If they can maintain their hardware lead and tighten up the software a bit, the next era looks bright.
Jobs of course (in addition to being an asshole) really was a product guy - he wanted to build seamless appliances that just worked, blending hardware, software and design into a beautiful thing that just did what you wanted (or what Jobs thought you wanted, which he was well attuned to).
I think Apple took some missteps with the iPhone in later models, maybe too much influenced by Jony Ive and form over function. It certainly wouldn't be a bad thing to put more focus back on functionality if that ends up to be the case.
I do think the challenge for Apple going forwards (but also for Android) is going to be how to best take advantage of AI. Maybe Ternus has a vision for that, but in any case the CEO can't be a one-man marketing dept - he just needs to know what he wants and hire the right people to get it accomplished.
IMO one of their great advantages so far is that they have not blindly bought into the AI hysteria and wasted $billions on it. They've shown you can still have a great company without chanting the "AI is the future" mantra day in and day out. It would be pretty disappointing for a new CEO to drag them into the cargo cult and declare "We, too, must find something that we can do with AI."
You can’t be a software company without an AI story to tell.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to restrict “successful” to iPhone-level unit sales and Apple profit margins.
But Dell’s profits cratered so bad that they took the company private and profits are still nothingburgers.
Sony just sold off controlling interest of its TV division.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/son...
Have you checked the profits of the other PC sellers?
A quick Google search shows that LG profits were $2.4 billion dollar (converted) and down its last fiscal year.
Every single low margin PC company that exists now like Dell, HP etc were much more profitable than an almost bankrupt Apple in 1997. They had no vision and decided to compete on price. It doesn’t matter why they are barely profitable low margin businesses.
Seeing there revenue vs profits, they should take Michael Dell’s (bad) advice to Jobs when he came back - “shut the company down and give the money back to shareholders” who could make more money in treasury bonds.
They both bought into hysteria and they've likely already wasted billions on it. Are you forgetting the interminable ads and announcements of "Apple Intelligence" from two years ago when even iPhones were marketed as AI-ready?
Imagine if on your phone to change the volume you had to swipe into a settings menu first and then change it on a slider versus just using the volume buttons on the side. Seems like a worse way for something you're potentially wanting to rapidly adjust, like when you accidentally start playing something way too loud.
If you locate them in the middle it could be a seamless "press, drag, release" action
It utterly destroys the “quick incremental adjustment” that taps are better for. It makes it more involved to even complete maximal adjustments, which are just press and hold. It makes all adjustments more involved, it’s not merely a matter of locating a physical key, it’s orchestrating movements your eyes and hands have to track together toward a location that can’t be known , through touch detection that can get fussy for any number of reasons.
This is not theoretical. This was my experience with a touchbar MBP. The idea was just wrong for this kind of routine function.
Meanwhile, I can adjust volume blind by feel on a MPB with function keys. I never for a moment when doing this for audio or brightness think “I wish I had a slider” and even if I did I know how to find one for use with the touch interface every MBP ever has had.
It also could get mad hot on my 2016 MBpro when video editing. Still love(d) that computer though…
I also would not mind it in addition to regular keys, there are some great interactions in there. But it's an extremely poor keyboard-emulator. Splitting off the escape key made a huge improvement, but it's nowhere near enough.
What a nightmare. ‘Mad hot’ even on… just being alive.
And I had to look down every time I had use it. I am glad to see it go.
Personally I’d love to see the touchbar make a comeback either as an addition to the fkeys row, or as a set of e-ink/oled physical buttons where the fkeys are. Allow the displayed legends to update while still keeping the physicality.
And of course the virtual function keys were awful.
Mine lasted 6 years of daily use.
Still, the M series laptops are so much better than offerings from competitors I am hesitant to even put them in the same product category.
The duality of Man
MacBooks of that period made compromises for useless gain in thinness. You can't with straight face tell that butterfly mechanism was a good tradeoff for .3 mm.
It's like thinking about how much time I lost using a 2010 10" Atom netbook for development as a poor student where I'd close down all apps to watch a youtube video, and "rails server" took five minutes to boot on hello world.
But having a shitty keyboard, losing the HDMI port, wasn't worth it.
The issue people had was from 2016-2019, the Macbook Pros sacrificed a lot of usability for thinness, when that should only happen for the Airs.
Why did we get all these things? It wasn't just thinness. It was to raise to Average Selling Price ("ASP"). Someone at Apple decided the ASP was too low.
Ultimately the Macbook Air came back and it's really the SKU the most people should buy.
I absolutely loved the one I used from 2017-2021. It was a maxed out 2017 model in gold. Some bozo director bought it for himself with his budget then quit a month later, so this thing no one really wanted ended up on the spares pile. I grabbed it to replace my 2012 13" MacBook Pro as my "going to town" computer, i.e. the one I'd take when I needed to step away from my desk and my desktop workstation. And whaddya know, the 7Y75 i7 benchmarked about the same as the Ivy Bridge i5 it was replacing.
The wedge shape is so undeniably more humanistic and comfortable than the current MacBook Air/Neo slab. 0.14" at its thinnest, rounded at the bottom to make it easier to pick up. An excellent screen. Great trackpad. Full size keyboard, and yes, I liked the butterfly keys! Key travel is dumb! I never had issues with it and I took it into network closets and steam tunnels and ate greasy lunches next to it and all kinds of dusty, dirty places, and never had a key failure. God, what a wonderful portable computer! It was like carrying an empty clipboard around, you'd barely notice it in a stack of papers or notebooks, but open the screen and bam, full-fat macOS!
Honestly it was the last Mac I think I've used that physically delighted me. I usually cringe when I hear executives talking about wanting to "delight" customers, but that shitty little slow, overpriced Macbook with one USB-C port, absolutely delightful. Like sure, Apple Silicon was amazing but in a different sort of way, in a "wow that V12 engine sure is powerful" and not "this entire car is amazing" way. The Retina MacBook was delightful even though my nerd brain knew that as a computer, looking at raw specs, was a complete dud (though mine had 16GB of RAM, nyah nyah, take that Macbook Neo!)
And now that the vision Apple had for that device actually came true?? That we live in a mostly mobile, USB-C world where my company's conference rooms all have AirPlay and most monitors have built-in USB-C input/hubs? That they could put an ultra cut down iPhone chip in it and even if it was only as fast as a 5 year old Macbook that would still make it as fast as an M1? Oh well, now we don't get one! You will have a brutalist cold slab of a Macbook Air or a pathetically locked down iPad appliance and be happy!
Perhaps it was a great product because of those flaws, those horrible compromises they had to make to get it that small. All I can hope is that there is some skunkworks project somewhere in Cupertino, maybe even unsanctioned, of hardware designers asking themselves "what would we have to figure out if we made it 0.25 inches thick?" or "Could we get a Macbook down to 1 pound?". I want a product whose development team were told "Make a Macbook. Priority 1. light, priority 2. thin, priority 3. there is no priority 3"
Joz, Ternus, if you're reading this, I would also pay huge sums of money for a modern 11-12" ultralight Macbook. I would write Apple a blank check for one, name your price.
I’ve just been buying expensive parts on eBay. I have two 16GB motherboards now and a few bottom cases and screens. Shoot me an email.
Same deal with the blank check. I carry a $7k MBP, I would have paid that for a much lower spec machine if it were stupid tiny.
That 2016-2018 Macbook Air had a 2010 dispaly ie 1440x900. That was ridiculous for the time, given that the Macbook Pro first got a retina display (2560x1600) in 2012. No there was no technical reason for excluding the MBA. It was a product decision all along.
I distinctly remember thinking in 2013-2014 "will they just update the screen already?" as it was kept me from buying a new one. I also remember thinking in 2015 when the 12" Macbook launched "oh the MBA is abandonware now". The Retina MBA launched in 2018, the 12" Macbook was discontinued in 2019 and 2020+ was the M series processor era. And here we are.
It wouldn't be HN if someone didn't dredge up a decade-old axe to grind.
Reputational damage always outlasts the defective products. There's nothing HN-specific or even nerd-specific about that phenomenon.
After Ives was fired/forced out/decided to leave to pursue his creative vision.
The guy litterally built modern apple from the ground up in equal with Jobs.
Thankfully he was fired and sanity prevailed which coincided with Apple Silicon line professors. The MacBook Pro that was immediate predecessor to M1 series was by far Apple’s worst hardware. It was bad on nearly every count.
How do you justify such a take?
The arrogance on hacker news is insane, or the self agrandizement and misunderstanding of how rare that is.
You have likely never done 1/1,000,000,000th of the scale or impact of this designer and then make flippant remarks that belay your ignorance of the matter.
I really would like to understand what your thought process is here. This is quite litterally like saying Michael Jordan was a pretty poor Basketball player and claiming Jerry Reinsdorf was somehow the real reason he succeeded.
In case Jony Ive or others like him, we simply do not know how many dozens or hundreds of very talented engineers and designers worked relentlessly under him so he can do beautiful presentations in British English.
Another person comes to my mind is Marissa Meyers. "Brilliant Executive" known for keeping Google Home page clean that's visited by billion people. But we all know how great she was when ended up at Yahoo.
Its all also well published and covered fact. I am genuinely shocked someone could have such a insistantly foolish take.
Yes, but how much of that was luck and how was extraordinary talent?
It's like saying "Donald Trump is really rich, ergo he must be a financial genius"... getting really rich isn't that hard if you're born into money and invest in New York real estate.
Now someone like Jobs who had fairly working class parents and founded a multi-billion dollar (now trillion dollar) company that radically changed the modern world, that, I would argue, is extraordinary talent.
While I don't personally have much an opinion on Ives's skill as a designer, I understand the GP's point of view - any "good but not great" designer could have done what he did, Ives was just lucky enough to win the lottery w.r.t. what company he worked for.
For a similar example, consider the case of Hollywood - you'll have plenty actors as talented as Brad Pitt (or whatever big name you'd like to choose) that don't end up staring in massive blockbusters, not because they lack talent, but because they weren't quite as lucky to get that first big break, which led to more recognition, more job offers, all of which compounded into making him a proper movie star. Obviously Pitt is a really good actor, but part of his success is likely due to luck as much as it is acting talent - he has tons of talent, but others might have equal talent and less luck, and therefore be less successful/have fewer people influenced by their work.
To use a software metaphor, consider the relative popularity of FreeBSD and Linux. Both are good OSes, but Linux got "luckier" because they didn't have to deal with a lawsuit, which meant it got more attention, more features, which led to a compounding "Matthew effect" where it now has a far larger market share than FreeBSD, despite them originally having roughly the same 'quality'.
Asside from your complete ignorance of the history at play, (Ive refounded Apple with Jobs) you seem to not understand what a 'mediocre' designer is capable of and how mind-bendinly hard it was to design the imac, ipad, iphone and apple watch
I genuinely can't believe you could be so wild to beleive such a thing. It becomes frankly stupid to the point of disrespectful of the work individuals put into their craft and the success they can find.
There is no person in the world outside of someone in this forum who would claim that somehow this was 'luck'.
HN has truly become one of the most toxically stupid places on the web.
Stupid and uninformed are different things. The constant stream of personal attacks and handwaving about abstract difficulty is not compelling.
Someone raised the idea of flagging new accounts. That would make it easier to simply ignore them.
Your take on crediting Ive with the success of Apple's product line would be exactly like crediting some designer at Nike with the success of their never ending line of sneakers.
If your theory of Ive's design genius being such a game changer was true, then why has Apple continued to flourish since he left 7 years ago? It seems pretty apparent that it's the brand/image established by Jobs that is successful, just as it's the Nike brand (bootstrapped by MJ & Nike Air) that propels Nike, not the magic of their designs.
Ive should have left shortly after the death of Steve. He was creatively spent at Apple.
He's not doing commoditised consumer design any more. He has enough money now, so he no longer needs to. The most consumer-oriented work recently has been an interior for the new Ferrari Luce EV.
I agree his post-Jobs years at Apple were somewhere between mediocre and hopeless (gradients...) and not many people seem to miss him.
Although to be fair, he wasn't responsible for Liquid Glass, which has set the bar for design failure at Apple to new depths.
But the iPod is still so nice. I wish I could have a phone with that form factor. Even if it just had VOIP. The big phones are often just too much.
Happy to have an unambitious reliable workhorse where the battery lasts two days.
I'd actually be happier if it was even less ambitious, and made the graphics bits less powerful. But that would likely be a bad business move.
Engineers tend to be selfish and self oriented to building whatever is easiest for them to ship. Theres a reason why they almost always are shifted away from heading products.
You must be working with shit engineers. Every product I've ever worked on, it's the engineers holding the line on quality while the side of the house that has to care about costs steadily cuts
I have worked at all top three firms, and never had engineers come close to being customer oriented.
I've worked at 2/3, and sure, there are shit product teams all over FAANG, but you can always decide to go work on one of the ones that does proper engineering
As long as they can go back to simplicity in the process. Apple has been shoving functionality into iOS for a long time now, but it's a haphazard mess. The settings app is a disaster of clutter, and searching for settings doesn't work half the time. It needs a complete rearchitecting before they start shoving more functionality into the phone.
Did you know that iPhones have tap, double tap, and triple tap (on the back of the phone) functionality that can be set to custom actions? I didn't until recently, its buried deep in the Accessibility options for...reasons? This could be promoted to a core feature, with a dedicated space in settings instead of buried.
I'm sure there's other useful functionality hidden behind the settings mess too.
After a year, the swipe up is still a nuisance. It often doesn't work, and I have to swipe up several times.
If that doesn't help, there are some settings you can try:
1. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > AssistiveTouch and turn on AssistiveTouch. Under Custom Actions, set Single-Tap to Home. Now you have a home button. You can move this button anywhere on your screen and adjust its "Idle Opacity" so it's less distracting when not in use.
2. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap and choose Double Tap or Triple Tap. Select Home from the list of actions. Now you can tap on the back side of your phone to go home.
There's also Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Touch Accommodations, but that's more about preventing accidental touches and swipes, so that would probably make the situation worse for you.
I don't remember the details, but I'm pretty sure Tony Fadell's startup was already in China building what would become the iPod.
Tim Cook should be remembered, not for moving production to China, but for restructuring Apple's production lines to be built-on-demand, while also shipping those from China. It wasn't always perfect, and I bet the other people in similar roles and positions would have taken the easy path.
Let's see if Aaron Sokrin can make this compelling.
As robotics is the future of manufacturing (Apple was all in on that in the early days of manufacturing the Mac in Fremont), it seems that it would have been worth while to try to make manufacturing affordable in the states via robotics.
Considering that Apple spent ~ $10B on the EV project and ~ $30B on Vision Pro, and meanwhile sits on a mountain of cash, I find their disinterest in investing in domestic production less than inspiring.
I think Liquid Glass is an abomination and usability nightmare, but they're doubling down on it now, so that's that I guess.
Nahh, they're backing off liquid glass as fast as they can without just rolling back to macOS 15... Tons of people inside apple hate it, and have been very critical of the design leadership. Alan Dye was the design king behind liquid glass, and he was pushed out (or just left, stories vary). His replacement, Stephen Lemay, is widely praised by the folks who hate liquid glass.
iOS 27 and macOS 27 in June will probably have Liquid glass turned back down to 6 or 7, and will at least remove some of the most glaring usability issues.
Scaling up in China is probably why many countries in the world can get the iPhone at launch these days.
I still remember the early iPhone days where the iPhone would launch first in a few major markets, and there would be massive queues outside Apple Stores by people from neighbouring countries hoping to buy and resell in their own countries for a huge profit. (This still happens every iPhone launch, but I think the scale is much less rampant.)
1. The mid-to-late 2010s Cult of Thinness as the last gasp of Johnny Ive was terrible for the Macbook range. Butterly keyboard, 12" Macbook, no Macbook Air, Touch bar... ugh. I personally believe Johnny Ive got gently shown the door over all that so was corrected;
2. The Apple Watch didn't know what it was at launch. Remember the $10,000 Apple Watch Edition that was like gold? Part of the problem here was a mis-hire, Angela Ahrendts in charge of Apple retail. So the Apple Watch was originally launched as a luxury product and that just never made sense for an electronic product. This isn't a Rolex. It quickly pivoted to something way more compelling: health and fitness. So this too was corrected; and
3. Ai. This is Tim Apple's big fumble IMHO. Remember how well-regarded Siri was a decade ago? AFAICT Siri has pretty much stagnated ever since. I mean there are marginal improvements but this tech has massively improved elsewhere. One of Steve Jobs's most underrated moves was the 2008 purchase of PA Semi. This was pretty directly responsible for the competitive advantage of iPhone chips and ultimately the M-series in Macs now ever since Apple ditched Intel. But Apple is nowhere on the AI front. And that's a failure.
Its been trash since day 1.
Siri is STILL utter garbage. It's like a POC so many times. Its accent recognition for me is horrible, and it feels like so many of its interaction types are hardcoded, like "Do X at this time" "Sure". "Do Y (very similar thing) at this time" "I can't do that".
And while I get (but don't necessarily always agree with) per-app isolation, it leads to absolutely comical things. My fiance has Siri turned off. Uses CarPlay. Can text me with voice commands. But she can be navigating somewhere, and say "Hey, find me the nearest Starbucks" and Siri will say, with a straight face, while the phone is navigating her somewhere, "I'm sorry, I don't know where you are".
Always was. If Apple had an easy trick to make it any good or useful, they would have already. LLMs aren't that, so Siri remains what it is.
Siri is useless, so is Alexa and Hey Google or whatever they are calling that. LLMs will change that but cost has to come down to make that feasible. On-device AI would be the gold standard there, I hope that’s not a pipe dream. Apple seems to be positioned niceley for that outcome, if it comes to pass.
You can wait until improving hardware eventually solves the local LLM problem but imho that’s too passive.
What if someone cracks the problem of splitting LLM inference effectively between local device and server? Think about it. ChatGPT can do calculus. Is that useful to most people? No. Can you currently effectively modularize an LLM and load knowledge on demand? No.
I’m fairly bearish on the use cases for current AI. The biggest is actually just firing people and suppressing labor costs.
But a personas assistant, at least in theory, is something people want, even if it’s just to effectively obey voice commands. If Apple loses to Google here it’s going to be bad for Apple. I think they have to do more than they’re seemingly doing.
Apple seems to be moving towards running AI on-device while the other big tech companies want to run inference on their data centers and sell AI as a service. Once those companies start enshittifying and jacking up costs, I wouldn't be surprised if people move towards preferring local AI. If that happens, Apple will be well-positioned.
Ive was the one behind the 15k watches. He wanted the in store experience to be like a jewelry store. They also brought in his friend that had been doing hi end watches and bands to help with the watch design. Beonce got an 18kt gold link band along with her watch. You can only imagine Ive’s glee at the watches being on the cover of Vogue.
…
3. Agreed that Siri stagnated, was already surpassed by Alexa a decade ago, and even moreso by LLMs today. However, some advantages of Apple Silicon have panned out for AI—e.g., using unified memory to run ML models, instead of requiring dedicated VRAM for a separate GPU.
Maybe an Alphabet "other bets" type setup?
Or simply just taking more chances on completely new product lines that may or may not pay off in 5-10 years (like VisionPro). I mean when was the last big new bet previous to VisionPro? Wearables, with the Apple Watch in 2015 is probably it, a decade prior. (AirPods are huge but feel more evolutionary from their wired EarPods + Beats roll-up)
They could & should make new segment bets with genuinely new product lines more than once a decade. They have the capacity.
Stated preferences vs revealed preferences.
Polling / focus groups vs sales.
You never really know what works until it works.
Apple VisionPro may turn out to be an iPod HiFi, iTunes Ping, eMate, Pippin, Newton, Macintosh Portable, Lisa.. etc.
Or it may turn out in 5-10 years to be a contributor like AppleTV, Watches, etc.
I don't even care which it turns out to be, I want to see them taking bets like this every year or two, not once per decade.
The fact that the list of "Failed Apple Products" returns a lot more stuff from 80s/90s/00s and very little from 10s/20s tells you how little they make bets anymore.
Most of the post-2010 "failures" are accessories/parts/iterations rather than completely new product categories.
To get that 90s, early 2000's innovation, Apple needs to somehow think like a small company (this is near impossible) or actually be multiple smaller companies.
If the new CEO is smart, he could start in-house startups with Apple funding and infrastructure.
Creating some sort of internal incubator that encourages experimentation enough to innovate but with enough accountability to not be a purely academic R&D lab is difficult I'm sure.
This is why I mentioned elsewhere in thread - Maybe an Alphabet "other bets" type setup?
Not sure if people with closer experience has an opinion on if that model actually works our not. I suppose we have gotten some real world output from it right?
They could even just offer me a dock or a mount as an accessory in most cases and it'd probably juice iPad sales, but they don't even do that. I'm surprised they haven't made more inroads into being a more serious Nest competitor because Apple could do it with relative ease.
You make a good point re: Nest. I am kind of a doomer on home automation market in that I have been an early adopter and it's been around 15 years, but most people just don't care about the space.
The home automation stuff people are interested in and Apple could attack is the doorbell/camera/alarm systems because what is out there is still genuinely a minefield of awful products. An Apple it-just-works premium offering would sell. And they have the physical store footprint to demo them.
Anyway, feels like Apple could throw some weight into this market, with Apple-branded devices, and "win" the market. At least for households that are already heavily invested in iDevices. Right now, I have to poke around and find a smattering of off-brand stuff and only about half of it is natively HomeKit, so I have to run HomeAssistant with a HomeKit bridge, etc.
There's also an argument the sales are limited. Instead of selling $1.5k worth of phone/tablet/headphone/watch per person every 3 years.. you sell maybe $$1k of home devices into a home that don't replace for 10 years. So $100/year per household vs $1500/year (3 person household).
I have had since the early days of IoT/homekit, various security cameras, doorbell, HomePod, thermostats, lights, switches, all that stuff. Honestly setting it up and maintaining it is more of a chore than an excitement. I upgrade when something breaks, begrudgingly. I do not breathlessly follow new releases ready to pre-order the new iteration. No one in the house really uses it except me, unless I happen to get up late / go to bed early and the lights need to be told to turn on/off.
In some ways it's not even that new technology wise. My dad had various light control panel via X10 and similar protocols going back to the early 90s if not sooner. Similarly was a sort of set-it-and-forget-it situation
The value of IoT that has been unlocked is, at best, minimal convenience. It's not unlike the metaverse: Large investment has been made, but there's no killer apps. I cannot even begin to imagine anything I'd consider high value all that home automation could do for me. The best case is like power windows in cars: Better than having to turn the handle like back in the days, and nowadays cheap enough to have 100% of the market, but, at best, a commodity, as nobody cares about which power window mechanism is being used.
Given how low the ceiling is, and how annoying an IoT's ecosystem's technical problems are, Apple shouldn't touch the market with a ten foot pole.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/hey-alexa-why-costing-amazon-...
I can’t find a publicly attributable source now.
I'm not an Apple fan beyond the Apple II era. But Apple has a way of taking early adopter markets and breaking into mainstream. x10 is from 1975, so there were probably people running home automation on Apple IIs, but...
The iPod was kind of early for portable mp3 players, but it wasn't the first. It made portable mp3 players mainstream.
The iPad wasn't the first tablet; Microsoft had been kicking around tablets that didn't sell for ages. But it's the only tablet with mainstream adoption.
Apple didn't invent HiDPI screens, but they brought them back to the mainstream.
Apple does have HomeKit to address home automation, but something more concrete could be nice.
Mostly because it's fragmented and Apple was nowhere to be found with their initially quite good and promising but then completely abandoned HomeKit.
In 2026 I still can't have my always-on supercomputer in the form of AppleTV to do anything with any of the devices at home. And Home app is extremely stupid, extremely limited, and requires a PhD in rocket science to figure out how to do anything with it (espceially since they just bolted on Shortcuts totally on the side).
Mounts, cases, smart locks, thermostats, bulbs…where is the “iPhone moment” for this sector? It’s all small beans now. Why would Apple want to compete here?
Personally I think any big moves in this area would be predicated on a next-level Siri companion. Stop futzing around with scenes, buttons, switches and pairing devices and just tell your house how it should work.
Is Apple willing to trade-off some of the steady reliability of their earnings stream for product lines that may be real contributors 5-10+ years out is the question? I think under Cook the answer to that was no.
I think staying on this path will eventually lead diminishing returns and endanger them long term.
Nobody is going to hand control of their home to a system that was the dumbest smart assistant 14 years ago and is still behind everyone else.
It’s amazing to me that Apple announced vaporware that they didn’t know how to build yet. Nobody did, but Apple usually bides their time making it work before the reveal.
Alfred North Whitehead famously noted that "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."
What has household automation really given us so far? Dimmable lights? Whatever. If I cared, I'd already have rheostats on all my light switches. Thermostat? My digital thermostat is already good enough.
The thing that would sell like crazy is a robot valet.
In other words, the ability to navigate carelessly through your home, dropping items when you are no longer interested in them and have them "magically" return to their proper homes.
Such a thing would need to be able to roam around your home and pick things up and store them, and then retrieve them when appropriate (when asked or based on schedules and other automations). Maybe even do a little light dusting.
If you can make it take out the trash, fold laundry, and empty the dishwasher, you're looking at a ridiculously popular system. Even if it costs thousands of dollars.
Thing is, the tech isn't really ready to give us a household robot that can pick your jacket up off the couch and put it away. When we can do that, it will be huge.
Once we are there, we've grown so used to the idea of an adversarial relationship with the businesses that provide our services, that we are being spied on and our data sold, would we even trust the systems that would be needed to enable such products?
How is it better than either? How is it doing as a revenue making product?
As a chatbot it's unusable due to its broken web interface.
Yes, I get it's a marrying of DeepMind and Google Brain teams or whatever. Still think it sounds duplicitous.
Perhaps the sticking point was where to make it.
Another entirely missing Apple product line: rackmount servers, with all the proper stuff like ILO management.
There are no successful car makers that outsource production, and even foreign car makers generally make cars onshore in US for tariff/political/regulatory reasons.
As for why they did it: Apple makes computers. If what you’re interacting with benefits from being a general purpose computer (under the covers or otherwise) Apple thinks they can deliver a superior experience and the margins that come with it.
I think they realized that the only computer in the car they cared about was the smartphone.
there's quite a bit loaded in your term of "computer" that doesn't really work. if a watch or headphones can eventually be called a computer, then a software-based car running on a battery can certainly fit under that definition.
If self-driving had worked, and a fully vertically integrated tech stack could have controlled your “mobile experience” end-to-end, maybe a different story.
“Siri, take me to pick up Grandma from her flight. Let me know when she lands and send her an iMessage when we’re five minutes away.”
Outside of the premium brand/build quality, I think Tesla was actually a successful proof of concept of what they could have done or could do. Computer/software-powered, battery-charged, integrated hardware/software, principled product tradeoffs, new retail model, advances in charging technology. Big parallels to the first iPhone. You even heard the same complaints from consumers when the first iphone came out ("I want my buttons/physical controls back", "The battery/range dies too quickly"). Apple may not want to be in the car business, but I think Tesla showed that cars could just be computers now
But I think Tesla shows the limits of Apple’s approach in the car market: Imagine a Model S that is maybe 50% better across design, materials, features, UX. That’s still not a “leapfrog” product the way the iPhone was years ahead of the smartphone competition when it was launched. It couldn’t justify also being 50% more expensive.
Recalls, warranty items, maintenance, accident repairs, etc.
Hyundai still can't sort out a decent experience for their in-house luxury brand Genesis all these years later.
They tried. But the irony is MS is more deeply ingrained. I worked a short stint in a shop that no joke ran Windows server to manage a whole floor of Macs using Active Directory. The only other Windows PC was a machine hooked to a large format printer. I spoke to the admin (dyed in the wool Apple user) who stated that as much as he loves MacOS, it can not match the features offered by Active Directory like AD controller replication.
Sure, but that's a choice by Apple to not even attempt to offer such features, or integration with AD, or a comparable feature stack. That all comes under my "proper management features" handwave.
Even managing a few Mac Minis for CI is a massive pain. There's popups that can only be resolved by logging in on the desktop directly, which is completely unsuitable for proper "server" use.
They could do a lot of things that would make money. The hard part is figure out which ones to say no to.
The car seemed to be solving the "what if we could make a $100k car"?
At some point of wealth people become so disconnected from normal everyday life of normal people that I suspect they lose the ability to identify problems & solutions that 200M consumers have/need.
I thought it was funny/telling that Ive's first product after leaving Apple was a limited edition collaboration project on a.. battery powered LED lamp for sailboats starting at $5k. He said it was inspired by the need for a durable lamp for his sailboat.
Not exactly bicycle for the brain / 1000 albums in your pocket / instant access to the world information kind of vibes.
Yes, Apple has gone down market these days, but their history is really premium.
Or they start premium and then move down market like they did when they released the Macintosh ($2500 then or $8000 today).
And the Mac didn’t do much more than the Lisa and had no software. (The LaserWriter didn’t come for another year, and with it a use case of desktop publishing).
The iPhone came out around $800 (taking into account the contract with ATT) when most phones were sub 100.
If we had the innovative Apple of yore it would push out crazy new and very expensive products and iterate while bring the price down or forcing competitors to compete on tech and bring their prices up.
Apple today is just too risk adverse.
Vision Pro sells for >3 grand. Their strategy still seems consistent with exactly what you describe.
But one product. I don't know man, I think they became chicken of anything grand. It is not like it was a $35000 product.
If the Vision Pro was the Lisa, where is the Vision (or Mac version)?
They should have bought Lucid and poured their car tech into that.
They should have a MacPro with four to eight MacStudio blades inside.
Almost all their sales are $800-$4000 items. Where is the $35000 equivalent of what they used to do like when they released the Lisa? Too chickenshit these days. Good reason to be, of course. It is just not in their DNA anymore.
> Except the iteration on it.
It’s only 2 years old and they’ve released version 2. I’m not sure the Vision Pro has enough market to keep making it, but it was a big new bet.
> And people we aghast at the cost.
Didn’t you say they should be releasing crazy expensive stuff?
> If the Vision Pro was the Lisa, where is the Vision (or Mac version)?
This isn’t really what happened with Lisa and Mac. Mac wasn’t the cheap Lisa. It was a totally different product addressing a different market and initially incompatible. The fact that Mac looked a lot like Lisa was driven by the fact that Jobs was yanked off the Lisa project by the board so he hijacked the Mac project and made it a similar looking system. This was internal politics, not a consistent strategy.
> They should have bought Lucid and poured their car tech into that.
Why? So they could be burning billions in capital on trying to break into a highly competitive, low margin market? This isn’t really Apple’s DNA.
> They should have a MacPro with four to eight MacStudio blades inside.
Again, why? What’s the market for this? This seems like a low value market segment. They don’t even make servers anymore because the market wasn’t profitable.
> Where is the $35000 equivalent of what they used to do like when they released the Lisa?
Lisa was a product of a different time. Computers cost way more in general. (The Macintosh was nearly $8k in today’s dollars.) It was also not commercially successful.
In the current era, it's probably cheaper to develop a car then to build out sufficient AI datacenters - which is also a negative ROI segment today for AI companies.
You're almost certainly right, and this is a good way to show just how remarkably big the AI buildout is.
https://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmac-studio/overview.h...
Just wish they'd sell those to end users, like the Xserves (which had ILO/IMPI in the end).
They're poised to consume the market for the "I want AI, but I don't want to sell my soul" demographic that is ever growing. Sure, the AI gluttony continues, and the vibes tell me people are only more and more willing to shovel their lives into the maw, but my thesis is people only value fire insurance after they've bought the house.
Put my down as bullish. Apple hardware is currently the worst it'll ever be, and gemma4 and qwen3.6 are the least intelligence-dense they'll ever be. Buy up taalas or spin up your own hardware. I'm confident Ive only scratched the surface of Ternus' 5-year plan.
but what could they possibly build that hasn't been done on iphone and ipad yet? these devices seem finished to me. all the latest features on these devices are getting increasingly useless, to be honest.
are you imaging them creating whole new devices?
I am doing the only thing I can: to vote with my wallet.
My current phone is a Sony Xperia and it has the headphone jack. I am listening to Hi-Fi music from Tidal right now, using the jack, and wired Crinacle earbuds.
Maybe the next innovation will be a software/service we haven't contemplated.
There was already a change in software with Alan Dye's departure and Stephen Lemay taking over:
* https://www.macrumors.com/2025/12/04/john-gruber-on-alan-dye...
AIUI, lots of folks internal to Apple were not happy with Dye, and are happy with Lemay. Some consider it a failing of the executive that Dye wasn't pushed out sooner (rather than choosing to jump himself).
- apple public cloud
Lets go!
The biggest hurdle in the health hardware game is regulatory. If they can make a noninvasive blood sugar monitor and get it approved they will both print money and help a ton of people.