[Animats]

Google is in some ways easier, because there's no real threat to their cash cow, search ads. Apple has to stay ahead of competition in phones. That competition is now quite good, and usually cheaper.

As CEO of Apple, Cook is expected to deliver the Next Big Thing. So far, he hasn't, and he's running out of time. (Cars? Tough, low-margin business. VR? Niche market. Watches? Tried that. Robots? Not ready yet. Voice AI? Already doing that, need to improve. Services? Crowded field, no edge.)

[k-mcgrady]

>> "Watches? Tried that."

I don't understand how people think they've tried the watch and failed. They've put out ONE version. The first iPod was Mac only and therefore didn't sell very well. When the iPhone launched you had to buy the device outright - no subsidy and it was lacking features that other phones had for quite a while. It was a few versions before it really took off. I think people shrugging off the watch are being incredibly short sighted (and I say this as someone who had one and sold it). It's not perfect for a mass market now but it can be. The software changes in watchOS 3 are really going to help towards that but in the long term this thing could become essential to your health and from interviews Tim Cook has done in the past it sounds like that's the direction they want to go once they've got the basic software and form factor down.

[ktRolster]

FWIW the apple watch sold fairly well: http://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-watch-with-sizable-sales-c...

Expectations of course are ridiculously high.

[geomark]

My impression is that the watch sold mainly because of Apple branding not because it solved a real problem or opened up an entire new market. People are hoping/expecting Apple's next big thing to become a viral hit lke the iPhone. The watch isn't that.

[zghst]

People bought it because they thought it solved an issue. Apple branding around other products have not made them successful (Apple Maps 2012, Ping, MobileMe, Newton, etc.)

[curt15]

But services have never been a core strength of Apple. They've always been at most "good enough". On the other hand, Apple has built up an enviable reputation for delivering well planned and executed physical devices with highly polished user interfaces. See also https://stratechery.com/2016/its-a-tesla/

[zepto]

The watch is selling well and continuing to grow at a rate greater than the iPhone did over the same period.

[aetherson]

What's your source?

[coldtea]

>I don't understand how people think they've tried the watch and failed. They've put out ONE version. The first iPod was Mac only and therefore didn't sell very well. When the iPhone launched you had to buy the device outright - no subsidy and it was lacking features that other phones had for quite a while. It was a few versions before it really took off.

Besides, this one version of the watch, outsold all competitor smart-watches 10 to 1 or more...

[kkhire]

inherent problem with the watch is that it's not a standalone device, its an extension of the phone.

but you're right, there's alot of revisionist history when it comes to apple product success during Jobs era. iPhone didn't become this massive product til 2010 when the 4 was released. that device changed everything for them

[freyr]

> iPhone didn't become this massive product til 2010 when the 4 was released

If we ignore the iPhone 3G, which was the top-selling mobile phone of 2008. Revisionist history indeed.

The original 2007 iPhone was hugely successful out of the gate within the smartphone category, which it shaped and then dominated for the next few years.

2010 was a tipping point for people abandoning feature phones for smartphones, and there wasn't yet a comparable Android competitor. But the seeds were sown years earlier.

[k-mcgrady]

>> "If we ignore the iPhone 3G, which was the top-selling mobile phone of 2008. Revisionist history indeed."

>> "The original 2007 iPhone was hugely successful out of the gate within the smartphone category"

And the Apple Watch is by far the best selling smartwatch. The market just isn't that big.

I think the 3GS was when I started seeing iPhone's everywhere in the UK at least and that was definitely the first really solid device where there weren't glaring feature omissions and performance problems. The market had also come to accept the high phone prices smartphones ushered in by that point too. Everyone I knew had a great PAYG deal back then so convincing them to go to a contract and pay 3-5x what they were used to took a few versions. I think with watchOS 3.0 the software is now at that point and we're just waiting on the hardware to offer something really compelling (which I think will be health related).

[freyr]

> And the Apple Watch is by far the best selling smartwatch. The market just isn't that big.

Right. The fact that the smartwatch market is currently small doesn't exclude the possibility that it will grow huge, as happened with the smartphone market.

But if we want to continue with the analogy, there are other key differences between the Apple Watch and the early iPhone. I'll point out two.

First, even with the first-gen iPhone's feature omissions (its most commonly cited feature omission? No physical keyboard), the iPhone made the immense utility of the smartphone immediately obvious to most people who used it. Many people loved it. By contrast, the reaction to smartwatches from early adopters ranges mostly from cool to lukewarm.

Second, the first iPhone differentiated itself by nailing features that mattered most to most people. Compared to its leading competitors, the iPhone has 8 hours talk time vs 5 hours, 4+ GB memory vs 64 MB, 2 MP camera vs 1.3 MP, Wi-Fi vs no Wi-Fi, twice the screen size, built-in iPod functionality, etc. Nothing really came close in terms of its core features. The glaring feature omissions people complained about (no memory card slot, no physical keyboard (!), no third-party apps, no copy & paste) either turned out to be inconsequential or were obvious ways to make a great product even better. By contrast, the Apple Watch failed to identify key features that make it categorically better than the competition, and people are scratching their heads trying to think of "glaring omissions" that could make the smartwatch more essential.

The Apple Watch might have a future yet, but comparing it to the iPhone really doesn't work out in the Watch's favor.

[k-mcgrady]

Agreed. I think they will be able to make it more and more standalone as the technology for that becomes available (battery life is probably the main reason they can't now). I see it as similar to the iPod being Mac only at the start.

[digi_owl]

Nah, the iPod thing was managerial, not technical.

[k-mcgrady]

It was both. You could only manage it using a Mac and developing iTunes for Windows was a technical roadblock. With the Watch you can only manage it using iOS and opening it up to other phones or making it work standalone is technical.

[swang]

i would say it was always a massive success from the beginning. maybe that's arguable. but to say iphone finally hit its mark with the iphone 4 is calling it a bit late.

[digi_owl]

But MSM was hyping it all the way.

[saurik]

(When the iPhone was first released the price actually was subsidized by AT&T, who got rather screwed by it because it was based on a "trust our security" model, and people would take it home and put it on T-Mobile. It is absolutely true that the first iPhone sucked vs. a normal phone, though. It wasn't until iPhoneOS 3 and the iPhone 3G[S] that the device started getting good.)

[technofiend]

Apple has a huge amount of brand loyalty. It's stunning to watch people explain away Apple's failure to refresh their hardware line sooner. They get a lot of latitude from their very loyal customers. Combined with their high margins and practices to protect same (soldered on memory and storage, license restrictions for non-apple hardware, killing their clone market) I'm literally not a buyer. Which is decidedly a minority opinion here on HN.

[Neeek]

To be fair, it's becoming pretty common to have RAM and storage soldered to the board these days on small form factor laptops, so it's not just Apple.

[digi_owl]

If any other company had done it first on a product range, there would have been a media lynch mob.

[tptacek]

Can you flesh out an argument that Cook and/or Apple is "running out of time"?

[ufmace]

I'd say that "running out of time" is probably over the top, but there's some truth behind the idea. Their huge margins and huger stock price and market cap are based on the perception that they're the company that can produce industry-changing smash hits over and over again. But Jobs was really the one doing that. Can Cook's Apple produce the next big thing, something that takes the whole tech world by storm, like the iPhone or iPad did? How long will investors wait if he doesn't make any big hits? It's not hard to imagine Apple losing some of it's luster if they keep churning out modest revisions on existing products and uninspiring duds for new products.

On the other hand, even with no more hits, they do still have incredible customer loyalty and a massively profitable product line. And a lot of people have predicted Apple's doom over the years, only to be proven wrong later. Betting on Apple for the next 5 years seems safe. I wouldn't bet on Apple for the next 20 years right now though.

[roksprok]

Isn't Alphabet's P/E twice that of Apple? 13 vs 25 if I remember correctly. Doesn't this imply that it's Google, not Apple, that people are counting on to 'produce industry-changing smash hits over and over again'?

[ufmace]

Interesting, I didn't know that actually. Seems GOOGL has a market cap almost as high and 2.5x higher P/E. Would make me wonder about Google a bit too. In my opinion, they don't really innovate at the market level like Apple does. They have the Search cash cow, Gmail was moderately innovative at the time, and most of their other stuff comes off as well-executed me-toos. Technically innovative, but not exactly opening up new markets for things that nobody knew existed.

It's also a narrative problem. Apple has the narrative going - Jobs is gone, can Cook really replace him? Google is mostly boring crickets as far as management narratives.

[sangnoir]

> Gmail was moderately innovative at the time

Say what now? Perhaps you do not remember that most free email providers had a 2 or 4 MB mailbox limit and you had to delete emails as soon as you read them. When I signed up, Google was offering a whooping 1 gigabyte of storage - an improvement of 3 orders of magnitude. Gmail allowed attachments of up to 25MB which only served to make Hotmail's 4MB mailbox look absurd.

Other email providers (free and paid) struggled with spam filtering (and still do). GMails spam filters are magic, as far as I'm concerned - I never get spam and I also don't even bother checking my spam folder for false positives.

These 2 innovations alone can't be "moderate" by any stretch of the imagination.

[ufmace]

I suppose it's debatable. I'm talking about stuff like the iPhone singlehandedly revolutionizing the touchscreen mobile market, and the iPad essentially creating the tablet market from scratch - they existed before, but were pretty much uniformly awful and I can't remember anybody ever wanting one.

It's not like email or webmail didn't exist before GMail, but I suppose you could argue that the revolutionary at the time use of AJAX plus gigabyte standard storage space, plus great spam filters was enough to transform webmail from a handicapped second-class citizen to something that tech experts would be happy to leave desktop email clients for.

But then, Google Maps was better than the competition, but enough better to be a revolutionary difference? I'd say no. But where do you draw the line between a good refinement of a pre-existing class of application to something that qualifies as revolutionary?

[aedron]

Most IT/technology companies trade above 20x P/E. That Apple is so much lower simply reflects how little confidence investors have in the company at the moment, as evidenced by the huge slide in share price.

[Spooky23]

They can't scale their "magic".

Working on the watch means that they aren't working on the Mac or the iPad. They are a victim of their own success in that a successful, well thought out, and profitable product like the watch is viewed as a neutral.

They've also flopped on the TV.

That said, their ability to execute is amazing.

[coldtea]

>Working on the watch means that they aren't working on the Mac or the iPad.

You do know that all 3 share the same basic OS and technologies (kernel, filesystems, basic services, lots of UI and helper code, etc) just in differently tuned versions with a different "facade" on top, right?

Or that that they have different teams on each of these devices for everything that's not shared, teams that don't even communicate with each other...

[Spooky23]

If everything is so rosy, why are we left with multi-year gaps in even minor product revisions for products like MacBook Pro, Mac Pro, iPod, iPad?

I love the products. I probably have $15k of Apple hear in my home. But I'm not buying my kid a 3 year old computer to go off to college with at a premium price.

[coldtea]

>If everything is so rosy, why are we left with multi-year gaps in even minor product revisions for products like MacBook Pro, Mac Pro, iPod, iPad?

Because the Air and MBP want to phase out in favor of MBPr and Macbook (plain) and they've been waiting on Intel to deliver anything significant to warrant a new product line for ages. (Intel Skylake CPUs in form factors and energy consumption compatible with the MBPr line have been TBD until recently --some still are--, and in limited production yields still. And previous generation didn't even give any performance speed bump of 2 and 3 generations behind MBPr CPU, and in some cases, worse). In the cases where Intel delivered, Apple did too (e.g. Skylake iMac and Macbook).

The Mac Pro has a similar story (and isn't their first priority or biggest seller anyway).

That said, not sure about any "multi-year gaps" regarding the iPad. The iPad Pro 9.7 came out in March, and the iPad Mini 4 less than a year ago, on September.

[tptacek]

That's an answer to somebody's question, but not to mine.

[Spooky23]

People (specifically Wall St) want magic.

If Cook can't deliver that, he's running out of time.

[pacala]

Next Big Thing: Knowledge. As a product, not as a loss leader for ads.

[agumonkey]

Honestly, what could be the NBT in consumer tech ? I feel we reached cultural and ontological plateau in most areas. If there's a next it probably won't be a big thing.

[Animats]

There are two classes of Next Big Things:

1. things which would clearly be useful, but couldn't be made yet or which cost too much to be practical. Example: flying cars, tablet computers.

2. things that could be done easily with current technology but hadn't been tried yet. Examples: Uber, Twitter.

A useful subclass of #2 is things which are known to be useful and have just become or are just about to become makeable. A good example is the Motorola Star-Tac, the first flip phone. It's a Star Trek communicator, made real.

Apple is good in that space. The Macintosh was of that type. Good UNIX workstations already existed, as did the Alto and Dorado, they just cost too much. The original 1984 Mac was a severely cost-reduced workstation - tiny screen, no hard drive, floppy disk storage only. It took a few more years to get a hard drive into the product, at which point it became useful.

The iPod was also in that space. It wasn't the first MP3 player. The iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, although it was the first to get rid of the keyboard.

So that's where Apple innovates - at the leading edge of what's commercially possible. They don't do long-term efforts to make a technology work, as RCA did with color TV and IBM did with computers.

[detaro]

Home automation/IoT is still a thing that could be it. And I'm honestly surprised Apple hasn't been more aggressive with HomeKit etc. With more and more crappy IoT devices, Apple coming out with a reliable and well-integrated platform could be great. I don't have Apple stuff, but the people I know that do often cite good integration between everything as a reason, so I think that angle might work.

They have voice control tech, they have end devices in all important form factors (TV, tablets, phones, watch), they have customers that like everything being tied together.

Only issue is that I'm not sure if they could do it with external partners making most of the devices (how do you guarantee quality to people? Premium home IoT is scarce for now), and making everything themselves would be a lot of different pieces to make.

[digi_owl]

Unless i can turn my house into my own butler, that will ready the table for me etc, IoT is effectively dead. Because flipping switches etc can be done as i walk around anyways. And walking around i need to do to prepare and put away things anyways.

[modeless]

The next really big thing will be consumer robotics, powered by advances in AI. It's still a ways off. Self-driving cars may be the first big application area. After that we'll see home robots to do cleaning, cooking, and maintenance.

Contrary to popular opinion, IoT is a dead end. The future isn't a million devices scattered around your home, but one capable robot that can be your servant and do everything for you.

[digi_owl]

Yeah, but that may well be further off than the likes of Boston Dynamics make it appear.

Just grabbing something from the fridge and putting it on a plate is a massive task for robotics.

[narrowrail]

You people need to stop saying this kind of stuff. I will bet you $1k on longbets.org that we do not have fully autonomous vehicles operating on public streets in 9 years (i.e. 2025). These types of statements are confusing the non-technical 'tech press' and they are misinforming the public.

[ufmace]

The way you worded it, I'd say we have that already: See Google's relatively public self-driving car project, already logging lots of fully autonomous miles on public streets https://youtu.be/bDOnn0-4Nq8

I do think it'll be more like 50 years to get self-driving cars being sold to the general public that can drive autonomously anywhere though.

[narrowrail]

"fully autonomous" requires no human intervention method, IMO. Google's cars have steering wheels. The gist of what I am trying to communicate is that serious disruption to the status quo will not happen from autonomous cars in my lifetime (one can quibble with specifics and lawyer the discussion at will).

[ufmace]

Well they have already designed a special self-driving car model from the ground up that has no provision for a steering wheel at all.

[jodrellblank]

VR?

HTC Vive sold 15,000 in ten minutes, and 100,000 in three months: http://www.roadtovr.com/htc-vive-sales-figures-data-100000-s...

"Digi-Capital cut its rather optimistic forecast for spending on virtual and augmented reality in 2020 to $120 billion, down from an earlier forecast of $150 billion." - http://fortune.com/2016/07/05/virtual-reality-htc-sales/

[ufmace]

I'm sure there will be a next Next Big Thing. I'm also sure that nobody here knows what it is. If you do, tell your stock broker instead of Hacker News, and become a billionaire if you're right. That's what makes geniuses geniuses - going all-in on the right thing at the right time.

People in the 1890s and 1690s and so on probably thought they were plateaued on things too. What are the odds that we're the real plateau? It might not be in consumer tech, but it's out there, waiting for the right person to discover it.

[yomly]

I feel wearables - IoT could be the next big thing (...who isn't saying this...).

Putting privacy concerns aside, imagine having contact lenses + voice and/or gesture control augmenting your life. Combine that with real-time health monitoring, all powered by your blood glucose.

That's hinging on still quite a lot of big technologies delivering and becoming mass-consumerable, but that is one way in which I can see technology and connectivity being taken to the next level in a similar sense that smartphones did.

Note: I am not particularly pro IoT nor wearables, but can see this becoming a thing in the future.

[argonaut]

Agreed with ufmace. It's more likely than not that the NBT is something nobody on this thread has mentioned. History proves this point over and over again - smartphones were not the clear NBT in 2006, social media wasn't the NBT in 2003, the sharing economy wasn't the NBT in 2009, etc. etc.

The one area where people's opinions did get the NBT right was probably in 2013, where the NBT was predicted to be enterprise.

[stormbrew]

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."

[dredmorbius]

A technology which bypasses centralised content distribution and advertising-supported media, along with pervasive ad-blocking, could have an impact, I suspect.

[leoc]

> Watches? Tried that.

It's probably too early to write off watches thus. Technically they're probably in the 'not ready yet' category: another few rounds of improvement in size constraints, battery life and potential independence from a smartphone (especially as putting in more types of radio becomes more viable) could make a big difference. The aWatch really was too early, or at least too early to create Apple's trademark illusion of perfection in a bolt from the blue. The obvious contrast is the iPod, where Apple didn't enter the game until its distinctive strengths in UI/UX and overall quality could be applied to already-existing components (most famously the Toshiba HDD) and concepts ('Palm-Pilot-like sync', 'WinAmp clone' ...) to create such a lightning-bolt with an obvious 'value proposition' for the user. Or maybe some of the aWatch's faults are actually down to UI or design failings which weren't really forced by technical limitations, but those too can be fixed over time, with MS-style release-until-good iteration.

> VR? Niche market.

No wai! VR/AR is also in the 'not ready yet' bucket; and it's not quite ready yet, rather than being another decade away or something. Between stereo cameras on smart devices, eye-tracking hardware for foveated rendering, and continued increase in flatscreen resolutions, in a handful of years VR is going to reach the 'iPod point' where there are no technical or price barriers to Apple putting together a product that's strongly desirable to a mass market. The initial 'system-seller'/'killer app' probably won't be anything very 'natively' 3D but, basically, 2D screens pulled into the VR space, likely with some modest 3D/stereoscopic enhancements. Think 'VR mobile' rather than 'mobile VR', as it were: VR as a way to escape the screen-is-too-damn-small/device-is-too-damn-big/screen-is-too-damn-close curve that box-with-a-screen-on-it mobile devices are trapped on. Likewise the trade-off between staring down, the gorilla arm and messing with a plastic widget. It won't make box-with-a-screen-on-it devices (including clamshells) obsolete, because being blindfolded by a VR screen is unviable or too scary or dangerous in many everyday mobile-device use contexts. (Mobile AR has a much better shot in those situations, but AR screen technology still faces real hurdles on the way to 'iPod point'.) But it doesn't have to: there are enough wealthy US baby boomers who take long journeys by air that Apple could probably have a hit device if it sold the thing only to them. (And remember, they're all farsighted.) Image sharpness won't be "retina" at first, but it will be good enough thanks to continued progress in LED pixel densities, especially for things that people are happy to do on a now-high-res-but-still-small smartphone screen. (And wealthy retirees aren't the most demanding judges of image sharpness.) Foveated rendering will keep the CPU/GPU burden down to within the abilities of a contemporary Appley mobile device. (Especially since you don't need to put the CPU/GPU on the damn headset! Apple can happily run a cable down from the HMD to an iPad-to-iBook-sized device.) Head tracking will be fully positional and good enough.

[aedron]

> in a handful of years VR is going to reach the 'iPod point' where there are no technical or price barriers to Apple putting together a product that's strongly desirable to a mass market.

Apple under Jobs could do that. There is nothing so far to show that Apple can do that without him.