Pema

All this constant chatter about cameras, cameras, cameras. I get it. Phone users want to take pics. Of just about anything, anytime, everywhere. These days you can't stroll on a street and not see someone holding up their phone taking a picture of some rather ordinary pigeon perched on a bollard. Big deal. You know that this pic and the photographer isn't going to end up in a museum somewhere alongside Ansel Adams. 

For my part I would like to have a camera to be useful to take the most mundane pictures without the constant frustrations that I always experience. I am standing in front my shiny car attempting to take a pick of a panel that needs scratch repair. What do I see? My reflection. So I try to lean away and what do I see? My hands hanging goofy like trying to shoot that pic. How bloody annoying. 

Then you are trying to flog something online, same deal. A stainless steel kettle and there you are like some skulking creep in the reflection. 

These are my bugbears about all this talk about cameras. For the average camera user I don't care how many pixels and how many lens when I can't solve the simple straightforward problem of reflection. Of course, you are going to jump in and say, hey get a tripod. Why didn't I think of that? Try lining up that shot, Sherlock. 

The other issue with phones, negating the all pervasive issue with cameras, is the utterly, stupid inadvertent touching of the screen and suddenly when you look at your phone screen you are facing some alien in outer space trying to flog you a bunch of stellar dust. Huh? How they hell did I get there? 

And finally there is this dot.com, Dutch Tulip Mania about AI. Every few years the IT industry sinks into the doldrums and then needs a spark, AI. Well, there was a company called Borland run by a bloke called Philip Khan who released a piece of software called Turbo AI back in the last century. 

Guess what the challenge was? Data. The data that the IT industry is going to scrape to give you intelligent anything is your data manipulated by algorithms, in case you haven't figured that out. 

In other words, it's not organic AI, it's old, crap data being scraped from humongous warehouses filled to the rafters with servers housing giga mounds of data. And the more we use our phones, our computers to search and do anything the data grows diametrically. But have you noticed this? As soon as you search for a warm toilet seat cover on your next search there are ten vendors that want to flog you warm toilet seat covers. That's not generative or predictive. That's just plain old stupid AI Mimicking. You searched for this so I am going to give you the same. 

Anyone whose ever stock traded will have noticed the disclaimer: past winnings is not guarantee of future earnings. And that disclaimer ought to be slapped on any AI product in the future: past data is being used to give you your answers but it is no guarantee of anything useful. It's the old saying garbage in/garbage out. 

Nvidia is running a storm of success to mega trillions, watch how they plummet back to earth same as the Dutch Tulip Mania and the dot.com when the ordinary folks work out that there is no magic bullet in AI. Just the same-o, same-o. 

The day that someone delivers organic AI is the day I will sit up and take notice. Till, one big, fat yawn      

Come to think of it, I believe that that is what Humane AI was trying to deliver. Real time AI. See how well they did?? 

That customisable top button is the most useless hardware feature ever. I have had my iPhone 15 Pro for a year now. I have assigned a number of tasks to it - always forget what for?

cg27 said:

And they spent ten years spinning their wheels on a vehicle program to no avail.

Overall I still prefer my Pixel phone. So much easier to use. But I throughly like the security of the iPhone. 

Well to hear Apple tell it, they learnt a lot. 

Like spending $1 trillion on going to the moon - what did we learn? Teflon and how to save a crippled space capsule. 

hexclock said:

macxpress said:

Apple should just buy Rivian. 

The EV market is crumbling. 

Where? Maybe in your boondocks. But if you cared to look at the Chinese EV invasion of Europe and the US you would quickly observe two things: 
1) the fossil fuel chuggers are dead as a door nail. 
2) Toyota just lost the plot. The Chinese are the new Japanese. 

I am totally lost. I thought that Rivian was kaput. So what's up with this engineer jumping onto a sinking ship? 

charlesn said:

Pema said:

charlesn said:

Pema said:

If you purchase a Bentley Bentayga, you get the Mulliner Tourbillon Clock as an $30,000 option. But, hey, what's $30,000 between friends when the Bentayga will lighten your wallet by $550,000? 

By the same measure, when you purchase the Apple Car, you get the Apple Ring thrown in for free. 

Let's face it, Cook has kept Apple afloat quite nicely. But the reality is that since Job's passing the only innovative product that Apple has released to date is the Vision Pro. All the others have been upgrades upon upgrades upon upgrades. Forget the watch it's not innovative.

And truth be told, Apple has botched what could have been a multi-billion product had they released it in a smaller form factor without all the bells and whistles at $1500-$2000. Pitching it at $3500 USD is the same mistake when they sold the Gold Apple Watch for some outrageous price. However, they did offer the Apple Watch at a more affordable price range which made it a hit. 

The Vision Pro US market has dried up. So now they are offering the Vision Pro around the world. They will sell a few. But not enough to offset the R&D effort and not near enough to move the needle by much when Apple releases their Dec. 2024 numbers. 

The moral in this: start small, grab market share, get an audience then slowly increase the features and price to achieve a $3500 price point. 
If you already own an Apple Vision Pro 1.0 then you have trade-in value. Right now the only thing you have to trade-in is the shirt on your back. And Apple does not want that!

Wow. This is all so utterly baseless and mindless, it's hard to know where to start so I just quoted it all. 

Vision Pro. So, according to your brilliant business mind, "smaller, simpler, cheaper" is the path to success! Well, my friend, both Meta and Microsoft--you've heard of them, right?--have been in the "smaller, simpler, cheaper" headset game for years. So where's the killer product that owns the market? OH... that's right. It doesn't exist.

I am not going to address the other points you raised about the Apple Watch and Air Pods. That was not the focus of my post. I was only reiterating what many highly-placed folks at Apple felt and said, 'that the product is not ready for release'. Which is what I have been thinking all along. This product has the potential to become a great money-maker for Apple. It's just that it is not fully baked. But Cook wanted a headline grabbing product and this was sitting on the lab bench being worked on and he shoved it out the door. 

It made headlines alright, but the wrong kind. As did the infamous Apple Car. 

My point on growing a product is that is the way to go. Rather than releasing the top-end. 

I am not even going to address the points you made about Microsoft and Meta. The former has an abysmal record with hardware - remember the Windows phone, which Microsoft bought from Nokia and then on-sold for $1.5 Billion (classic buy high, sell low) and so far as Meta goes I am astonished that this company is still around with all the bad press they are getting. 

Finally, to round it off. You have forgotten to mention the Google Graveyard. It has grown so large that future products won't be buried for the lack of space, they will just be cremated and placed in an urn. 

"I was only reiterating what many highly-placed folks at Apple felt and said, 'that the product is not ready for release'" 

Really? Please share with the rest of us who these "many highly-placed folks at Apple" are who said that the Vision Pro was not ready for release. Names please. And please link to publications or sources where we can see those quotes. I'll wait. You do realize that simply because you put something in quotation marks doesn't mean that someone said it, right? 

If you had bothered to read the lead-up to the now clearly half-baked release of the Apple Vision Pro you would be in know. The general feeling amongst several people at Apple was not to release the Vision Pro for a variety of reasons, the main one being that it is too expensive for commercial success. 

Seeing this, Apple's PR machine swung into full damage control and started telling all and sundry that a good many fortune 500 companies had purchased the device, along with several medical facilities. Well, let's break that down: fortune 500 and medical facilities. The former would not blink at buying several of these at $3500 a pop. They regularly spend thousands of dollars on equipment that gets obsoleted the next year and chucked in the tip. I worked for one, I ought to know. So far as the few stories peppered about how revolutionary the VP in performing micro surgery. Well, again, medical facilities have enormous budgets to throw at equipment at all levels from $10,000 to $10,000,000. The VP would hardly make a dent. 

My comments throughout was that if Apple had intended for the VP to become a hit with prosumers it failed and failed miserably. Peppering the internet with stories about how fortune 500 companies and medical facilities bought it and marvelled at it hardly makes the case, other than Apple's well-oiled PR machine is doing the best it can with a poorly conceived release. 

My contention and I stand behind it 100% is that Cook wanted a headline grabbing product after the dismal demise of the Apple Car and pushed it out the lab before it was ready for primetime. No doubt, Apple has the money and resources to make lemonade out of lemons. Come mid-2025 and possibly early 2026 we will see a new and improved Vision Standard at the affordable range existing side-by-side with Vision Pro for companies and medical establishments. 

The problem with that is that people have soured on this product, like they have on Apple Maps and the old saying applies: 'you only get one chance to make a great impression. 

Added to that, I am sure you have read that Apple has reaped a great many benefits from the failed launch of the Apple Car. I would luv to know what benefits, other than a tax deduction and how to not build a car when you are not in that space. Period.