[aqzman]

As with all Apple products, I'm sure Apple will iterate on this and keep making a better product until it can rival Google Home and Amazon Echo. It seems quite often that Apple first generation of new products (huge exception for the original iPhone) can't really compete with competitors, but very quickly, in two or three generations, they end up with the best product on the market.

Although what really surprised me in this article is that Google Home only has 14% of the market share while Amazon Echo has 73%. I had assumed that their market shares were much closer, but according to the article Echo is out selling Google Home more than 5 to 1!

[kristianc]

> huge exception for the original iPhone

There's quite a lot of revisionism (completely understandable) that takes place about the original iPhone, but the iPhone only really got going with the second gen.

The iPhone is probably _the_ case study for not writing off Apple in the first gen of its product. Writing in 2006, many of the predictions why the iPhone would fail seemed perfectly reasonable (high cost, carrier subsidies, impossibility of simplifying the phone interface [1]), and it's only in retrospect that they seem ludicrous.

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/23/iphone_will_fail/?p...

[r00fus]

Why revisionism? Even without 3G, the $20/mo unlimited 2G was a game-changer. Jailbroken Apps on the OG iPhone were a game changer (precursor of App Store). Maps (powered by Google) was a game changer. Movies watchable in mobile format was a game changer. The bloody screen (icons looked painted on) was a game changer.

I had a Palm 650 (which I loved) before that, the iPhone did almost everything better and cost less per month including data - and with iPhoneOS 2.0 had an immense upgrade.

It's revisionism to not see how impressive even the OG iPhone was.

[jandrese]

The original iPod was a pretty flawed product as well. The price point was very high and the storage was a bit less than it really needed and the scrollwheel was fragile. I'd say Apple didn't get it right until the third generation.

It's hard to overstate just how flawed the original iPhone was. You were locked into AT&T, you had to effectively buy the phone outright AND pay the subsidy (which never went away, no matter how long you owned the phone). The radio in the phone was obsolete before it was even announced (no 3G support at all). There were zero apps nor any mechanism to add apps to the phone, Jobs tried to sell the "just use webapps!" but the phone was really not powerful enough nor were web technologies well baked enough to make that a reality. The battery life was less than amazing and the entire phone was somewhat slow.

However, at the same time the iPhone completely disrupted the phone OS market. It focused heavily on the web browser just as the technology was finally there to put a mostly full featured web browser in a phone. Turns out that going to a webpage and having it render mostly correct was more important than shitty castrated apps hamstrung by artificial limitations on Symbian phones. The built-in apps covered most of the bases too, so the lack of apps wasn't a disaster. Mostly however it was the interface. People were sick and tired of godawful phone UIs and nobody else in the market was the least bit interested in improving it. The world revolutionary gets tossed around a lot in tech circles, but the iPhone UI was truly revolutionary. It was a bloody coup that left Symbian buried in a shallow grave out back and flat glass bricks sitting on the throne.

Apple's strategic advantage is that they have the cash and corporate willpower to iterate the design until it meets the market need.

[dingaling]

> and nobody else in the market was the least bit interested in improving it

Without even digging I can name the LG Prada UI as one other contemporaneous effort. The KE850 was actually announced before the iPhone.

[jandrese]

Was still miserable once you got past the home screen. Most importantly the web browser was total dogshit.

[melling]

They aren’t going to iterate it into a $30-$50 product.

Amazon and Google are going to sell hundreds of millions of their devices, which will allow them to improve their AI globally.

Personally, I think the Dot is smarter than Siri. I still try to throw a few questions to my iPhone and Apple Watch, but like Apple Maps, it’s a less than satisfying experience.

I need to get my girlfriend the Echo so I can stop the “Hey Siri, ...Hey Siri, ...Hey Siri” moments.

[threeseed]

Siri is available on Apple TV, Apple Watch, iOS and Macs.

So Apple also will sell hundreds of millions of devices and allow them to improve their AI globally.

[draugadrotten]

I can't wait. Siri "AI" is one of my biggest tech disappointments. I was expecting Apple to data mine the millions of voices and questions they got and teach Siri new things every week. Years later, Siri still can't understand that I want to call back my missed phone calls.

[jandrese]

When Siri first came out I wondered if it would be able to improve upon the voice macros that were built into MacOS for years.

Turns out the answer was no. Worse, you can't even get a list of everything Siri knows how to do, so you have to guess and hope she doesn't just stick the query into Google again. So she's only useful for demos and for the two or three things you remember she can do. Apple never even gave us a way to define our own macros. There should have been a whole section on the app store for Siri macros you could install for various interests. She can't even launch apps! It's so ridiculous.

[brandon272]

One area where I've noticed improvement in Siri is that it makes far fewer errors in recognizing what I am saying lately.

A year ago, I would fight with her constantly in my car on my way to work. "Hey Siri, play playlist iPhone 3" .. "Sorry, I can't find playlist iPhone Free" .. That type of thing doesn't happen anymore, for me, at least.

Can't speak to her overall capability to do other things, but in the car this morning I asked her to "Play Spotify" and she had no idea what I was saying - or at least pretended to not have any idea!

[y_molodtsov]

Thankfully Apple recently hired a person who helped built the Assistant in Google to work on Siri and other initiatives.

[tpush]

Apple already sold hundreds of millions of devices and their AI is comparatively awful.

[jacksmith21006]

But estimate is 2 million Home pods.

https://9to5mac.com/2018/04/13/kgi-homepod-sales-cheaper-mod... KGI: Apple could sell just 2 million HomePods across all of 2018, company 'mulls' low-cost model

[melling]

I guess I wasn’t clear enough.

I own all of those devices. I talk to my Alexa more than all those devices combined.

[innagadadavida]

It is also so much easier to throw/recycle a $30-40 product and upgrade to something nicer. This is one of the product strategy Apple executed with phones.

[Twisell]

It’s always the same issue when trying to compare Apple products vs others. Apple sell a lot directly to customers via their own on-line and physicals stores.

So before Quaterly results sales figures are pure speculation from analysts (and to be even worse Apple often don’t even reveal précises sales figures for new segments, melting number in the "others" category).

On the other hand competing manufacturer don’t do a lot of direct sales and communicate sales to resellers (so a sales don’t mean the product was actually bought and used by a real customer). Meanwhile Tim Cook was the architect of a zero stock policy so for Apple sale figures, every unit produced are put into a real customer hands.

So at the end of the day it’s usually only after one or two year after Apple entered a new market that you can really mesure success. In case of success Apple can’t hide benefits of the new line in the "other" category and you start to have real metrics. And if competitors stay on resellers inventory you start to see big discounts while their financials results decline.

In case of Apple faillure (like "fatboy" iPod or the "tin can" MacPro) Apple let the product slowly die and ultimately revamp it’s product line. Meanwhile competitor financial trajectory is unnafected.

[simcop2387]

A large part of that I think is that Amazon got to the market first. That let them get into consumer hands earlier, and 3rd party Dev hands too. Thats given them an edge in support for most random home automation stuff and other services.

[realusername]

> huge exception for the original iPhone

That was the case the original iPhone as well, I would say the iPhone really took-off on it's second version.

[struppi]

Yes. The original iPhone was: Firs, a big wow. Then a longer series of disappointments over the next few months. I remember I didn't buy the first iPhone because you could not write apps for it for the first 9 months or so (Just with JavaScript or a hacked version of XCode). And it was slow and could not do many things that other phones could do at that time.

Bought an Android soon after and so far, I have stayed. But that might change, because of the different privacy policies of the two companies.

[jammi]

I bought the first iPhone a couple of months after release, which was in August or September 2007. The first jailbreak allowing your own software to be run on one was the reason I got one. I and everyone I showed it to were blown away by what was doable with it with custom software. The CLI-only hacked SDK was pretty hard to set up and use, but it was still better than what was available for other phones.

Used it jailbroken into 2011, when I finally replaced it with an iPhone 4, which in its turn ran jailbroken until 2014. That was when I got an iPhone 6, which I'm still on and I haven't jailbroken it, because Apple more or less caught up in stock iOS with the more important jailbreak hacks around that time. It seems like iPhone 6 will be phone I'll use for the longest time, because it's still fast enough and works fine.

[jandrese]

Yeah, Jailbreaks became much less necessary over time and also harder to do. I had gcc on the original iPhone and a full build chain. It was glorious, if a bit slow and annoyingly hacky because you had to self sign everything gcc spit out before it would run.

There's only a couple of things I still miss from the jailbreak days. One was a hack for iTunes that downloaded and displayed the lyrics for whatever song you were playing. The other was a SOCKS proxy that let me tether my phone without incurring the ridiculous tethering surcharge.

[megaman22]

Amazon has, at various points, had sales such that they were almost giving away Echos. When prices are down in the <$100 range (or $30, for the Echo Dot during some sales), there's a lot of people that will take a flier on something and buy one for the hell of it and try it out. A homepod at $350 is more of a real investment.

[tpush]

> Although what really surprised me in this article is that Google Home only has 14% of the market share while Amazon Echo has 73%

These are sales figures for the first two months where Homepod was available, not overall market share.

[prepend]

Looks like overall share is a little different. Amazon 69, Google 25 as of Jan.

https://www.voicebot.ai/2018/01/10/amazon-alexa-smart-speake...

[kafquaesque]

After using both it’s not surprising they are being outsold. Alexa can do more things and seems more intuitive. Really hoping everyone in the market gets better.

[mullen]

Considering you can get a Amazon Echo dot for $25 - $35 and be plugged into the huge amount of skills for the Echo, it does not surprise me.