> 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 changed what a phone is.
The iPad is an iPhone, but bigger. The watch is an iPhone, but smaller. These are not innovations of the same kind. They're the sort of thing you'd expect out of Facebook or Amazon or any other large mature bureaucratic corporation.
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.
> name the thing of this caliber they did in the 2010s.
Well, you had to wait for the 2020s, but Vision Pro. It's an entirely new computer, meant to be your primary device. It's similar to how the Mac came out when PCs already existed, but were just different.
The Vision Pro is hardly differentiated from the top end Meta VR model. There are a few UX enhancements, and I think they'll take the lead in the space eventually. But I wouldn't say this is a big innovation in the VR space from what I've seen.
The iPhone was hardly different from other touch screen phones at the time, except for the UX enhancements. And it turns out good UX changes the world.
Pay attention to how people talk about the experience of using Vision Pro vs other headsets. The eye tracking interface is widely praised and described by third parties (not just Apple) as feeling like magic.
I haven't used it yet, but I can imagine what using a computer would be like if I didn't have to actually point my mouse anywhere and instead it could effectively read my mind about where I want to click. IMO this is the interface revolution that will become ubiquitous over the next 5-10 years, and Apple is once again leading the charge.
> The Vision Pro is hardly differentiated from the top end Meta VR model.
I think their approach is unique. They are branding it as a replacement for your computer. The one and only device you need to be productive. And don't underestimate the value of not needing controllers.
Google glass was ahead of its time. And was creepy with its recording ability and other features it launched with. Also, it was only a display for an attached phone for the most part. It couldn't really do anything.
Why would you want a computer strapped to your head? Computers generate heat and have weight that you'd rather put in your pocket than have to support with your neck. To make it work you're stuck with a trade off between performance, weight and battery life when none of those is fun to sacrifice in this context.
Moore's law has been dead for a while now and nobody really knows how much more we can get in terms of performance per watt. But even if it continues to improve, you're implying that what they've got right now is this:
Or maybe worse than that, because the trade off never really goes away. Desktops and servers are still faster than laptops, but portability is a huge advantage, so sacrificing some performance is worth it to have something with you everywhere you go. But how much performance is it worth sacrificing to avoid having a phone in your pocket? Nowhere near as much as it is to avoid lugging a desktop computer around with you.
Or to measure it from the other side, lots of people still have a Macbook even though they also have an iPhone.
That's why I said Moore's law limping along.. it has slowed significantly, and the original transistor doubling every 18~24 months is definitely dead, but transistor processes are still improving, slowly.
The trade off is always there, but more people are using their phones over their desktop computer these days.
That said, I do have serious concerns the greater impact to society in general when transistor technology hit a hard roadblock. Probably outside the scope of this discussion though.
> That's why I said Moore's law limping along.. it has slowed significantly, and the original transistor doubling every 18~24 months is definitely dead, but transistor processes are still improving, slowly.
What they're really doing is getting more power efficient. The "feature size" (number of nm) is fiction at this point. And the tricks they're using to eek out improvements at this point are, uh, interesting. Like they can't make it better without causing errors to occur so they just do that anyway and cover it up by using more error correction. It's really not obvious how much more of this there is to be found.
> The trade off is always there, but more people are using their phones over their desktop computer these days.
That isn't exactly true. The growth in the number of people with a desktop computer has leveled off, but it hasn't really gone down, and the things people use them for are still the same things. If you're going to write a long document, you're going to want a full-sized keyboard. The GPU needed for modern AAA games isn't going to fit in a phone. Professional activity that requires a lot of computation, like compiling code or editing video (or, going forward, a lot of this AI stuff), is a lot faster on a high-power device with more CPU or GPU cores.
What actually happened is that at least the same number of people still use a desktop computer, but now everybody has a phone, including the people who traditionally had a desktop (and still do). So more people have a phone than have a desktop, but not because fewer people have a desktop.
And it would be hard for some new technology to do the same thing to phones because nearly everybody has a phone. A new device can't have 20% more users than phones do when 97% of people have a phone.
Why weren’t there tons of earbuds that looked like AirPods before the AirPods came out? Two independent things that weren’t linked with a wire that you could put in a charging case?
I seem to remember there was one other similar looking device at the time, I think from Samsung. But it wasn’t as small and got terrible battery life.
There was absolutely nothing like them at the time in the category.
> Why weren’t there tons of earbuds that looked like AirPods before the AirPods came out? Two independent things that weren’t linked with a wire that you could put in a charging case?
Because making them that way is more expensive.
> There was absolutely nothing like them at the time in the category.
iPhone: There is now a usable internet-connected general-purpose computer in your pocket.
AirPods: We got rid of the piece of wire between your earbuds.
> iPhone: There is now a usable internet-connected general-purpose computer in your pocket. AirPods: We got rid of the piece of wire between your earbuds.
Most people who have AirPods didn’t have earbuds with the wire. Those who did didn’t wear them like AirPods. The iPhone is a computer in your pocket you interact with through touch. AirPods are computers in your ears you interact with through voice. Especially with LLMs, the latter is a huge step forward.
Also, the processing power in an AirPod outclasses Apollo 11’s; if we’re going to go full tech reductionist, it’s still a feat.
> Are you really contending that this is a difference of the same magnitude as the iPhone?
Yes. Convincing a large fraction of the population to not only adopt a novel computing device, but attach it to their person in a publicly-visible way is something that happens a few times a generation at most.
AirPods are far more broadly adopted than the Apple Watch. I’d also argue against the latter having the sense of design finality the AirPods came out of the door with. Similar to the iPhone.
> AirPods got people to stop complaining that Apple took away the headphone jack. I suspect that might have even been the main reason Apple made them
Doubtful given development timeline and sourcing. It’s more that they arise from a shared vision.
They literally were the next iPhone. Apple mainstreamed the wireless earbuds product category in 2017 and then proceeded to dominate it. (Note that Apple owns Beats as well.)
Urgh AirPods are really annoying, I'm not a fan of their propagation. I would say 50% of folks I work with use them for video calls now. They have some cut in behaviour so you miss the first part of what those people say every time they start talking. They also have a much higher incidence of "sorry, it was using the laptop mic / speakers" and waiting for people fiddling about. If you're not into your audio setup get a wired headset for remote calls please...
We went from earbuds looking like one thing, to basically everyone wearing airpods-like things with great noise cancellation and usability. I'd say that's a home run.
>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.
> 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.
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 changed what a phone is.
The iPad is an iPhone, but bigger. The watch is an iPhone, but smaller. These are not innovations of the same kind. They're the sort of thing you'd expect out of Facebook or Amazon or any other large mature bureaucratic corporation.
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.