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Apple Glasses Could Be Unveiled in Mid 2021 and Made Available to Order in 2022
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"When the new Apple TV interface was first announced Tim Cook said the future of TV was apps. That clearly didn’t turn out to be true."
I think that still will become true, the problem is that the Apple TV group has no vision!
Rather than seeing the Apple TV as
(a) a home server PLUS
(b) a way to pour content onto a big screen
They have insisted on seeing it as ONLY the same box that was being sold in the 1990s, ie a box that provides TV/movie content and plays games. ZERO vision!
There are slight hints that someone in the TV group gets this (eg hiring the author of Dayview) but the change is so damn slow! Where are the hooks for aTV to connect to a camera? To sync viewing across devices in separate households?
At some point I hope this changes, but the problem is not the claim that apps are the future. Even today, it's such a gradual change that most people have not noticed it, but there is REAL VALUE in using aTV as your TV central, especially if most of the apps you use are "well written", because of the centralized search and keeping track of what you've viewed that is performed by the TV app in conjunction with the HBO app or the Spectrum TV app or whatever.
If anything the real problem is not "the future of TV is apps" so much as that "crappy apps dramatically dilute the overall Apple TV experience" and there are too many such bad apps, apps that don't handle the remote properly, don't publish their content up to TV.app, don't remember the Closed-Captioning status, don't handle audio correctly, ....
Since the screen is literally everything in front of your eyes the fact it physically is only 1 1/2 tall and 2 inches wide (per eye) doesn’t need to seem that small. But if you need to zoom in then out all the time to get details then I’m not sure it’s the killer product that Apple thinks it is.
I own an Apple TV and have for several years and I’m mostly happy with it -SIDE NOTE the remote sucks-but it really isn’t much more than an expensive Amazon Firestick or Roku. Having apps is fine, having apps with desirable content appears to be more difficult. Years ago the iPod became big because they got the rights to sell digital music back when streaming was a dirty word to music publishers. Without the legal music that iTunes could sell the iPod would have been a novelty at best. With legal digital music it was absolutely dominant. Netflix showed years ago that getting movie access then producing their own content was profitable. Apple should have bought either long term rights or better yet content production entities like Disney or NBC/ABC/CBS or Warner or 20th Century. This should have been done before the first Apple TV was released. They needed something for people to watch on the ATV that they couldn’t easily get elsewhere.
I actually don’t think that’s true at all. What’s the killer app for Home Pod, Apple TV or even Apple Watch? I mean I like my Apple Watch, having time, notifications and timers on it is handy, but that’s it, it’s totally dispensable.
I’m sorry but I’m just not convinced that all of a sudden people who have never worn glasses are going to start wearing them. This is going to be a niche product. There’s plenty of people that will never wear glasses for any reason.
I agree, and I don't think apple cares much, maybe on logistics. we have to show it with our wallet. I have to upgrade my Mac mini 2012. But I am done with China and other dictatorship countries now (I live in one). I will wait or buy something from Taiwan and make it hackintosh.
I have four 27 inch iMacs (2010, 2012, 2017 and 2019) and one 21 inch iMac, 2 iPads and an iPhone but those are the last products I will purchase from Apple......until they put our country first and profits second. I am willing to pay more for my computers because you can pay now or you can pay latter and we are up to over 6 Trillion with the bailout and that is likely going to go higher. Penny wise and dollar foolish.
Darth Tulhu
macrumors 68020
Not every killer app is for everybody. It is the reason for existing within Apple's ecosystem.
The HomePod's is the seamless integration with Siri and your Apple Music devices.
For the Watch it's the integration with your iPhone, notifications, the health and fitness aspect, etc.
In every keynote where a new product is presented, Apple has a demo that shows their vision for the device. That is what I'm referring to.
It's not like they just said, "We built a speaker. See what you can do with it, Devs" and leave it at that.
Now, whether or not the demoed features are "killer apps" for YOU is another matter entirely, and the reason why I put "killer apps" in quotes.
No, it’s exactly what’s needed to get our noses out of our phones.
The Apple Watch lowered my screen time substantially even though it was a screen strapped to my wrist. Rather than pull out my phone every time I got a notification, or just to check the time, and then fall into the black hole of everything else on my phone calling for attention, I raise my wrist, acknowledge the notification and lower my wrist. Seconds of interactions rather than minutes or hours.
The glasses fill the missing piece which is to have visual information that doesn’t fit on a Watch, overlaid on the real world so you can still engage with the world around you and the people in it but have it augmented with information, rather than staring into a glowing screen 14 hours a day oblivious to what’s around you.
Every product starts as a niche product. The Apple Watch basically broke out last year. The iPad is still considered niche And Apple sells billions of dollars worth of them.
that said, it’s a gamble. But where else is Apple going to go?
To me, it’s no different from wearing sunglasses at the beach. You do it for the health benefits, not necessarily because you like wearing something on your face.
If Apple’s AR glassed can provide a compelling enough benefit, I do see people with perfect eyesight willingly wearing them, the same way people who have never worn watches start sporting fitness bands for the health tracking capabilities.
Those aren’t really apps though, they’re more like APIs waiting for somebody to make a killer app *with*. Seamless integration with Siri isn’t an app, killer or otherwise, unless Siri does something. Now obviously Siri does do things, like play songs on request or turn the lights on or off, maybe that’s the killer app for you.
For me though, no Apple product since iPad has really *had* a killed app. I own pretty much all of them, and they’re a pleasure to use and are best in class (except the TV remote, obviously, the designer of which should burn in hell for), but if someone asks me what they’re really useful for I can’t really list anything. I can read my texts on my wrist, which is nice, but I need to get my phone out to write a decent reply. I can ask Siri to adjust the lights, or the volume of the music, but only in very vague terms, if I want to finely adjust either I need physical buttons.
The HomePod is basically a smart speaker for iPhone users who use Siri and Apple Music, since no such combination currently exists in the speaker market (and likely never will, since Apple doesn't open up Siri to third parties). It's really more to prevent them from defecting to spotify and other voice assistants. I don't have the HomePod (it's not available for sale in my country), but if I were to get one, the killer app for me is probably the ability to use Siri to play Apple Music, the same way I do so on my iOS devices.
The Apple TV is there for users who want a premium viewing experience. For me, the killer app is its ability to integrate with my other apple devices and services, allowing for some degree of consistency. The UI on my 5th gen ATV (the one with the A10x chip) is fluid and smooth, and I guess I am one of the few posters here who actually likes the remote for how easily it lets me scrub through content and scroll around. I am also going to assume that by using apps through the ATV instead of those bundled with smart TV, the TV manufacturers don't get my usage / viewing data, so there's that added element of privacy and security.
I do wish Apple would make a TV stick just for airplay mirroring. I have a couple of 3rd-gen Apple TVs in my school just to mirror my iPad to the projector screen, and I would love to be able to invest in a few of those sticks to bring around with me for presentation purposes.
As for the Apple Watch, I find it's really more of a bunch of conveniences rolled into one tight little package. I use my watch for notifications, Apple Pay, Siri, calendar events (via the Siri watch face), quickly viewing app data (like passwords stored in 1password), music controls and well, just telling the time. It really is like a remote control for your phone. For me, the killer app is being able to quickly see incoming notifications on my wrist, which means I don't have to fish out my phone every time it buzzes, as well as be informed of upcoming lessons (I have my timetable reflected in my phone as calendar events, which notifies me 15-30 minutes prior so I have enough time to get ready for my next class). When you are constantly on the move, every little convenience matters.
Developers and Marketing Dep. are often enemies, because marketing likes to sell dreams.