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Apple Ramps Up R&D Intensity to Pre-iPhone Levels

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Re: Apple Ramps Up R&D Intensity to Pre-iPhone Levels

#61

Post by chx »

sho_hn wrote: post #56
chx wrote: post #40

If you go back to Steve Jobs' original iPhone speech, the crux of it was: revolutionary user interfaces (mouse, click wheel, multi-touch) enabled revolutionary products (Mac, iPod, iPhone). And while we know the LG Prada shipped with a capacitive touchscreen that's a technicality: LG took the UI of a feature phone, minimally adjusted it for touch and that was it. Meanwhile Apple took their desktop OS and shrunk it to…

> Even if we had an inclination of what they are cooking, figuring it out is near impossible. And we don't. This is some sort of strange myth-making. Making a touchscreen phone had been the writing on the wall and pretty obvious to many. Having a company set up and willing to do it and do it well is another matter. But it doesn't mean you can't see things coming. Ideas and execution are not the same.

> Making a touchscreen phone had been the writing on the wall and pretty obvious to many.

Really.

This reminds of this discussion https://reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/1wdp6n/what_makes_the_o... I opened a decade ago asking "What makes the Oculus different from previous VR?" and the winning answer was pointing out how much the 1994 IBM Simon Smartphone feature list resembled on the surface the iPhone feature list.

In other words, still watching the world through my own eyes, I have been a columnist of the largest computer monthly in Hungary from 1993 to 2001. Yes, the IBM Simon, the Nokia Communicator, the Palm, the Pocket PC, yes those were there

But none of that meant anyone could have foreseen the iPhone. Android history articles often mention how Google essentially needed to restart because of how revolutionary it was! https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-d... if there was a prophet who could foretell the iPhone their words didn't register in Mountain View, that's for sure.

If you think anyone did, the Internet does not forget, link it.

Re: Apple Ramps Up R&D Intensity to Pre-iPhone Levels

#62

Post by edgyquant »

paxys wrote: post #51

This is yet another instance of people simply not understanding what R&D spending means in the context of tech. Most employee salaries are R&D. Cloud compute is R&D. Any expense related to developing any of their existing products or services gets categorized under that bucket, and they get tax breaks on it. R&D does not only mean new research.

> Most employee salaries are R&D. > and they get tax breaks on it.

This isn’t true anymore. The tax break for engineers counting as R&D ended last year and this is cited as one reason for so many layoffs

Re: Apple Ramps Up R&D Intensity to Pre-iPhone Levels

#63

Post by AnthonyMouse »

thoughtsimple wrote: post #55
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as willfully ignorant of the Vision Pro as those complaints were of the iPad, and later the Apple Watch and the AirPods These are the evidence of the opposite. Apple's hardware from the 70s and 80s, like the original Macintosh, were something special. NeXTSTEP, the Steve Jobs thing that got rebranded as Mac OS X when Apple bought them, was the first modern OS to be simultaneously good and popular. The iPhone change…

>If the Apple II was the 70s and the Macintosh was the 80s and NeXTSTEP was the 90s and the iPhone was the 2000s, name the thing of this caliber they did in the 2010s. Arguably, the iPod was 2000s and the iPhone was 2010s. The iPhone really didn't get started until the iPhone 3GS in middle-2009 so it started slowly but really defined the 2010s for Apple.

That's just as true of the others. NeXTSTEP was the 90s but "Mac OS X" wasn't released until 2001. But if you asked someone in 2004 or 2014 if Apple had done anything interesting recently, you'd have been able to name what it was.

Re: Apple Ramps Up R&D Intensity to Pre-iPhone Levels

#64

Post by keenmaster »

AI is the greatest threat to Apple’s dominance. They might be spending billions on creating an AI-centric iOS and iPhone, and that would be money well spent. If Android phones put a personal secretary in your pocket, fully integrated throughout the device, then iPhone users would be very tempted to switch without feature parity.

Re: Apple Ramps Up R&D Intensity to Pre-iPhone Levels

#65

Post by AlotOfReading »

pests wrote: post #60
AlotOfReading wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For context, this is what Apple's autonomous vehicles look like: https://dmxvlyap9srmn.cloudfront.net/article/pictures/8e1f6d... They're Lexus' with mattresses on the roof. Ghost has a weird pattern and their name on the sides of the vehicle. Nuro is uses Prius' mostly. Woven planet/Toyota tends to have slicker looking vehicles. They're the right vehicle in this picture: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.files.wordp…

What is attached to the back wheel in the Apple photo?

Just a rotary encoder.

Re: Apple Ramps Up R&D Intensity to Pre-iPhone Levels

#66

Post by Someone1234 »

Legion wrote: post #47

Hope that includes the non-invasive glucose monitor for the Apple Watch.

I think everyone is hoping that. Non-invasive glucose monitoring is a major holy-grail piece of medical technology that would help people almost immediately.

If they did develop this, they'd likely make as much money selling the IP to medical technology partners (e.g. hospital equipment) as they would adding it to the Apple Watch.

Re: Apple Ramps Up R&D Intensity to Pre-iPhone Levels

#67

Post by sho_hn »

chx wrote: post #61
sho_hn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if we had an inclination of what they are cooking, figuring it out is near impossible. And we don't. This is some sort of strange myth-making. Making a touchscreen phone had been the writing on the wall and pretty obvious to many. Having a company set up and willing to do it and do it well is another matter. But it doesn't mean you can't see things coming. Ideas and execution are not the same.

> Making a touchscreen phone had been the writing on the wall and pretty obvious to many. Really. This reminds of this discussion https://reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/1wdp6n/what_makes_the_o... I opened a decade ago asking "What makes the Oculus different from previous VR?" and the winning answer was pointing out how much the 1994 IBM Simon Smartphone feature list resembled on the surface the iPhone feature list. In…

I'm not talking about columnists. Journalists are not people who build things. I'm talking about people who build things and think about what to build next.

The option of doing away with the hardware keyboard and going touchscreen-only was always there and always up for discussion, but for the longest time not easy due to the power and performance envelope at the price point. Lots of devices already worked like this outside of phones, for example a lot of touchscreen kiosk hardware (e.g. ATMs). It's just not a particularly big leap of the imagination to do this in a phone form factor. It was also present in mobile form in plenty of media and scifi, e.g. 2001's tablets.

What matters is whether you think you can pull it off, and whether you're willing to try, and whether you are able to identify the right moment to try. A lot of companies were not willing to try (e.g. out of fear of cannibalizing existing product lines or rejection by the customer). Others didn't have the tech stack necessary to do so.

What Apple did right is to have the good sense (or luck) to try it when the technology supply chain to back it was there, and not do it too early. Other phone makers wrote their tech stacks for much lower-power devices, and really struggled to scale their existing operating systems, dev community, etc. up to making a richer device, and didn't have the ambition to push for it. Apple started, as OP pointed out, by scaling down a desktop-class OS at a point where the hardware had just made it possible, and this worked out well. What made the iPhone a success wasn't just the form factor, it was also e.g. having a proper web browser (which Apple didn't even write themselves). This pattern replicates in a few other aspects of the device (supply chain for capacitive touch, batteries, etc.)

The iPhone is a fantastic success story of a good product concept, waiting for the right moment, sensible tech choices, solid tech asset management by a software company, very good industrialization, and great execution and integration. It's not a magic fairy-tale unicorn idea that no on else could think of.

It's annoying because it misrepresents and misunderstands what it takes to make a good product, and leads to internalizing the wrong lessons and values. It's one of the subtle reasons why there aren't more Apples.

Re: Apple Ramps Up R&D Intensity to Pre-iPhone Levels

#68

Post by chrisjc »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #24
mustacheemperor wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he would be shocked to see this comment, though, since it is materially identical to the complaints I remember reading circa 2010 and is as willfully ignorant of the Vision Pro as those complaints were of the iPad, and later the Apple Watch and the AirPods (when 'the FBI will destroy Apple's privacy edge' was the government conflict du jour). I don't mean to come across as standoffish here, it's just, t…

> as willfully ignorant of the Vision Pro as those complaints were of the iPad, and later the Apple Watch and the AirPods These are the evidence of the opposite. Apple's hardware from the 70s and 80s, like the original Macintosh, were something special. NeXTSTEP, the Steve Jobs thing that got rebranded as Mac OS X when Apple bought them, was the first modern OS to be simultaneously good and popular. The iPhone change…

> If the Apple II was the 70s and the Macintosh was the 80s and NeXTSTEP was the 90s and the iPhone was the 2000s, name the thing of this caliber they did in the 2010s.

Apple Silicon?

Re: Apple Ramps Up R&D Intensity to Pre-iPhone Levels

#69

Post by ramesh31 »

chx wrote: post #40

If you go back to Steve Jobs' original iPhone speech, the crux of it was: revolutionary user interfaces (mouse, click wheel, multi-touch) enabled revolutionary products (Mac, iPod, iPhone). And while we know the LG Prada shipped with a capacitive touchscreen that's a technicality: LG took the UI of a feature phone, minimally adjusted it for touch and that was it. Meanwhile Apple took their desktop OS and shrunk it to…

>If you go back to Steve Jobs' original iPhone speech, the crux of it was: revolutionary user interfaces (mouse, click wheel, multi-touch) enabled revolutionary products (Mac, iPod, iPhone).

This was specifically called out in the Vision Pro announcement. They are completely ditching controllers for VR/AR, and going full hand/finger tracked gesture control. It's why I think Vision will be the first device that people actually end up using in mass. The display fidelity is one thing, but interaction control is the number one reason why VR has failed. People (average normal people) really have no idea how to use game controllers if they didn't grow up as gamers. The platform will never take off until fully intuitive controller free interaction is acheived, and Apple knows this. Ambient computing is the next step, and keyboard/mouse will be a small footnote from the early history of HCI years from now.

Re: Apple Ramps Up R&D Intensity to Pre-iPhone Levels

#70

Post by astrange »

sho_hn wrote: post #67
chx wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Making a touchscreen phone had been the writing on the wall and pretty obvious to many. Really. This reminds of this discussion https://reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/1wdp6n/what_makes_the_o... I opened a decade ago asking "What makes the Oculus different from previous VR?" and the winning answer was pointing out how much the 1994 IBM Simon Smartphone feature list resembled on the surface the iPhone feature list. In…

I'm not talking about columnists. Journalists are not people who build things. I'm talking about people who build things and think about what to build next. The option of doing away with the hardware keyboard and going touchscreen-only was always there and always up for discussion, but for the longest time not easy due to the power and performance envelope at the price point. Lots of devices already worked like this…

The novelty in the iPhone wasn't a touchscreen, it was a capacitative multitouch screen and a UI framework that could do their app designs but still at 60fps.

Although the last one wasn't purely technical; IIRC Nokia got it, decided it was cool "because it was 60fps", tried to compete just by doing that and failed.

> having a proper web browser (which Apple didn't even write themselves)

Yeah they did. There wasn't that much KHTML in there at that point.

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