do think of Steve Jobs himself as one of the best natural tech product innovators I've ever met. Another example I cite as a significantly notable step change was SpaceX's understanding that the way to engineer exponentially more mass to orbit per dollar was pioneering a substantially different process of rocket development. That's more a process than a product - but that's kind of my whole meta-point.
If your question was basically to try to call out "guy who didn't think iPhone 1 was unusually visionary at the 2007 launch, doesn't think anything is visionary". Well... you win. But it's more because I think most new products in new categories are 'visionary' in some ways. It's just that the majority of new visions fail commercially. Semantically, 'visionary' probably best parses to a synonym for novelty and 'newly different' doesn't necessarily equate to good, so it's not useful as a threshold metric for product success. However, I do think the iPhone business overall is certainly one of the ten most innovative and successful new product businesses our industry has ever seen. But that doesn't change the fact that many knowledgeable observers at the original launch didn't see it that way - because it wasn't that yet. Twenty years of incredible success and constant iteration tends to obscure that the original product - as innovative as it was - wasn't what its descendants became. And the victors tend to rewrite history and our collective memories obscuring the context the 1.0 was created in. Standing there in the Apple booth, I DID think it was really good, bold and different. I told someone that night I expected it would probably be my personal "product of the year" - and recall this was in early January. My comment above was because just being a fanboy exclaiming how visionary a product is informs nothing and helps no one.
The visionary bit for me was Jobs getting a US phone company to agree to a data plan that made financial sense to potential users.
There were multiple articles about Jobs spending most of his day with Jony looking at prototypes Jony's team had devised and giving critiques and feedback. Then they would iterate on what Jobs said.
Of course the engineering team had to figure out how to make Jobs suggestions real within the physical and technological constraints they were working with.
> I think the proof of Ive's excellence will come out of this next OpenAI project.
I think Ive's lack of high profile success since Jobs passed away shows Jobs true talent. He was a taste savant. A genius for figuring out what people would like and building a team capable of building those things at scale.
Ive could take Jobs ideas and come up with a concrete design for making them real. But he doesn't have that instinct for figuring out what kinds of products people want in the first place.
I would love to know what Jobs would have done with AI to make it into something people want to use, instead of being terrified it's just going to put them out of work.
Jarvis, please make me a sandwich.
This won't only be in the free tier. Altman says they don't even break even on the paid tiers. They will use whatever money is available to fill that gap, and advertising money is available. https://x.com/sama/status/1876104315296968813
Soon we will live in a world where people don't make purchasing decisions for themselves, they ask an AI which will suggest the product that pays the most for ads. Payola World.
Was it the eyeball scanners that gave you this idea?
Ives is not that person he is too nice.
Jobs wasn’t the one producing the designs. He was critiquing them and pointing out what he liked.
Was the iPhone revolutionary? Absolutely!
But, imho, it was built on evolutionary advancements.
> The crux of the problem was clear: these devices were captivated by "technical possibilities," but failed to address "user problems."
Hmm.
But it seems high cost, the walled garden, and inability to compute directly on the headset limits its appeal. It needs a Mac tethered to it despite its powerful SoC.
I don’t think this is true at all. The smartphone is not some kind of endgame device after which there is no future. No more so than the train was the endgame of transportation. Why are we limiting our imagination about the future to only include what is true today?
Smart phone, laptop, headsets, VR goggles, AI can work with all of these just fine.
I think part of Apple's struggles with AI is they can't find a way to tie it to their hardware in a differentiating way. Since it's so cloud based and there are few compelling use cases for running worse models locally, "AI" works just as well on any device.
Old time buses with people reading felt a little more like some 80s buses full of people with Walkman headphones. The material was a bit of a performance of "I'm minding my own business".
A modern environment with people grafted to their phone apps feels more than that. It sometimes feels more like the movie cliche of an opium den.
Here, people aren't just signalling the idea that they are minding their own business. They really are lost in their own world of addiction. A circus clown could ride down the aisle juggling flaming bowling pins and these phone users would not even know.
Kind of like torn jeans. Before the mid sixties torn clothing would signify economic disadvantage and you’d avoid it if possible but afterwards it signified rebellion and people wanted to signal rebelliousness with torn jeans or at least signal being part of an in-group however large and diluted it be.
It still does. Absolutely insane to me that people are willing to put on the appearance of being poor, and they think it's cool. You will never catch me wearing ripped jeans, but maybe that's because I grew up poor enough that I had to wear ripped jeans when we couldn't afford new ones.
Whether it is a high fashion rip of the season, made by artisans, versus some counterfeit rip made at home or in an unlicensed sweat shop versus the unimaginable actual wear and tear of old clothes.