Yes he doesn’t have a good track record picking his successor, too bad he is not alive to fix his second mistake.
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Apple Drops Plans to Develop MicroLED Displays for Apple Watch
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Just because Apple won’t be making MicroLED displays doesn’t mean future Apple products won’t have them. It just means they’ll be ordering them from a supplier instead of making them inhouse. Let’s not pretend there would be this huge cost savings they’d pass onto the consumers if Apple made them in-house or this huge technology leap. These are displays after all. If Apple doesn’t make them and they are economically viable then somebody else will. Any savings Apple might encounter as a result would go right into the C level executives and shareholders pockets. Consumers themselves might see a buck or two come off of the price if anything at all. Big whoop….
I’d rather have them putting R&D money into AI and reducing the size of the tech that goes inside the Vision Pro so 10 years from now they look like AR glasses you can buy today but with visionOS doing it’s thing from the perspective of the person who is wearing it while looking mostly like regular glasses / sun glasses to others.
I’d rather have them putting R&D money into AI and reducing the size of the tech that goes inside the Vision Pro so 10 years from now they look like AR glasses you can buy today but with visionOS doing it’s thing from the perspective of the person who is wearing it while looking mostly like regular glasses / sun glasses to others.
They already do that (your iphone is a Samsung screen designed by apple, and apple silicon is manufactured by TSMC)
There's something wrong going on at Apple.
There product production pace is becoming glacial. Specially software.
There was no iPad released in all 2023! That's Ok since the hardware was much ahead of the software. But the software, iPadOS, still sucks and nothing meaningful was developed for a whole year.
It's sad when you see them list "New emojis" as a highlighted new feature for a major iPadOS/iOS release.
There product production pace is becoming glacial. Specially software.
There was no iPad released in all 2023! That's Ok since the hardware was much ahead of the software. But the software, iPadOS, still sucks and nothing meaningful was developed for a whole year.
It's sad when you see them list "New emojis" as a highlighted new feature for a major iPadOS/iOS release.
They are spending their money on lawyers.
Exactly, and I feel the same with respect to my Apple Watches. Going to MicroLed would likely cause an unnecessary price increase. As an aside, that would no doubt foster a few hundred/thousand negative comments here, as a result.
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Unlike AirPower the car nor the MicroLED was ever announced by Apple. And for most companies you don't know how their internal R&D works. Of a project isn't feasible, then you cancel it.
Personally, I think the AVP was a mistake but it does effectively counter the narrative that Apple, and Tim Cook specifically, are averse to taking market risks and innovating.
Not really sure what the "innovation" is with AVP
It's got marginally better specs than existing entrenched HMDs -- that's basically it
I guess the finger pinching/wave your hands around to do things?
meh..
Within Apple's ecosystem. New OS and new product line not doing it for you? It's as much an innovation as the Apple Watch was. But that's just a semantics discussion.
I'd personally argue that the AW was (and is) better than competitors in some ways the AVP is not
The Watch is also far more actually useful IMO
One of the largest drain on the battery is the display. MicroLED is supposed to be more efficient than OLED. A microLED screen would give more battery life on a watch. Beyond that, microLED is not prone to burn-in and can likely be brighter than OLED. Ultimately microLEDs would probably have longer lifetimes than OLED.
Some of these features are less important on a watch, but do become important on a phone, tablet, or laptop. I think one of the reasons that Apple started with the watch was a lower risk to try a new technology on a lower volume device than launching on something really critical like the iPhone.
I agree with you, not because of recent cancellations, but because of what wasn’t cancelled, or cancelled soon enough.
Titan should have been cut after 5 years, not 10, and I would argue even sooner than that because they would have figured out pretty early how hard FSD is (was Siri going to do the driving?).
HomePod is over-engineered and uncompetitive in several ways (price, software and h/w interop).
AVP has no real use case, just vague promises of something coming down the line.
However, I don’t have any issue with making a go at modems and displays, as they learned with processors that more vertical integration was better.
What I don't understand is that they've clearly hit making their own silicone out of the park and yet somehow modems present an insurmountable challenge?
They can obviously do it but choose not to because the economic reward isn't there.
The question is just if they are instead refocusing on other moonshot projects or if we are seeing a shift in strategy where they are backing away from approaching full integration to making pretty good, cobbled together products with an Apple logo on them.
Is Tim starting to bow out and thus abandoning long-term strategies?
They can obviously do it but choose not to because the economic reward isn't there.
The question is just if they are instead refocusing on other moonshot projects or if we are seeing a shift in strategy where they are backing away from approaching full integration to making pretty good, cobbled together products with an Apple logo on them.
Is Tim starting to bow out and thus abandoning long-term strategies?
Actually not entirely, but using it with Fitness+ Training, did a lot more than my previous HR monitors.I no longer live anywhere near a decent Gym and I get a great cardio workout every day.
Things like being able to easily see my HR Zone workouts is very useful. And it’s surprisingly accurate when I compare it to my Polar H9.
Then there is also fall detection and the myriad of other sensors included that give me that sense of safety I like. No other HR monitor I had, did that. So it works out for me (and millions of others) better than other smartwatches.
It’s the integration, and the inspiration that no one else has matched that makes it (for me) the absolute best. So my fitness journey continues.
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Dang. Sad to hear this. I've been patiently waiting for microLED for years. Seems like the holy grail of display technology. If we can fit 19 billion transistors onto an iPhone SoC then I have faith that someone will eventually be able to fit tens of millions of LEDs onto consumer displays in a way that is economically viable. At least I hope so...
The iPad OLED rumors never really made sense to me until now. Just didn't add up that they would put all that work into miniLED and then all that R&D into microLED just to transition to... OLED.
Apple has so much money to spend on R&D and they had already sunk billions into this. I would be curious to know what exactly it was that made them call this off. Surely they had to have run into some sort of engineering impasse rather than just "we didn't succeed by [x] date" or something, right? Idk.
The iPad OLED rumors never really made sense to me until now. Just didn't add up that they would put all that work into miniLED and then all that R&D into microLED just to transition to... OLED.
Apple has so much money to spend on R&D and they had already sunk billions into this. I would be curious to know what exactly it was that made them call this off. Surely they had to have run into some sort of engineering impasse rather than just "we didn't succeed by [x] date" or something, right? Idk.
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Modems are a complex mix of digital processing with analog signals. Getting that right for all of the various frequencies and modulations can be tricky. Doing that without tripping over the minefield of Qualcomm patents is clearly nearly impossible. It would not be surprising if Apple decided to not build one but just to use it as a bargaining chip with Qualcomm.
Which is the best selling watch in the world.
The Blue LED was definitely the holy grail of technology. It took $ billions to develop, over 20 years of research and it earned Nakamura a Nobel Prize.
I'm thinking Micro LED might be just as special.
What Cook has done is continue with Jobs' legacy of allowing smart people do smart things if they think there maybe value in it. Listening to people like Mark Rober who was left to do his own research to its conclusion. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. But they have to know when to stop.
When you consider a massive project like Titan, the potential benefits means they can continue for years and like others say, develop technologies that can be integrated into other projects.
Many big discoveries are found when looking for something else. So these projects are rarely ever a waste.
However, Steve Jobs Sapphire Glass collab with GT Industries proves they are better trying these things in house. That cost them a lot for virtually nothing in return. GT Industries over promised and it cost them their business. Better having Apple do it who can afford it and move on with New Technologies (at the minimum) as the payoff.
Exactly, and the things they learned, they could use to boost Qualcomm. It could be a big win for Apple and definitely a bigger win for Qualcomm if they use some of Apples own patents in their design. Who knows?
So you want a more boring Apple, not one that pushes the limits and sometimes or even often fails.
Homepod Mini is amazing and is more functional than my Eve Room (weather sensor) and considerably cheaper. Over engineered maybe, but also delivers more for a great price.
In Australia
Eve Room - AU$179: Temperature, Humidity, Air Quality
Homepod Mini - AU$149 - Temperature, Humidity, Speaker, Thread Home Hub
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So what is Apple actually working on now? I'm genuinely wondering what is within their competency zone at this point. Can't (or won't) build professional-level hardware (software too, depending on what you think about their current offerings), giving up on AI, giving up on the car (admittedly an ambitious project but one that had massive resources sunk into it), can't build a multi-zone wireless charger apparently, no more routers, no more music players, operating systems filled with bugs and glitches, AirPod Max going years without so much as a color change, can't make up their minds on what they want the HomePod to be seemingly, hyper-bloated product lines that no one can keep in their head anymore, and product design that seems to be going downhill by the year - what the hell is going on over there? The last embers of Steve's creative genius are, I think, finally out. It took over a decade but it's clear Apple is no longer the company he left behind. And he's not coming back this time to save it for a third time...
Why people keep saying this is beyond me. Nothing is further from the truth. Matter of fact, it's quite the opposite. There's much more to AI than Siri / generative AI. A lot of the R&D that went into the car project was AI-related and now that can be used across Apple's entire product lineup.