If Apple is so far behind, why are the Six flies of the Apocalypse (Google, OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Spotify, and Epic) constantly buzzing around Apple to redesign or get access its ecosystems? And if they don’t get in, they petition the EU/DOJ, crying about unfairness and damage to their business plans.
Yeah. When all these LLM chatbot companies sell their own phones and computers, that's basically when we know Apple is in a fight. As it stands now, the media is overdramatizing the importance of chatbots to Apple. It's like saying Apple needs to have its own search engine or social media business or they will be doomed. How can that be an actual take when these chatbots need phones, laptops, desktops, tablets as their user-facing interface?
The tech media does think that voice only interfaces are awesome for some reason. It's like they think it is the endpoint of computing where we just are talking to them, and magically, everything comes out the way we want it. It's something I totally disagree with. If a device or service is voice only, it fails as a mass market device. It's the least dense information medium for humans. Nobody will be doing anything serious with voice only interfaces.
It does kind of sound like Google is an afterthought in the chatbot wars? They do have branded phones and computers, but nobody takes them seriously right now? Have to wait for the outcome of the DOJ trial?
“We don’t have anything to show for in June in respect to useful AI, Tim. We now support a new cool cartoony variety in Image Playground, but that’s it.”
”What about Vision Pro?”
”We have 16 active users now. Not exactly great ROI, Tim.”
”What we could do is skin our operating systems with the Vision Pro OS look, to get some value out of the R&D. It’ll distract our user-base from the lack of innovations. Frosted glass, please.”
What I love about this narrative style is that it completely ignores decades of Apple history and creates a magical reality in which things just happen on a whimsical thought.
sure Apple has been working on overhauling the user experience stack with swiftUI and it would make sense at some point they’d want a new look to streamline that and show off what it capable of.
But hey nope Apple has the power of whimsy…. I’d have thought they’d use it to create an amazing robot machine that sits in each store and recycles your existing device in front of your eyes in to a brand new thing.
The Apple logo shown has a similar treatment as the Apple Card in the app. That logo changes as debits and payments are incurred. I don't think Apple would do that with this logo, but there could be instances where I'd like to see that happen.
Apple could bring back the illuminated logo in the lid of MacBooks. They wouldn't, but the colors, man. The colors moving around on a frosted white apple would be totally awesome and far out.
I'd like to see a new macOS that works sleeker and looks less like iOS, starting with the System Preferences or whatever they're calling it this week.
If Apple is so far behind, why are the Six flies of the Apocalypse (Google, OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Spotify, and Epic) constantly buzzing around Apple to redesign or get access its ecosystems? And if they don’t get in, they petition the EU/DOJ, crying about unfairness and damage to their business plans.
Apples disruption comes from its combination of MacOS, iOS, VisionOS, Apple Watch OS, iPadOS, and Apple Silicon. Designing a solution to stay connected to the internet and home to supercomputers for answers is easy, even Samsung can do it. But Apple aims for something higher than the information Broker/Ad companies.
That’s what the competition is doing Google, Meta, and Microsoft. Amazon back in the day with Alexa always sounded good with that internet pipeline and Apple was always behind Amazon/Google and doomed because of it what happened to her and the smoke and mirrors show?
The success of an AI model or Chatbot hinges on its constant connection to supercomputers. Privacy concerns are secondary, particularly when the objective is to collect vast amounts of public information.
This approach, is currently being employed by Google, Meta and now Microsoft, but Apples path is different from its competitors in terms of the privacy aspect, and the probability that they have new Apple Silicon (servers?) in play being upgraded and adapted in conjunction to their software efforts at the same time.
WWDC 2025 should be interesting…
Apple makes the stuff people want, so they have the user base, which is what the other tech companies are after, but Apple IS fairly behind in the AI arena. And actually I am glad. The AI thing just takes the human out of everything. Apple is doing AI ethically instead of stealing everything and pretending that's not what they're doing.
Wonder if this means this years iPhone will e a bigger deal than first thought.
Well, the cameras have seem to wrought rather large protrusions such that they are now camera bars. They will be talking camera performance to justify that. Camera performance has been so good for the past several models that the 2025 models will be the last gasp. Improvements in phone camera performance is now for a niche of pros, not amateurs, but they will make it a big deal. Sensor shift stabilization on all cameras? 48 MP for all cameras? Other fancy photography and video stuff I have no interest in.
If they increased iCloud storage tiers to 10 GB for free, 100 GB for $1/mo, 500 GB for $3/mo, and 3 TB for $12/mo, I think that represents a huge win for mainstream consumers in the photography and video features.
The rumored thin iPhone is obviously a big deal. It's time for such a model after 10 years of not trying for thin. I think it will sell better than iPhone mini and Plus models, combined. It's been a long time since Apple has chased after "thin".
The Pro models will have a more "unibody" design it seems, where the camera bar half will be part of the band, supposedly. This represents a huge hardware design change. For the past several years, iPhones used an internal mid-frame structure for internal components to mount to, enabling the front display and back MagSafe glass to be easily removed and replaced. If the camera bar is not part of the case, hmm, how will those internal components be mounted?
The UI changes could be the biggest win if they made good GUI design changes and it's not just a skin. Too much of the UI is now live, where touching it does something. That needs to be detuned, especially the lock-screen hot areas and the generic slide gestures. They should get rid of the slide to the left to bring up the camera gesture from the lockscreen. The long press on the camera and flash-light icons should be sliding switches, or a sliding switch with a path. There should be notification and control center handles. Notification and control center panels should appear on the app switch UI, which I would prefer the app windows not to have an overlap. Just simply fine-tuning the UI would be a huge, best feature in years type of change.
Those are all great design ideas.
I'm looking forward to seeing what Apple has come up with to freshen their UI and UX. I recall a Microsoft engineer talking about how they used low key visual animations and transitions, like bringing a blurred image into focus, to mask some of the effects of underlying threads or processes that were blocked waiting on a callback or transaction that took a little extra time to complete. In essence they were using these effects to mask latency. This was a good 10-15 years ago with CPUs and GPUs that were primitive compared to what we have today.
No matter how much processing capability you have available to use there will always be latencies somewhere in the execution pipeline. If you want a responsive human interface you need to find a way to mask or minimize these latencies. In the past it was waiting on database transactions, waiting on slow hard disks, waiting on cloud transactions, waiting on complex calculation, etc. With AI we now have sophisticated neural engines cranking away on massive datasets. These are now a source of latencies that we didn't have to think about in the past. Of course today's CPUs, GPUS, and NPUs are massively more capable and faster than anything we've ever had in machines in the form factors we are now accustomed to. But we always want more.
It totally makes sense to me that Apple would want to tailor their user interfaces and user experiences to exploit the processing capabilities they now have available to them. As you said, this cannot just be a reskinning, it has to be baked in. It also has to be better in ways that make sense. I don't want to see goofy widgets, unnecessary animations, or gratuitous fluff. With Apple having all of this power in their hands, they need to use it to make things logical, simpler, and more intuitive. This does not mean "dumbing down." Simplification means refinement and being purposeful. Dumbing down means believing that your users are stupid.
Wonder if this means this years iPhone will e a bigger deal than first thought.
Well, the cameras have seem to wrought rather large protrusions such that they are now camera bars. They will be talking camera performance to justify that. Camera performance has been so good for the past several models that the 2025 models will be the last gasp. Improvements in phone camera performance is now for a niche of pros, not amateurs, but they will make it a big deal. Sensor shift stabilization on all cameras? 48 MP for all cameras? Other fancy photography and video stuff I have no interest in.
If they increased iCloud storage tiers to 10 GB for free, 100 GB for $1/mo, 500 GB for $3/mo, and 3 TB for $12/mo, I think that represents a huge win for mainstream consumers in the photography and video features.
The rumored thin iPhone is obviously a big deal. It's time for such a model after 10 years of not trying for thin. I think it will sell better than iPhone mini and Plus models, combined. It's been a long time since Apple has chased after "thin".
The Pro models will have a more "unibody" design it seems, where the camera bar half will be part of the band, supposedly. This represents a huge hardware design change. For the past several years, iPhones used an internal mid-frame structure for internal components to mount to, enabling the front display and back MagSafe glass to be easily removed and replaced. If the camera bar is not part of the case, hmm, how will those internal components be mounted?
The UI changes could be the biggest win if they made good GUI design changes and it's not just a skin. Too much of the UI is now live, where touching it does something. That needs to be detuned, especially the lock-screen hot areas and the generic slide gestures. They should get rid of the slide to the left to bring up the camera gesture from the lockscreen. The long press on the camera and flash-light icons should be sliding switches, or a sliding switch with a path. There should be notification and control center handles. Notification and control center panels should appear on the app switch UI, which I would prefer the app windows not to have an overlap. Just simply fine-tuning the UI would be a huge, best feature in years type of change.
Those are all great design ideas.
I'm looking forward to seeing what Apple has come up with to freshen their UI and UX. I recall a Microsoft engineer talking about how they used low key visual animations and transitions, like bringing a blurred image into focus, to mask some of the effects of underlying threads or processes that were blocked waiting on a callback or transaction that took a little extra time to complete. In essence they were using these effects to mask latency. This was a good 10-15 years ago with CPUs and GPUs that were primitive compared to what we have today.
No matter how much processing capability you have available to use there will always be latencies somewhere in the execution pipeline. If you want a responsive human interface you need to find a way to mask or minimize these latencies. In the past it was waiting on database transactions, waiting on slow hard disks, waiting on cloud transactions, waiting on complex calculation, etc. With AI we now have sophisticated neural engines cranking away on massive datasets. These are now a source of latencies that we didn't have to think about in the past. Of course today's CPUs, GPUS, and NPUs are massively more capable and faster than anything we've ever had in machines in the form factors we are now accustomed to. But we always want more.
It totally makes sense to me that Apple would want to tailor their user interfaces and user experiences to exploit the processing capabilities they now have available to them. As you said, this cannot just be a reskinning, it has to be baked in. It also has to be better in ways that make sense. I don't want to see goofy widgets, unnecessary animations, or gratuitous fluff. With Apple having all of this power in their hands, they need to use it to make things logical, simpler, and more intuitive. This does not mean "dumbing down." Simplification means refinement and being purposeful. Dumbing down means believing that your users are stupid.
Yes. If Apple takes the real-time engine and frameworks developed for visionOS, and evolves and uses it for iOS, macOS, iPadOS, that would be a big win, imo. The UI should always have its compute cycles guaranteed when it needs to animate something.
“We don’t have anything to show for in June in respect to useful AI, Tim. We now support a new cool cartoony variety in Image Playground, but that’s it.”
”What about Vision Pro?”
”We have 16 active users now. Not exactly great ROI, Tim.”
”What we could do is skin our operating systems with the Vision Pro OS look, to get some value out of the R&D. It’ll distract our user-base from the lack of innovations. Frosted glass, please.”
What I love about this narrative style is that it completely ignores decades of Apple history and creates a magical reality in which things just happen on a whimsical thought.
sure Apple has been working on overhauling the user experience stack with swiftUI and it would make sense at some point they’d want a new look to streamline that and show off what it capable of.
But hey nope Apple has the power of whimsy…. I’d have thought they’d use it to create an amazing robot machine that sits in each store and recycles your existing device in front of your eyes in to a brand new thing.
I was sarcastically joking, to suggest a meeting at the coffee corner during lunch break. I’m just shooting the shit 💩
Comments
Yeah. When all these LLM chatbot companies sell their own phones and computers, that's basically when we know Apple is in a fight. As it stands now, the media is overdramatizing the importance of chatbots to Apple. It's like saying Apple needs to have its own search engine or social media business or they will be doomed. How can that be an actual take when these chatbots need phones, laptops, desktops, tablets as their user-facing interface?
The tech media does think that voice only interfaces are awesome for some reason. It's like they think it is the endpoint of computing where we just are talking to them, and magically, everything comes out the way we want it. It's something I totally disagree with. If a device or service is voice only, it fails as a mass market device. It's the least dense information medium for humans. Nobody will be doing anything serious with voice only interfaces.
It does kind of sound like Google is an afterthought in the chatbot wars? They do have branded phones and computers, but nobody takes them seriously right now? Have to wait for the outcome of the DOJ trial?
sure Apple has been working on overhauling the user experience stack with swiftUI and it would make sense at some point they’d want a new look to streamline that and show off what it capable of.
I’d have thought they’d use it to create an amazing robot machine that sits in each store and recycles your existing device in front of your eyes in to a brand new thing.
Apple could bring back the illuminated logo in the lid of MacBooks. They wouldn't, but the colors, man. The colors moving around on a frosted white apple would be totally awesome and far out.
I'd like to see a new macOS that works sleeker and looks less like iOS, starting with the System Preferences or whatever they're calling it this week.
Apple makes the stuff people want, so they have the user base, which is what the other tech companies are after, but Apple IS fairly behind in the AI arena. And actually I am glad. The AI thing just takes the human out of everything. Apple is doing AI ethically instead of stealing everything and pretending that's not what they're doing.
I'm looking forward to seeing what Apple has come up with to freshen their UI and UX. I recall a Microsoft engineer talking about how they used low key visual animations and transitions, like bringing a blurred image into focus, to mask some of the effects of underlying threads or processes that were blocked waiting on a callback or transaction that took a little extra time to complete. In essence they were using these effects to mask latency. This was a good 10-15 years ago with CPUs and GPUs that were primitive compared to what we have today.
No matter how much processing capability you have available to use there will always be latencies somewhere in the execution pipeline. If you want a responsive human interface you need to find a way to mask or minimize these latencies. In the past it was waiting on database transactions, waiting on slow hard disks, waiting on cloud transactions, waiting on complex calculation, etc. With AI we now have sophisticated neural engines cranking away on massive datasets. These are now a source of latencies that we didn't have to think about in the past. Of course today's CPUs, GPUS, and NPUs are massively more capable and faster than anything we've ever had in machines in the form factors we are now accustomed to. But we always want more.
It totally makes sense to me that Apple would want to tailor their user interfaces and user experiences to exploit the processing capabilities they now have available to them. As you said, this cannot just be a reskinning, it has to be baked in. It also has to be better in ways that make sense. I don't want to see goofy widgets, unnecessary animations, or gratuitous fluff. With Apple having all of this power in their hands, they need to use it to make things logical, simpler, and more intuitive. This does not mean "dumbing down." Simplification means refinement and being purposeful. Dumbing down means believing that your users are stupid.