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Apple lacks strategic vision

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Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#92
post #14

I'm convinced that Tim Cook's biggest mistake was not creating an EV. Just look at how Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi and BYD have moved into the EV space and have created amazing experiences for their customers. CarPlay paired with American cars is simply few generations behind from what the Chinese companies have done. Yet Apple was early enough and had an EV team but Cook killed it. Even if the 1st gen was crap…

An Apple ev would have cost 100k, and the 50kwh battery upgrade would have cost 20k extra.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of these products could be expected from any well run company. They are both very polished versions of something that already existed. The direction to optimize in was already clear. No one wants to compare Apple to a generic well run company, they want to compare Apple to itself a decade or two ago. Others have said that if Jobs were still alive, AR would be ubiquitous by now, and everyone would have a stylish…

I think the Apple Silicon transition is far from something that could be expected from 'any' company. Microsoft already tried something similar with ARM Surface machines and the whole attempt was an absolute failure. > I think that is exactly right. I think that's entirely wrong. The hardware just isn't there yet! The AVP is the closest you can get to real "AR glasses" at the moment (as distinct from the Xreal 'non-c…

Developers working for Apple platforms are used to their software being broken by Apple every once in a while, so they need to update it to match the latest OS’s expectations. In the Windows world, 30-year-old Win32 apps can still run on Windows 11, as long as they don’t use any egregious hacks. And if they stop working on an Arm PC, Microsoft will be to blame.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#94
post #20

I think Apple’s strategic vision bas been pretty great. What they’re lacking is quality control. They need a hard-ass that will scream at them when they try to release stuff like liquid glass. It’s been too long since Jobs death and they’ve gotten comfortable pushing out poor quality features.

This is a funny comment. I think quality control should be mostly about undisputable bugs and hardware errors. But something like liquid glass is HIGHLY subjective. Lots of people love it. Others hate it. It has nothing to do with quality. Maybe you mean taste. But that is also super subjective and nobody gets it right for everyone.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#95

It seems like the company has stagnated and Cook seems to consistently makes questionable decisions - fighting the app store rulings, doubling down on vision pro, focusing on OS redesigns instead of generative AI. Maybe they've just calcified - the youngest person on their board is 63. At the end of the day they haven't had a credible threat in over a decade.

"focusing on OS redesigns instead of generative AI"

Apple is like 150.000+ employees. What makes you think they have to choose between OS redesigns and AI. There is probably more than enough talent there to do all the things.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#96
post #25

Apple has a great chance of being the personal AI machines. If they managed to add inference chip that competes with Groq and similar hardware, they would make much bigger wins comparing to main their own models. Imagine being able to run 32B reasoning models with hundreds of tokens per second on your local laptop.

I'm sure that is the future. But we're still pretty far away from being able to put a 32B model in memory right? The whole industry is on that trajectory. Just give it another decade and the standard for base memory will likely be 64GB or more.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#97
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of these products could be expected from any well run company. They are both very polished versions of something that already existed. The direction to optimize in was already clear. No one wants to compare Apple to a generic well run company, they want to compare Apple to itself a decade or two ago. Others have said that if Jobs were still alive, AR would be ubiquitous by now, and everyone would have a stylish…

isn't the VR Scuba mask dead now? I think Apple is hitting a wall that most tech companies are hitting. New gadgets aren't really improving our lives. We have the internet on our phones, Now the internet is a wasteland. Probably the biggest cultural innovation of the last 5 years has been podcasts and that's just gussied up radio.

Podcasts were arguably mainstream back in 2014 with Serial.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#98

I don’t see a compelling reason for Apple to jump into the AI game. The MacBook Pro M4 is a dream to work with, and it works great with Claude Code. Creating quality products is a niche market, but that strategy still has merit.

the number one reason is that Siri is an embarrassment. And that has become so much clearer now with ChatGPT and Claude next to it. Everyone is simply thinking: why can't we have that. Why do we have to talk to a low quality agent that can't answer basic questions while i can also walk around with my airpods in having a full conversation with ChatGPT.

I understand it is not that easy. But Apple has been neglecting Siri, or maybe failed to improve it, for so many years. And now the perception is that there is just no excuse anymore.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#99

There are a few hiccups, but everyone'e acting like Apple Silicon wasn't one of the most wildly successful overnight improvements in laptops in the last 50 years and that airpods aren't so popular that even Android phone users buy them.

Both of these products could be expected from any well run company. They are both very polished versions of something that already existed. The direction to optimize in was already clear. No one wants to compare Apple to a generic well run company, they want to compare Apple to itself a decade or two ago. Others have said that if Jobs were still alive, AR would be ubiquitous by now, and everyone would have a stylish…

AR has a lot of limitations, that's what they were trying to sidestep. To be able to take a frame of the environment, composite the virtual frame and the real one in unison with various blending ops at your disposal. And finally, present the user with a properly composited image that works anywhere.

Now, if you use multiple lenses, with one masking in grayscale the real frame positioned just before the lens in which you project the virtual frame, you can do some limited blending ops. But it's quite difficult to deal with parallax if the lenses aren't glued together, or even then with refraction.

Apple took a very conservative approach. And made it to market. Now look at the competition. Sure, they have concepts with good compositing, but the ones in the market right now aren't able to produce the same imagery that Apple Vision is capable of.

Maybe I'm wrong, haven't looked at the market in some months, but I always thought of the Apple Vision as a very pragmatic design trying to circumvent AR limitations by being a VR headset.

Re: Apple lacks strategic vision

#100
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even Jobs wasn’t perfect. NeXT machines were technically amazing and also beautiful but they never really found many customers. He also thought the Segway would transform society but it ended up being sort of a joke and best known for being used by fat mall cops.

NeXT software though became the base of OS X. BTW Mac Pros did not find many customers either. I bet Silicon Graphics did not sell very many boxes; it was important who bought these boxes.

Yes but the software wasn’t selling until it was forced upon the Apple customer base. You could buy NeXTSTEP for an Intel PC in the 1990s but nobody did.
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