[rkuykendall-com]

Apple is such an absolutely massive company, but Musk makes them look so small. On the one hand, Apple has more brand recognition and cash than God. On the other hand, when you spend your time dreaming about electric cars, rockets, and hyperloops... who would want to play with laptops?

Musk plays the game on an entirely different level.

I think Sergey Brin understands this. Google is playing on that level. Self-driving cars, robotics, machine learning, Google Glass, augmented reality, NLP, etc.

The future will be a different world, and while Apple shaped much of the last 20 years, I'm afraid that time is over.

[enraged_camel]

>>The future will be a different world, and while Apple shaped much of the last 20 years, I'm afraid that time is over.

This statement is a very good example of how successful Apple's secrecy practices are.

You look at Google and seeing all the "cool" shit they are publicizing. Glass, robots, NLP, and so on.

You then look at Apple and see... nothing. Maybe a few speculative press release from mysterious "sources" but nothing that will clearly indicate what they are working on in their underground bunkers. Short of a prototype device being stolen in public, you don't know with any certainty what the hell they are working on.

So then you conclude that Google has a good grasp of the future whereas Apple is sliding into irrelevance.

That's exactly what Apple wants.

The first rule of warfare is to hide your plans and movements from the enemy. Apple is in a great position right now: the only thing the tech world knows for certain they are working on is the next versions of their current product line.

To give you an idea of how advantageous this position is: the iPhone was released from a similar position of extreme secrecy. That's why competitors were at least a year, if not two or more, behind. By the time they caught up, Apple had already built a war chest of tens of billions of dollars.

To suggest that they aren't doing anything that will shape the future is the epitome of silliness.

[kamaal]

>>iPhone was released from a similar position of extreme secrecy.

Every one knew that a iPhone was coming. The surprise was just how radically different the UI was. The kind of thing they had packed in such a small place.

The surprise was what iPhone was, not if apple was building a phone. The latter was very well known.

[lukeholder]

Don't underestimate that Apple has a good grasp of the cutting edge technologies even if they are not building those things themselves and putting out beta after beta. What Apple have a knack for is waiting until the technology is at a stage where there is a real and legitimate consumer use for the technology and refine it down to where its practically usable.

Futurist tech list google glass and self driving cars is exciting - but not within the grasps of real use by everyday people.

[kamaal]

Sorry but if that were true Apple would have already replaced the Google search engine.

Technology isn't what you can just search on the internet and copy paste. It takes years to continually build and tune technology that powers things like Google.

The thing about Google is the mere scale of research in AI and other areas going into building things like self driving cars isn't something your average programming team can code up in 6 months when given the requirements. There are a lot of hard problems, that take time.

Things like iPhone, iPod etc. No matter how radically different in UI aren't in the same scale of technology comparison as a search engines or a self driving cars are. The latter takes time, a lot of effort, and precious brain cycles applied to core science topics over a lot of time to achieve.

The difference is like inventing a drug to cure cancer, and comparing it with software to distribute it. No matter how difficult the latter is, there is no way you can compare it with former.

[gfodor]

So what is Apple cooking up in their labs, if you're so sure they're not doing any of the things listed?

[taybin]

"Do you want to sell sugared computers for the rest of your life?"