I was wondering if this was somewhat related to Apple trying to find a future direction because lately they've been just adding new versions of phones or macs or adding new updates to them but have not introduced anything except for maybe apple watch 2 years ago which has been steadily growing but not the immediate hit or newly introduced like Amazon echo or Google Home for right now.
Maybe this prioritization of a lot of new features is them making up for introducing a new product direction?
EDIT: oops, found Apple Homepod, maybe they're not marketing it well? Anyone here that uses it? My friends are apple lovers, buying nee iphones and macbook pro and havent heard of it either.
I think you raise a good point; I don't believe the HomePod even merits your "oops". It's not being heavily marketed because it's not all that impressive.
It is definitely the best speaker around, multiple reviews say the sound quality is amazing. However, we are in a golden age of ML and the Siri on HomePod is a joke when compared to Alexa and Google Assistant. Apple's culture of secrecy has left them woefully behind in the AI race (where researchers love to publish).
I agree with you that Apple does not really know where to go next. Awesome AR glasses that actually sell and do amazing things? An amazing smart home assistant that can run your home, but is handleable with simple within the Apple eco-system? I don't think Apple has done anything that bold in recent years and will struggle like you say.
Unless Apple secretly is doing something truly "Wow" and they're just quiet about it. Otherwise, I believe Tim Cook will earn more and more comparisons to Steve Ballmer: Great for sales/stock price, missed out on a game changing era of technology.
However, we are in a golden age of ML and the Siri on HomePod is a joke when compared to
This has nothing to do with secrecy or lack of user data or lack of algorithms knowledge. What is missing in Siri is lack of high quality gold data sets -- this is often curated by hoards of phds and other domain experts. It takes time to do the curation and Google is ahead of the pack. Amazon has done a great job opening up the eco system to third parties.
Apple's strength is its limited product lineup, and iteration on those devices.
Even dating back 10 years, there's really only Macs, iPods, iPhones. Now Watches. Smaller stuff was also always around (Airport, Time Machine, TV, now Homepod)
There is also a big difference in how these new devices interact -- they talk to each other in non trivial ways (e.g. watch <--> iphone). Now instead of QAing O(n) feature, you need to QA O(n^2) feature interactions. This is hard to scale and maintain
Comments
I was wondering if this was somewhat related to Apple trying to find a future direction because lately they've been just adding new versions of phones or macs or adding new updates to them but have not introduced anything except for maybe apple watch 2 years ago which has been steadily growing but not the immediate hit or newly introduced like Amazon echo or Google Home for right now.
Maybe this prioritization of a lot of new features is them making up for introducing a new product direction?
EDIT: oops, found Apple Homepod, maybe they're not marketing it well? Anyone here that uses it? My friends are apple lovers, buying nee iphones and macbook pro and havent heard of it either.
I think you raise a good point; I don't believe the HomePod even merits your "oops". It's not being heavily marketed because it's not all that impressive.
It is definitely the best speaker around, multiple reviews say the sound quality is amazing. However, we are in a golden age of ML and the Siri on HomePod is a joke when compared to Alexa and Google Assistant. Apple's culture of secrecy has left them woefully behind in the AI race (where researchers love to publish).
I agree with you that Apple does not really know where to go next. Awesome AR glasses that actually sell and do amazing things? An amazing smart home assistant that can run your home, but is handleable with simple within the Apple eco-system? I don't think Apple has done anything that bold in recent years and will struggle like you say.
Unless Apple secretly is doing something truly "Wow" and they're just quiet about it. Otherwise, I believe Tim Cook will earn more and more comparisons to Steve Ballmer: Great for sales/stock price, missed out on a game changing era of technology.
This has nothing to do with secrecy or lack of user data or lack of algorithms knowledge. What is missing in Siri is lack of high quality gold data sets -- this is often curated by hoards of phds and other domain experts. It takes time to do the curation and Google is ahead of the pack. Amazon has done a great job opening up the eco system to third parties.
Apple's strength is its limited product lineup, and iteration on those devices. Even dating back 10 years, there's really only Macs, iPods, iPhones. Now Watches. Smaller stuff was also always around (Airport, Time Machine, TV, now Homepod)
There is also a big difference in how these new devices interact -- they talk to each other in non trivial ways (e.g. watch <--> iphone). Now instead of QAing O(n) feature, you need to QA O(n^2) feature interactions. This is hard to scale and maintain
supposedly a nice piece of hardware, but until HomeKit is more supported by IoT devices, I really have a hard time selling myself on one.