I wish Apple would stop chasing trends like self-driving cars and augmented reality. They used to have a strong vision for the future -- now it just looks like they're out of ideas.
I get your sentiment but i would also like to say that people scoffed at jobs holding what looked like an oversized iphone on the stage and that's been a boom for them fwict. the iphone was a product that people dismissed out of hand. the ipod was a product that people dismissed out of hand and it saved apple. hell the apple ii was pretty revolutionary back in the day.
Yeah, that's kind of what I'm saying -- instead of focusing on more "serious" things that "everyone knows are the future", I wish Apple had the courage to focus on the kind of products that people tend to dismiss as boring or derivative at first.
I think that it had less to do with apple and more to do with steve jobs. I can't think of any product from Apple after Steve Jobs died, that had any mass market effect. Either with new product or evolution of the existing product. They are still riding the Steve Jobs high.
> products that people tend to dismiss as boring or derivative
Not a good heuristic, as that describes the Apple Watch.
(Though it wasn't derivative; its contemporaries existed almost exclusively off the back of a torrent of leaks about the future Apple product. Competitors knew about it long before it was launched and raced ahead with their own junk.)
(Also I don't think the Apple Watch is boring, but it is niche. The particular niche I am fascinated with is healthcare. It's possible that within a decade or two, their Watch product could be highly disruptive.)
My point was that everything they have made was derivative in some way. Apple ii was derivative of Apple i. Macintosh was derivative of the Apple ii. iPod was a derivative of the other music devices. iPhone was a derivative of the iPod and cell phone. ipad was a derivative of the iPhone. Their watch was a derivative of the iPhone and a watch. OS X was a derivative of Mach.
Who knows where they will take ar and self driving? I would like to see what they come up with... they certainly have enough money to find out.
However, their "vision for the future" has often been more along the lines of taking concepts that have been imperfectly implemented by others and then refining them. The iPhone comes closest to representing something fundamentally new and different in the totality of hardware, software, and ecosystem. But most of Apple's success has comes through refinement and execution.
Vehicle electronics packages and AR would seem to be two areas that could benefit from refinement as the underlying technology becomes available.
What? Apple will have (has?) the biggest AR platform in the world, by far.
One of the next iPhones will have eye tracking and high quality 6dof (positional) tracking. Those two features basically turn your phone/iPad into a hand held portal into AR/VR.
The hand held form factor will be at least as big as the HMD form factor... probably bigger honestly.
Apple has prototyped this kind of experience with Pokémon Go. There is no company better positioned to take the AR market than Apple. In all likelihood your next iPhone will be the world’s dominant AR platform.
This is not fanboying... I think industrial AR and HMDs are very interesting. It’s just clear to me that Apple has the audience in both users and app developers to deliver both sides of this marketplace much faster than anyone else. And it’s also clear to me that handheld has major advantages over HMDs that will especially affect the consumer market.
I don't see what's the problem with that. If you have billions of cash laying around you have to try and invest in something else in case your main product does not work out in the future. It's not like they have limited resources and will pull engineers away from building a next mac or iphone to build a self driving car.
Apple has never been leading the pack. They were one of the last device companies to release their own MP3 players and the iPod is the device that started the wave they are still riding.
If Apple releases an AR headset, you can bet it'll basically be Google Glasses, but good.
Apple car rumors surfaced when driverless was not a trend and only done as research project by Google. I guess they thought they could leapfrog the established industry as they did with the iPhone.
But now EVERY major car manufacturer is hot for self-driving vars. Intel, NVidia, Waymo, Uber, Lyft, countless startups etc. I can’t see how Apple can contribute here something meaningful, or make money, I think they should drop the project.