Since there was talk about Apple Watch, there also was a lack of wow effect people had expected from it. Considering Apple’s human power, there is something going that takes time. Might be a car, might be something else. Smartphones have plateaued, so they’ve been working on something greater long before growth had slowed down. Time will show.
Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming
121–130 of 269 posts
Re: Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming
#122Why not financial services?
There's a handful of small players testing the banking regulations now (like Mondo) to get authorised as basically "iPhone banks" - modern, mobile, without the legacy and technical debt.
With Apple Pay (and their $billion reserves) Apple could conceivably sweep in and buy up these newly regulated challenger-banks and buy their way into FS overnight.
Re: Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming
#123I think I would be more excited if Apple were researching ways to remove the cell phone completely, at least in a physical sense. Think about it, with the rise of things like AR/VR for output and Viv for input, what need do we have of a handheld device? Everybody is concentrating on the next iPhone, but what if it is a set of contact lenses and headphones? I think that would truly blow people's socks off. Sure, Apple…
Google glass seemed to be the first step in that direction, but it hasn't proven so popular.
Apple will do it with lapel pins.
(Sorry, Jony.)
Re: Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming
#124It's a car and it's not a "pivot". The Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and Watch are all about apply the same philosophy to new product categories and then tightly integrating them. At the core of it is fundamentally rethinking the interface between user and machine. With cars it makes perfect sense as long as you do one thing first: throw out everything you've read about fully autonomous cars being right around th…
First, Apple's historic design advantage is probably gone - since the competition has greatly improved. For example, the watch didn't offer something significantly different(10x) than other smartwatches. But i can see your second point being true, maybe full-autonomy will take a long time. So even if Apple will design a great interface, it would probably be copied by competitors fast enough, unless there's some big b…
>So let's go wild - what if Apple succeeds in making siri a true AI, with a great personality
With human rights?
Re: Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google Maps' advantage has a lot more to do with data than algorithms. Google Now is probably a better example, though I've never used it myself.
"Google Maps' advantage has a lot more to do with data than algorithms." Given literally everyone else collected the data well before google, and maps was still better, this seems wrong. Google developed better ways to get the data and automate it, not just got better data. For years, literally everyone else had better data.
Apple is not even trying, or is leaving their Maps team terribly under resourced. I've been running some experiments submitting the same edits to Google, Yelp & Apple simultaneously (since Apple uses Yelp data), and timing how long each takes to update. The last time I publicly recorded my results:
Google Maps: 40 minutes
Yelp: 3 days 20 hours
Apple Maps: 13 days
https://twitter.com/syneryder/statuses/668473075365642240
I know Apple's policy is to screen edits carefully to ensure accuracy & avoid vandalism, but it's actually making their maps more inaccurate, because it takes longer for errors to be fixed. Google has also started incentivising frequent editors with rewards (like free 1TB Google Drive subscriptions), which helps encourage people to make the corrections in the first place.
Re: Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming
#126Apple was once considered extremely innovative despite its secrecy because it regularly shipped ground-breaking new products like OS X, its breathtakingly high-design computers in the late 90s and early 2000s, the iPod, and of course the iPhone.
Apple hasn't shipped a successful new product line since Steve Jobs' death, and sales of its last successful major product — the iPhone — now seem to be slowing. Their cloud efforts are famously flailing, and their software is increasingly stale: who here has a folder full of unused Apple apps, with better third-party replacements on their home screen or dock? Almost everyone with an Apple device.
I sit here writing this on a Macbook, unironically. Their hardware manufacturing capability is best in class, and they've managed to hone their existing products' hardware increasingly close to perfection. But innovative? You can't be innovative just by spending money on R&D. You have to ship new products. And for now, Apple seems like it can't.
Re: Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
...yes. Yes I am. Egg on face. The point still stands though, it's such a shame seeing the minimisation of ports on all systems these days. I can understand using standard ports (usb-c) for peripherals, but essentials such as Ethernet, display and several USB ports (whichever format) should remain built in.
There's a simpler reason for the lack of an Ethernet port. Compare the size of an Ethernet port to a USB port on the Mac Pro and then look at the side of your MacBook Pro. The Ethernet port would not even fit.
I bought a 2012 MacBook Pro (which Apple still sells in stores) instead of a 2015 model partly because it still has an Ethernet port. Apple could definitely make laptops with Ethernet, they're just choosing not to in their desire for ever thinner machines.
I also feel the keyboard and trackpad quality has deteriorated on the thinner devices. I much prefer the snap of the click on the 2012 MacBook Pro trackpad to the Force Touch simulated click.
Re: Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming
#128Why not financial services? There's a handful of small players testing the banking regulations now (like Mondo) to get authorised as basically "iPhone banks" - modern, mobile, without the legacy and technical debt. With Apple Pay (and their $billion reserves) Apple could conceivably sweep in and buy up these newly regulated challenger-banks and buy their way into FS overnight.
Thanks to all those banks that have seeded Apple Pay with more customers than they could possibly have hoped for.
I don't know if Apple are thinking along these lines, but I do know that it's a great idea either way.
Re: Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming
#129Apple was once considered extremely innovative despite its secrecy because it regularly shipped ground-breaking new products like OS X, its breathtakingly high-design computers in the late 90s and early 2000s, the iPod, and of course the iPhone. Apple hasn't shipped a successful new product line since Steve Jobs' death, and sales of its last successful major product — the iPhone — now seem to be slowing. Their cloud…
> Apple hasn't shipped a successful new product line since Steve Jobs' death
I disagree.
The Apple Watch is only "unsuccessful" using a yardstick calibrated to the scale of existing Apple product lines -- in its first year it appears to have achieved sales revenue on the same order as Rolex ($4.7Bn, per Forbes).
(Apple's secretiveness makes it hard to tell how many Watches they've sold, but the low estimates are in the millions, and the high end estimate -- 12 million shipped through 2015, per Canalys -- would put them in the same league as the market leading luxury watch manufacturer, if not ahead.)
If any other company had released a product that replaced the century-old industry-wide #1 luxury brand within a single year it would be seen as truly disruptive and a major breakthrough. But the wristwatch industry is small by Apple standards, and the nascent smartwatch market is still embryonic compared to smartphones, so the scale of sales doesn't match onlookers' inflated expectations of an Apple product.
(As for Project Titan, I expect a bit more than just an electric car, given that scale of investment. Possibly an attempt at redefining how we do intraurban and suburban personal transport, the Apple way. But they'll have an uphill struggle to supplant the automobile with something better, because of all the built infrastructure and regulatory constraints, so at least at first it'll look like "just an electric car".)
Re: Apple R&D Reveals a Pivot Is Coming
#130According to this chart, Apple spent $6B in 2014 and is projected to spend just over $10B in 2016. For comparison, in 2014 Volkswagen spent $13.5B, Samsung spent $13.4B, and Microsoft spent $10.4B. [1] Apple has, historically, not been a big spender when it comes to research, tending to favor short-term, tightly focused research over long-term, curiosity driven research. Over the last few years their research budget…
You are comparing across industries. Apple is a mix of software and manufacturing. As is Samsung. VW is a car company. Further, a better metric is to look at % of revenue spent on R&D.