Saw the Ive and Altman commercial yesterday on YouTube. They sounded very bullish on this as if it were the next great thing.
As much as I don’t personally care for where technology is heading as it removes humans from the equation more and more, my interest is piqued concerning this. As it always is when Jony Ive is involved. The man always produces the best hardware designs, whether it’s a computer, a music player, a smartphone, a tablet, a watch, wireless earbuds, and even a paper red nose. Whatever he makes, it’s either revolutionary or st worst, best in class.
Oh, Jony Ive has had his misses. There are times he's given a shit sandwich of components and what came out wasn't great. He couldn't save it. It boiled down to being a systems problem, with Jobs ultimately responsible, or Ive himself in the early Cook era as CEO. Ive was given carte blanche on product marketing and product design, including the GUI after the 2012 reorg, and that 2013 to 2018 era or Apple products had a lot of misses.
The iPod 3rd gen was 4 capacitive buttons on top of the capacitive scroll wheel. That sucked. It was mostly fixed with the iPod 4th gen with a capacitive scrollwheel on a rocker that could be mechanically clicked at the corners.
The iPod shuffle with no buttons was an obviously misfire of design and product marketing. Button clusters dangling from headset cords are not good at controller audio functions, especially the double and triple clicking. Reverted in the next model.
The 2013 Mac Pro was a bad design, bad marketing all around. Ive was particularly proud of it, but it didn't serve the Mac Pro's customers well at all, and apparently did not serve the hardware engineering time well either.
The MacBook 12 was Ive's baby too. They tried really hard to get it to sell, to replace the MBA. Never took.
I'm not a big fan of the 2D UI look introduced with iOS 7, but other people really like it. Me, it was too much like web page design, or flat design, with words that were buttons but didn't look like buttons. Who knows who drove the decision for the slide-left from anywhere on the iOS lockscreen to get to the camera.
I think the Apple Watch was Ive's biggest design hit. It only had the wart of the premium tier of gold cased Watches. The band design, the UI, the case design, all has stood the test of time.
It was only after 2018, when Ive checked out, where Apple's hardware finally returned to its generally solid state.
But what will it do that can't be accomplished on an iPhone today, let alone two years from now? Another piece of silly VC funded nonsense that misunderstands the market.
One thing that's always bothered me about Siri is its inability to maintain conversational context across all of your Apple devices. One reason for not allowing context chaining is because of Apple's privacy-first, per-device handling of human-device interaction and data storage. Some people don't like keeping personal information in the cloud but are okay with it being on a device they own, possibly a wearable device. If a newer but smart Siri-like capability was encapsulated into a wearable device it could serve as an a "Personal AI Hotspot" that can only be accessed from other user-owned Apple devices that are close proximity to the hotspot, as well as the owner of the hotspot and paired devices. It would be quite easy to put a fingerprint reader on the hotspot since this capability has been used in hardware security keys and secure thumb drives for years. Voice recognition could be incorporated as well, as could cellular connectivity.
This new wearable device, perhaps called 'Iris,' which is the opposite of 'Siri' in that it actually works very well, could provide context chaining, running conversations, dialogs, queries that require deep thinking, and user interaction and control across all manner of connected Apple devices, including iPhones, iPads, Macs, Vision Pros, AirPods, Apple TVs, etc. It would also be able to use the paired connected devices like iPhones, iPads, and Macs to access information in their local data models, from the web, and from AI services like ChatGPT.
As a trivial example, you could ask 'Iris' to do a competitive analysis of a prototype product you are considering moving into full scale production. The AI 'Iris' would already know a lot about the project because you brought 'Iris" into the conversation from its inception. Over the course of the project execution 'Iris' has learned more and more about the project based on your activities and artifacts accumulated within the scope/context including studies, technical and business proposals, demos, prototypes, conversations, memos, emails, phone calls, etc. You could ask 'Iris' at breakfast to do a thorough competitive analysis and generate a visual presentation, including videos, risk assessment, etc., that you'll need to present to the business leaders on a certain date. Prior to that date 'Iris' queries you as needed, on whatever Apple device you are currently using, if it needs more information, clarification, or wants to run the evolving presentation by you for comment. Because the context is maintained in the wearable device, it doesn't matter where you are or what device you are currently using. You can be in your car and continue the conversation and running dialog you started on your iPhone, updated on your iPad, and viewed in textual and video form on your Mac or AppleTV. Since the conversation and dialog is always maintained on the wearable device, your privacy remains intact.
If nothing else, this type of context chaining capability would make an amazing journaling tool and recording tool for investigations, inspections, narrations, lectures, speeches, etc. With a wearable camera in the device or augmented with other camera equipped wearables (or devices), like smart glasses, video AirPods, a 360-degree head mounted camera, etc., you could enjoy your adventures and vacations using only your natural sensors, i.e., eyes and ears, rather than fumbling around with a camera or smartphone and still have a recording of your adventure to view when you get home. Of course your audio-visual recording would be available on whatever video-equipped Apple device you own, including Apple TV.
Saw the Ive and Altman commercial yesterday on YouTube. They sounded very bullish on this as if it were the next great thing.
As much as I don’t personally care for where technology is heading as it removes humans from the equation more and more, my interest is piqued concerning this. As it always is when Jony Ive is involved. The man always produces the best hardware designs, whether it’s a computer, a music player, a smartphone, a tablet, a watch, wireless earbuds, and even a paper red nose. Whatever he makes, it’s either revolutionary or st worst, best in class.
Remember Alexa? Apple was declared behind because they didn’t have a little speaker tied to a super computer that phoned home what happened with that? I’m not necessarily saying Apple is way ahead, but I would rather have Apple Silicon along with MacOS and all the different versions/offsprings of it going forward in comparison to the competition, it’s become obvious it’s gonna take a little bit more time for Apple to build out and optimize both in comparison to the competition, and I definitely hope Apple is on schedule to release the M5 before the end of the year in some of their devices along with continued software upgrades to go along with it. WWDC 2025 should be interesting.
It will track your every movement, everything you say and will spit out more AI garbage than you could ever imagine.
While it servers will be burning the planet down.
But Apples, shiny new M series servers based upon Apple Silicon probably won’t be burning down as much from wattage standpoint, (servers I might add that Apple has been reluctant in building).
I am suspecting now that this is just going to be basically an AI IoT. Meh.
Just because they have a platform (social media, AI, etc.) doesn't mean they will have successful products. This sounds like an Open AI version of the vaporware Facebook Phone. I just wish Ive would return to Apple. But it seems like he has found an easy way to become a billionaire. So...
So.. a device which collects data and even if I use iPhone or MacBook, this device will absorb and collect data from all users when connecting it with Apple products which makes Apple‘s privacy obsolete.
And this device gets smarter and smarter by learning with collected data.
It will be a personal device while Apple makes generally purposed devices.
I see that Apple stock is underperforming as the worst stock performer YTD among Magnificant 7.
Rotten Apple will feel the pressure. Better now than late: Tim Cook needs to step down as he can’t afford to doom Apple further and further since Vision Pro.
So Apple is in trouble because two clowns get on the stage a la Qualcomm/Microsoft last year and announce something (nothing) that requires software and hardware which preforms like vaporware but is far beyond anything Apple has done to date, and the hardware would be better than Apple Silicon and the OS driving it will be better than any of the five operating systems Apple has released in the last 25 years? Oh and at the end Apple is also doomed too.
Note: Microsoft’s effort came up so far short of Apples Rosetta one (let alone Rosetta two) and the CPU/SOC designed by Qualcomm also came up short of the M1 processor in overall actual performance in software/hardware, which is why Microsoft is now also doubling down on their AI efforts this year and downplaying the hardware aspects, Microsoft has even gone so far as canceled some of the Surface hardware recently. (Microsoft hardware solutions are so bad that many in the geek crowd are crying that Apple should emulate it with a touch screen MacOS on an M4 iPad).
The biggest difference is that Apple’s computers/devices actually sell at a profit from day one there are no giveaways. The Microsoft hardware solutions (over 12 years?) are all lost leader unprofitable Me-too products.
Like the Microsoft/Qualcomm current mashup, which is a lost leader and is an unprofitable Me-too product this 6 billion dollar Bromance will end in tears. (but Johnny will be a billionaire). The OpenAI Sam/Jonnie show is just looking to hold on until the initial public offering.
I'm guessing that this is going to be a consumer oriented CRISPR, so that we can reconfigure ourselves for the dystopian future...
Sam is running out of time. The clock is ticking. They have to have that initial public offering within a year particularly with the mad hatter at the top in the White House. The daily instability is probably killing Sam….
Comments
The iPod 3rd gen was 4 capacitive buttons on top of the capacitive scroll wheel. That sucked. It was mostly fixed with the iPod 4th gen with a capacitive scrollwheel on a rocker that could be mechanically clicked at the corners.
The iPod shuffle with no buttons was an obviously misfire of design and product marketing. Button clusters dangling from headset cords are not good at controller audio functions, especially the double and triple clicking. Reverted in the next model.
The 2013 Mac Pro was a bad design, bad marketing all around. Ive was particularly proud of it, but it didn't serve the Mac Pro's customers well at all, and apparently did not serve the hardware engineering time well either.
The MacBook 12 was Ive's baby too. They tried really hard to get it to sell, to replace the MBA. Never took.
I'm not a big fan of the 2D UI look introduced with iOS 7, but other people really like it. Me, it was too much like web page design, or flat design, with words that were buttons but didn't look like buttons. Who knows who drove the decision for the slide-left from anywhere on the iOS lockscreen to get to the camera.
I think the Apple Watch was Ive's biggest design hit. It only had the wart of the premium tier of gold cased Watches. The band design, the UI, the case design, all has stood the test of time.
It was only after 2018, when Ive checked out, where Apple's hardware finally returned to its generally solid state.
Just create a device with sensors and let new HomePod do the AI and help you.
This new wearable device, perhaps called 'Iris,' which is the opposite of 'Siri' in that it actually works very well, could provide context chaining, running conversations, dialogs, queries that require deep thinking, and user interaction and control across all manner of connected Apple devices, including iPhones, iPads, Macs, Vision Pros, AirPods, Apple TVs, etc. It would also be able to use the paired connected devices like iPhones, iPads, and Macs to access information in their local data models, from the web, and from AI services like ChatGPT.
As a trivial example, you could ask 'Iris' to do a competitive analysis of a prototype product you are considering moving into full scale production. The AI 'Iris' would already know a lot about the project because you brought 'Iris" into the conversation from its inception. Over the course of the project execution 'Iris' has learned more and more about the project based on your activities and artifacts accumulated within the scope/context including studies, technical and business proposals, demos, prototypes, conversations, memos, emails, phone calls, etc. You could ask 'Iris' at breakfast to do a thorough competitive analysis and generate a visual presentation, including videos, risk assessment, etc., that you'll need to present to the business leaders on a certain date. Prior to that date 'Iris' queries you as needed, on whatever Apple device you are currently using, if it needs more information, clarification, or wants to run the evolving presentation by you for comment. Because the context is maintained in the wearable device, it doesn't matter where you are or what device you are currently using. You can be in your car and continue the conversation and running dialog you started on your iPhone, updated on your iPad, and viewed in textual and video form on your Mac or AppleTV. Since the conversation and dialog is always maintained on the wearable device, your privacy remains intact.
If nothing else, this type of context chaining capability would make an amazing journaling tool and recording tool for investigations, inspections, narrations, lectures, speeches, etc. With a wearable camera in the device or augmented with other camera equipped wearables (or devices), like smart glasses, video AirPods, a 360-degree head mounted camera, etc., you could enjoy your adventures and vacations using only your natural sensors, i.e., eyes and ears, rather than fumbling around with a camera or smartphone and still have a recording of your adventure to view when you get home. Of course your audio-visual recording would be available on whatever video-equipped Apple device you own, including Apple TV.
Just because they have a platform (social media, AI, etc.) doesn't mean they will have successful products. This sounds like an Open AI version of the vaporware Facebook Phone.
I just wish Ive would return to Apple. But it seems like he has found an easy way to become a billionaire. So...
like Scotty tries before the keyboard.
https://youtu.be/QpWhugUmV5U