Now what? The problem with saying ‘Apple hasn’t done much lately’ was always that you said this and then a month later it might launch the Watch or the AirPods. You don’t know what’s in the labs!
Except that these days, we kind of do. We knew Apple was working on a car for a long time because it was such a big project it was bound to leak, although Apple never said anything publicly. We know it’s working on xR because it launched the Vision Pro, but the Vision Pro wasn’t ready to launch. And we know it’s working on LLMs because it spent an hour talking about that at WWDC last summer, and then realised that it couldn’t launch the flagship feature after all. And there’s the problem.
I think the car project was the classic Apple of Steve Jobs. Apple spent a lot of time and money trying to work out whether it could bring something new, and said no. . The shift to electric is destabilising the car industry and creating lots of questions about who builds cars and how they build them, and that’s a situation that should attract Apple. However, I also think that Apple concluded that while there was scope to make a great car, and perhaps one that did a few things better, there wasn’t really scope to do something fundamentally different, and solve some problem that no-one else was solving. Apple would only be making another EV, not redefining what ‘car’ means, because EVs are still basically cars - which is Tesla’s problem. It looks like the EV market will play out not like smartphones, where Apple had something unique, but like Android, where there was frenzied competition in a low-margin commodity market. So, Apple walked away - it said no.
You can generalise this point: Apple has a lot of money (it has $140bn of cash, and paid shareholders $115bn in buybacks and dividends in FY2024 alone) and it could buy or build lots of things, but it doesn’t follow that they would be a good fit. People often suggest that Apple should buy anything from Netflix to telcos to banks, and I used to make fun of this by suggesting that Apple should buy an airline ‘because it could make the seats and the screens better’. Yes, Apple could maybe make better seats than Collins Aerospace, but that’s not what it means to run an airline. Where can Apple change the fundamental questions?
That takes us to xR, and to AI. These are fields where the tech is fundamental, and where there are real, important Apple kinds of questions, where Apple really should be able to do something different. And yet, with the Vision Pro Apple stumbled, and then with AI it’s fallen flat on its face. This is a concern.
The Vision Pro shipped as promised and works as advertised. But it’s also both too heavy and bulky and far too expensive to be a viable mass-market consumer product. Hugo Barra called it an over-engineered developer kit - you could also call it an experiment, or a preview or a concept. Lots of serious people think that some combination of glasses and headsets could be the next universal device after smartphones, and Apple should certainly be working on that, but no-one thinks the hardware is ready to deliver that today, and the Apple we know doesn’t ship things that aren’t ready. It ships MVPs that get better later, sure, and the original iPhone and Watch were MVPs, but the original iPhone also was the best phone I’d ever owned even with no 3G and no App Store. It wasn’t a concept. it wasn’t a vision of the future- it was the future. The Vision Pro is a concept, or a demo, and Apple doesn’t ship demos. Why did it ship the Vision Pro? What did it achieve? It didn’t sell in meaningful volume, because it couldn’t, and it didn’t lead to much developer activity ether, because no-one bought it. A lot of people even at Apple are puzzled.
The new Siri that’s been delayed this week is the mirror image of this. Last summer Apple told a very clear, coherent, compelling story of how it would combine the software frameworks it’s already built with the personal data in apps spread across your phones and the capabilities of LLMs to produce a new kind of personal assistant. This was the eats of Apple - taking a new primary technology and proposing way to make it useful for everyone else The hero demo at WWDC was ‘when is mom’s flight landing? / what’s our lunch plan? / how long will it take us to get there from the airport?” with your iPhone synthesising data from across apps and services to answer real-world questions posed in ways that computers could not answer before. This is your iPhone knowing who your mother is, finding the flight in all the various threads of comms in the last few weeks, knowing that it need to find a flight in the near future, and showing you what you need.
