I know being late to the game and doing the tech "right" in terms of design and usability is kinda Apple's thing, but lately it seems like they have been only picking areas that weren't successful for a reason, like insurmountable technical difficulties or lack of customer interest, and no amount of Apple's design or marketing magic can fix that. See – self driving, AR/VR, smart speakers, folding phones, now home robotics. I know for a fact that they have been hiring a bunch of engineers from Google's Everyday Robots division (which shut down last year), but I really can't see why the same people will be successful under a new corporate overlord.
Apple explores home robotics as potential 'next big thing'
21–30 of 162 posts
Re: Apple explores home robotics as potential 'next big thing'
#22[deleted]
Re: Apple explores home robotics as potential 'next big thing'
#23"Smart home" has really fallen flat across the board, from smart speakers to the Roomba. It would be great if Apple changed that, but I'm not optimistic. I just don't think people really want smart home devices all that much.
I have the feeling that basically all current smart home products are either a disappointment in their limitations or useful but really time consuming.
The only smart appliances I got are Philips hue lights which are nice but well, after the initial discovery, I use them as classical light bulbs 99% of the time. I’ve found zero useful automation (not saying they don’t exists) and I can’t see why I would control lighting from my phone (at least not enough to justify spending hundreds into smart bulbs and smart switches).
Ultimately, I’m not against smart home but since each home is unique, by definition, those objects are only useful if the user is willing to invest enough time to tailor the configuration to be useful in his own unique house.
Oh I thought about ranting about my experience with Sonos speakers which are really nice speakers with great audio quality for the money and size and everything you’d want except the "smart" part you are forced to use with their terrible (and closed) software.
Re: Apple explores home robotics as potential 'next big thing'
#24I want something that cleans my bathroom and toilet. I will buy it for my business and will pay 20-30k/year. Also, something to Clean my dishes (Load in the dishwasher, turn it on, and put it away). Doing my laundry - load, wash and fold. Mow the lawn.
Automated lawn mowing is relatively mature at this point and works well, assuming you have a relatively flat lawn.
A one time purchase price of 20k would be acceptable. $20-30k per year is ridiculous. For that price you can hire a person to come and clean your toilet for 5 hours a day, every single day.
Re: Apple explores home robotics as potential 'next big thing'
#25I want something that cleans my bathroom and toilet. I will buy it for my business and will pay 20-30k/year. Also, something to Clean my dishes (Load in the dishwasher, turn it on, and put it away). Doing my laundry - load, wash and fold. Mow the lawn.
Pretty sure you can get a domestic service to pop by at much lower than that. Biologics are still king.
Re: Apple explores home robotics as potential 'next big thing'
#26"Smart home" has really fallen flat across the board, from smart speakers to the Roomba. It would be great if Apple changed that, but I'm not optimistic. I just don't think people really want smart home devices all that much.
I really do want smart home devices! My biggest issue so far has been stability and interoperability issues between each vendor and system. Those things have gotten better, but are still a headache. Apple is in a pretty good position to solve those pain points (at the cost of buying new devices (Apple brand or Apple Certified maybe?). Or maybe I need to dive deeper into HomeAssistant...
> Or maybe I need to dive deeper into HomeAssistant...
This is the answer.
HomeAssistant is fantastic and has unified everything of mine into a single platform. Control mostly happens through Google and Apple/Homekit devices (other than hardware switches), and everything works pretty seamlessly.
Re: Apple explores home robotics as potential 'next big thing'
#27There are a bunch of things in a house that are time consuming that would benefit from the help of robots. In fact it’s all the things that rich people can afford to hire someone to do:
- cooking
- cleaning
- taking care of kids
You can be sure that a ton of people are working on those.
Re: Apple explores home robotics as potential 'next big thing'
#28I want something that cleans my bathroom and toilet. I will buy it for my business and will pay 20-30k/year. Also, something to Clean my dishes (Load in the dishwasher, turn it on, and put it away). Doing my laundry - load, wash and fold. Mow the lawn.
I would pay like $5000 for a laundry folding robot. I just want a big washing-machine sized box where I dump my laundry at the top and slowly everything gets folded. That's 1 hour / week freed up.
Re: Apple explores home robotics as potential 'next big thing'
#29I want something that cleans my bathroom and toilet. I will buy it for my business and will pay 20-30k/year. Also, something to Clean my dishes (Load in the dishwasher, turn it on, and put it away). Doing my laundry - load, wash and fold. Mow the lawn.
Automated lawn mowing is relatively mature at this point and works well, assuming you have a relatively flat lawn. A one time purchase price of 20k would be acceptable. $20-30k per year is ridiculous. For that price you can hire a person to come and clean your toilet for 5 hours a day, every single day.
So... I have a gardener. He works two days a week doing all kinds of stuff.
The mowing itself (and trimming) takes 5% of his time, or even less.
Funny how people enjoy automating the part that you easily could do yourself without a massive time impact.
Re: Apple explores home robotics as potential 'next big thing'
#30I know being late to the game and doing the tech "right" in terms of design and usability is kinda Apple's thing, but lately it seems like they have been only picking areas that weren't successful for a reason, like insurmountable technical difficulties or lack of customer interest, and no amount of Apple's design or marketing magic can fix that. See – self driving, AR/VR, smart speakers, folding phones, now home rob…
that failure is much more a leadership issue than a talent issue. Google was founded by PhD students and it shows. (I am one.) It's like a giant lab where things get prototyped and innovations are pushed, but where product ends up sidelined by bloated admin (how many levels are there and why does it feel like an MMORPG i.e World of Warcraft) and lack of clear capitalist vision (I'm actually anti-capitalist but even I can admit to this LOL). Honestly, it sounds exactly like a university. I used to think Google was slated to be the king of AI back when I starting out because they had ALL the talent (even OpenAI is its offshoot if you consider early employees and Ilya himself). I feel like it was so lateral that it was a loose federation of small tribes of smart people that live under the same banner, but not a tight organization where each team had its purpose within a giant mechanism. But as the saying goes too many cooks spoil the broth.
Apple is WAY different internally. For all its dreariness and corpo atmosphere (not allowed to talk to each other, teams siloed and laser focused on shipping a specific product) they have much clearer vision of what will sell and what not, usual company missteps (AR glasses) notwithstanding.