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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

Appointing John Ternus is going to be a pretty clear indicator to investors that Apple plans on continuing its iterative hardware, supply chain and operations focus and isn't looking to shake things up from a product or vision standpoint. Which may be the best move for the company (this strategy has definitely worked wonders for the last decade and a half), but I can't help feel that among all the large tech companies Apple is the one most at risk of a major disruption. It might not come tomorrow or even in the next decade, but whenever the next shift in personal computing happens (maybe AI, maybe AR/VR, maybe something else entirely) they are going to be caught unprepared and unable to adapt in time.

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> It might not come tomorrow or even in the next decade, but whenever the next shift in personal computing happens (maybe AI, maybe AR/VR, maybe something else entirely) they are going to be caught unprepared and unable to adapt in time.

I get what you're saying, but thinking about it, I'd be very surprised if the personal computing world ends up seeing anything like a paradigm shift that is so unprecedented it will catch the likes of Apple unprepared. And I realize it might sound arrogant or even ludditic to say this, but we'd need some sort of shocking new concept that no one ever came up with even in sci-fi. It's no longer really a matter of being able to technically implement something, but more about coming up with a human interface that is both totally novel and more convenient and practical than what we have now.

The qwerty layout comes from 19th century typewriters and we're still using it. The mouse was conceived of in the 1960s. Tiny computers that fit in the hand and voice operated devices have been utilized in early sci-fi works. And there's obviously VR, even though I think that's more of a toy than anything.

The only thing that is potentially in that same league of usefulness that I can think of is a brain-computer interface of some sort but those are currently so far away from having competitive practicality that there's a huge amount of runway.

> might not come tomorrow or even in the next decade

…what company do you think is immune from disruption beyond the foreseeable future?

The big banks (unless they do fraud again), health insurance companies in the US, the major telecoms, Airbus, Bayer, Tyson, JBS SA, Nestle, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, Cargill

No company is immune to disruption, but plenty of them have innovation and adaptation in their DNA. IMO over the years Apple has lost that. Look at Google, or Meta, or even Microsoft. Diversified income streams. Clutch acquisitions. Massive capital investments. Data centers. Nuclear power plants. Moonshot factories. Self driving cars. AR glasses. Robots. Venture investing and dealmaking. Massive AI ambitions. Stuff they try might not always work, and sometimes fail spectacularly, but they still do it. Apple meanwhile has been perfectly content depending on a single product and the monopolistic hold on the ecosystem of that product for basically 100% of its revenue for the past two decades.

I don’t think Google is a great example to hold up here. They throw so much random crap at a wall hoping for another golden goose. Then kill anything that isn’t after a few years. If you can’t tell, I’m still salty about Google domains.

Many of the things you listed need time to bake and Google never cooks anything more than a quick sear in the pan.

The company is among the leaders in the AI race and doing a quarter million self driving taxi rides a week but sure they aren't innovative because they shut down a domain name website..

Tbh, Apple has a lot of future products under R&D. No one hears about it because they're very secretive.

> Look at Google or Meta...

Yeah, look at them: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/big-tech-companies-billions... Diverse they aren't. Alphabet is broken down in to segments but several segments including the largest one all boil down to online advertising revenue.

And Microsoft was already well diversified back in 2000.

> maybe AR/VR

I dunno, have you tried an Apple Vision Pro? It's actually a pretty phenomenal product for V1. I think really all they need to do is: (1) hit retina-tier PPD (pixels-per-degree) and (2) manage the weight, (3) do everything they're already doing, and I'm sold as a replacement for TVs & Desktop monitors.

None of that will help, it has to be able to do something people want to do. Only us on tech forums care about the actual specs and how cool the tech is.

What can a person do in a Vision Pro that they're willing to spend $1000+ on that they can't do in a $300-$500 Quest?

It can't replace TVs and monitors because only one person can use it at a time

Also it's incompatible with makeup and messes up your hair. So it's a dead product for like 60% of the working age population.

Maybe stop wearing makeup, it's bad for your skin and doesn't make you better at your job unless your job is BS anyway. Legacy product of a chauvinist era.

Furthermore, your argument means all VR headsets are inherently anti-female, which is the craziest take I've ever heard.

If your product needs people to stop wearing makeup and agreeing that it's chauvinistic, it's dead in the water.

Just admit there is nowhere near the needed public excitement or uptake about any AR/VR headset, esp. the Apple Vision Pro which has pretty much nothing to do on it but watch movies and TV and use the laptop / desktop you already own

Roughly $20-30B in investment by Apple to build the Apple Vision Pro over roughly the course of half a decade is disagreeing with you. That's an insane investment into a product category with "no public excitement or uptake about any AR/VR headset."

I didn't bring up makeup, btw. I just thought it was an absurd argument. It has nothing to do with whether the product succeeds or fails in the long run, which is precisely what I'm talking about.

Yes, the AVP store is pretty scant at the present moment. But regardless, I would absolutely explore the feasibility of replacing my TV, my desktop monitors with an AR/VR headset if it met the tech specs I listed above. I'd much rather have a 70' screen viewing experience for movies, or gaming.

Btw, why did Valve announce the Steam Frame this last week if the AR/VR market is dead? Why are companies like Virtuix, Disney developing omnidirectional treadmills for more physical VR exploration? Why are companies like Meta working to develop surface electromyography tech, electro-tactile solutions to simulate the sensation of touching physical objects in VR?

Maybe all this money being spent on a non-existent market segment is a product of a fucked economic hierarchy where the rich have so much money they can blow it all on projects that will never reach massive scale, which is an argument I'd actually listen to.

Billions and billions have been invested in failures. What kind of argument is this? Is Horizon Worlds by Meta a resounding success? It cost billions to make as well.

You can do anything you want. The average consumer is not going to flock in droves to the AVP which cannot do anything special its cheaper competition cannot do, and which cannot replace TVs (because those can be used by more than one person at a time as I said already and you didn't reply to).

Metas Display Ray Bans and Quest. Maybe even Steam Frame, those all have an audience: regular people or gamers. Who is the audience for AVP? Pretty much only tech spec nerds on these forums like you and I. That's a dead product, imo

> Just admit there is nowhere near the needed public excitement or uptake about any AR/VR headset

> those all have an audience

So which is it

You're saying as if it's a bad thing. We need new blood. Thank god IBM Failed and we got microsoft /hp/apple. Now it's time for the next wave to make the current Dinos go extinct

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